outliers

16Nov10

Reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, there’s so much I like, that seems sound, that seems to redress inbalances in our understanding of success and intelligence. For instance the popular perception that high performers are born not made, ideas about giftedness, genius, and so on.

1. Gladwell makes the point that it takes hard work to achieve. The “10,000 hour rule”. wikipedia:

A common theme that appears throughout Outliers is the “10,000-Hour Rule”, based on a study by Anders Ericsson. Gladwell claims that greatness requires enormous time, using the source of The Beatles’ musical talents and Gates’ computer savvy as examples. The Beatles performed live in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time, therefore meeting the 10,000-Hour Rule. Gladwell asserts that all of the time The Beatles spent performing shaped their talent, “so by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, ‘they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.’” Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent 10,000 hours programming on it.

2. Parenting is critical. In the discussion of why Lewis Terman’s group of gifted children did not do as well as they might and why Chris Langham with such a high IQ has not made it in formal higher education he looks at sociologist Annette Lareau‘s idea of concerted cultivation, the sort of intensive parenting that helps children succeed.

3. The luck of being in the right time at the right place is an important factor all throughout the book, from the sports successes with their birthdates to the birth year of the jewish New York lawyers.

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Tags: choice, economics, intelligence, Malcolm Gladwell, paradox, psychology, success