Reading Room

Success Is Understandable, Perhaps Even Predicatable

Outliers: The Story Of Success

Christmas has come early with a book to read and review, Malcolm Gladwell’s latest Outliers. This is his third book (after The Tipping Point and Blink) where again he does his unique mash up of Social Anthropology, Economics, Demographics and poking about with under analysed trends. Combined with his gift for telling a story this makes for another thought provoking few hours.

Firstly his definition of an Outlier: Outlier noun

1: something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body

2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample

It could have been written to describe Gladwell himself. Next we need to qualify what Gladwell means by success. He focuses not on material success (although Mammon is often not far behind) or happiness, but on success as a proxy for pre-eminence, a master at what you do. Whether that’s Bill Gates with programming or The Beatles with music making, it seems there is a set of criteria that if present indicate a much greater chance of significant success occurring. Those criteria include;

• Spending a lo of time practicing, 10,000 hours (or about 10 years), and not only practicing but doing the really difficult stuff, pushing yourself out of the comfort zone into learning really new things.
• Being born in the right year or/an in the right month. It seems life chances are not evenly distributed, which brings us to a more controversial area of opportunity
• Being born to motivated parents with access to resources which tends to be middle class ones. This seems to be based on US data only, this shows that middle class parents equip their children with broader and more effective life skills.
• Having the required level of raw material (IQ, physicality, musical proficiency etc) to be competitive. In basketball you need to be at least 6ft or ideally at least 6.2, but over that height there isn’t a direct correlation between height and success.
  

Gladwell’s thesis is a challenge to all those who think success is about talent and luck. It isn’t. It’s more about the dynamic combination of circumstance, passion for your subject and hard work. Follow your dream now has some evidential underpinning, that if you are good enough to begin with you could become great with focus and effort.

Claudine McClean
T: +44 (0) 1789 734333
E: claudinem@predaptive.com