Outliers: The Story of Success

by Sandra Ramirez

The story I read for the class book club is Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers: The Story of Success”. I’m not usually entertained when reading school books, but this one was definitely an exception. Once I picked it up and started reading, I really didn’t want to put it down. The book begins be defining what an outlier is:

Out-li-er: Something that is situated away from or classified differently from a main or related body; A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample. 

The book is divided into two different parts, Opportunity and Legacy. The first half of the book was by far the most interesting. The chapters on opportunity relate to its role in determining success. Most of us are conditioned to believe that hard work, commitment and the likes will create the road to success. This book essentially claims that’s not the case at all. Instead, it provides examples of how society has created rules and opportunities for some that are either impossible to achieve, or even completely unavailable to others. The book’s first example is Canadian hockey. Hockey is a hugely popular sport in Canada so athletes start training very young. Coaches begin selecting players for their traveling All-Star teams when the boys are just 9 or 10 years old. The cutoff date for players to be of age is January 1. If players are not of age by January 1, then they must wait until the following year to be recruited. Coaches are looking for the bigger, more coordinated players. Those tend to be the players who had the opportunity to mature over the last 12 months if they missed the previous year’s cutoff date. Statistics overwhelmingly show that star professional hockey players were born in January, February, March and April, than any other month. This is because their birthdays came after the initial cutoff, allowing them another 8-12 months to be the bigger, more coordinated player that coaches are looking for. 

Once the players are selected, they have access to better coaching, better teammates and they practice more often than the players in the “house leagues”. All-star players play between 50-75 games per season, versus 20 games a season for house league players. By the time the all-star kids are 13-14 years old, they really are better players and are more likely to make it to the Major Junior League, and eventually on to the pros. The kids were divided into two groups of Talented and Untalented at a very young age, and the talented are provided with a superior experience and end up having a huge advantage over those that were categorized as untalented. It wasn’t because they worked harder or earned it, it was simply because they were born before the cutoff date. 

10,000 Hour Rule 

Studies show that 10,000 hours of practice is required to master a skill and become an expert at it. This rule applied to composers, basketball players, ice skaters, concert pianists and even master criminals. If we apply the hockey player example here, a late-born prodigy doesn’t get chosen for the all-star team as an 8-year-old because he’s too small, so he doesn’t get the extra practice, and without the extra practice he has no chance of hitting 10,00 hours by the time the professional hockey teams start scouting players. A quote in the book pretty much encompasses that concept, “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” 

However, practice is also an opportunity. Child prodigies cannot fully develop their talents as children unless they have parents who encourage and support their talent. The child’s parents must make time for the child to practice. If the child comes from a poor family and has to hold a part-time job when they’re a teenager, then there’s not enough time to practice. They don’t have the opportunity to develop their talent. 

The Beatles 

The Beatles’ came to the United States in February of 1964, otherwise known as the British invasion. Just 4 years prior to that, they were still a struggling high school rock band. At that time a club owner in Hamburg, Germany had the idea to have non-stop live shows. There weren’t any rock and roll clubs in Hamburg, there were only strip clubs. The club owner met an entrepreneur from Liverpool who arranged to send some bands to Hamburg, including The Beatles. The Beatles also met other club owners in Hamburg and started playing the club scene. The jobs didn’t pay well, the acoustics were bad and the audiences were unappreciative, but as Gladwell so eloquently put it, “They kept going back because they got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex.” What mattered though is that the band was forced to play, A LOT. The band played for 8 hours straight, 7 nights a week. They traveled to Hamburg 5 times between 1960 and the end of 1962. During their first visit the played 106 nights for 5 hours a night. During their second visit they played 92 nights; the third visit they played 48 times totaling 172 hours. During the year and a half that made up their fourth and fifth visits, they performed a total of 270 nights which added up to 90 hours of performing. The Beatles got their first real burst of success in 1964 and by that time they had already performed live more than 1,200 times. During their time in Hamburg, they learned stamina; they had an enormous amount of songs including rock and roll and jazz; and they had learned to be disciplined on stage.

Bill Gates 

Bill Gates was the son of a wealthy lawyer in Seattle and his mother was the daughter of a well-to-do banker. After getting bored in public school, his parents sent him to Lakeside in

Gates got bored in public school so his parents sent him to Lakeside in the 7th grade. Lakeside was a private school that catered to Seattle’s most elite families. When Gates was in 8th grade

the Mother’s Club raised $3,000 and purchased a computer terminal and the school started a computer club. It was 1968, at a time when most colleges didn’t have computer terminals yet. Gates had access to a time-sharing terminal with a direct link to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. He and his classmates taught themselves how to use the new device, but they had to buy time on the mainframe and it was expensive. When the money ran out, the parents raised more, but the students quickly spent it. At the nearby University of Washington, a company called Computer Center Corporation, C-Cubed, leased time to local companies. Coincidentally, one of the firm’s founders had a son who attended Lakeside. She arranged for Lakeside’s computer club to test the company’s software programs on the weekend in exchange for free programming time. Gates would take a bus to C-Cubed and programmed late into most evenings. C-Cubed eventually went bankrupt so Gates and his friends started hanging around the computer center at the University of Washington. The university started ISI, Information Sciences Inc., and gave Gates and his friends free computer time in exchange for working on a piece of software that could be used to automate company payrolls. Within 7 months, Gates and his friends had ran up 1,575 hours of computer time. The computers at the University of Washington were free and they were open 24 hours so Gates would go during the slowest time between 3am and 6am. A company called TRW approached Bud Pembroke, one of the founders of ISI, because they needed programmers familiar with the software that Gates and his friends had been working on. Pembroke called the kids from Lakeside and the school let them work there during the school semester and an independent study project. 8th grade to the end of high school for Gates can be considered his Hamburg. There were a series of opportunities that led to Bill Gates success:

1. Gates got sent to lakeside

2. Mothers of lakeside had enough money to for school’s computer fees

3. When the money ran out, one of the parents happened to work at C-Cubed à which

happened to need someone to code on the weekends à which turned into weeknights

4. Gates happened to find out about ISI and ISI happened to need someone to work on its

payroll software

5. Gates happened to live within walking distance of the University of Washington

6. The University happened to have free computer time between 3am-6am

7. TRW happened to call Bud Pembroke

8. The best programmers Pembroke knew for the particular problem happened to be 2

high school kids

9. Lakeside was willing to let those kids spend their spring term miles away writing code

What do all opportunities have in common? They gave bill gates extra time to PRACTICE. By the time he dropped out of Harvard, he’d been programming practically nonstop for 7 consecutive years. He was PAST 10,000 hours.

This book related to Positive Deviance because Outliers are essential Positive Deviants, with one exception. The true positive deviants would be those who DID NOT have access to all the opportunities that Bill Gates had, and still somehow would have ended up creating Microsoft, or still would have ended up being a professional hockey player.