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Outliers, The Story Of Success
TechForensics writes "Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is subtitled "the story of success." It is a book that purports to explain why some people succeed far more than others. It suggests that a success like Bill Gates is more attributable to external factors than anything within the man. Even his birth date turns out to play a role of profound importance in the success of Bill Gates and Microsoft Corporation." Look below for the rest of Leon's review.
Outliers
author
Malcolm Gladwell
pages
301
publisher
Little, Brown and Co.
rating
Excellent.
reviewer
Leon Malinofsky
ISBN
978-0-316-03669-6
summary
Success comes from external factors or unsuspected internal ones.
Outliers also tries to answer such diverse questions as what Gates has in common with the Beatles; why Asians have superior success at math; and the reason the world's smartest man is one of the least accomplished. All of these things are viewed in terms of generation, family, culture, and class. Outliers — those persons of exceptional accomplishment — typically have lives that proceed from particular patterns.
Chapter 1 is an examination of similar towns in Italy with vastly disparate life expectancies and no apparent reason. Though the towns were only miles apart, the life expectancy in Roseto was surprisingly longer-- longer, in fact, than any neighboring town in the region, making Roseto an outlier. The eventual explanation, namely, the prevalence of multigenerational families under a single roof with the attendant reduced stress of lifestyle, while not one of the book's more shocking revelations, nevertheless serves as an example of an outlier and the sometimes hidden causes of their status.
Chapter 2 seeks to answer the curious question why athletes on elite Canadian teams were all born in the same few months of their birth year. In a system in which achievement is based on individual merit, one would assume the hardest work would translate to the best achievement. The fact this criterion on was wholly overmastered by timing of birth was studied and showed that hidden advantage, namely being older and stronger than persons born later in the year of eligibility brought continuous, cascading, even snowballing advantage, which ultimately produced Canada's most elite players. If everyone born, in, say, 1981 was eligible to begin play only in a single year, then naturally the older boys, being larger and better coordinated, would dominate. Hockey player selection in Canada is shown to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, namely a situation where a false definition in the beginning invokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.
Chapter 3 is far and away the most interesting in the book. It sets forth the so-called 10,000 hour rule, and in its course, shows why Bill Gates and the Beatles succeeded for essentially the same reason. Gladwell begins by noting that musical geniuses such as Mozart, and chess grandmasters, both achieved their status after about 10 years. 10 years is roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice. 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness. Both Bill Joy at the University of Michigan and Bill Gates at Seattle's famous Lakeside school, two schools with some of the first computer terminals, had access to unlimited time-sharing computer time at essentially the beginning of the modern industry and before anyone else. Because both were absorbed and drawn into programming, spending countless hours in fascinated self-study, both achieved 10,000 hours of programming experience before hitting their level. Because hitting that level took place at exactly the time need for that level of computer expertise manifested in society, ability came together with need and unique uber programmers were born. The Beatles played seven days a week on extended stints in Hamburg Germany and estimated by the time they started their phenomenal climb to greatness in England that they had played for 10,000 hours. Subsequent studies of musicians in general in music school showed that elite, mid-level, and low-level musicians hewed very closely to the "genius is a function of hours put in and not personal gifts" school of thought: members of each group had similar amounts of total lifetime practice. This book makes a fascinating case that genius is a function of time and not giftedness, validating both Edison's famous saw about 98% perspiration and Feynman's claim that there is no such thing as intelligence, only interest.
The next chapter tells the tale of Bill Langen, whose IQ is one of the highest in recorded history. However, he was a spectacular failure in his personal life. Prof. Oppenheimer, on the other hand ascended to work on the Manhattan Project though in graduate school he had tried to poison his adviser. The difference is shown to result from an astonishing lack of charisma and a sense of what others are thinking in Langen, and an extreme personability in Oppenheimer, which is said to show that success is not a function of hard work or even genius but more of likability and the ability to empathize.
Chapter 5 tells the tale of attorney Joseph Flom, of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher and Flom. According to Gladwell, Flom did not succeed through hustle and ability but rather by virtue of his origins. Intelligence, personality and ambition were not enough, but had to be coupled with origins in a Jewish culture in which hard work and ingenuity were encouraged, and in fact a necessary part of life. This, along with having to scrabble in a firm cobbled together out of necessity because Jews were not hired by white-shoe law firms, gave the partners and unusual and timely expertise: Flom's firm decided it had to take hostile takeover cases when no one else would, and that turned Flom and his partners into experts in a kind of legal practice just beginning to boom when they hit their stride.
Chapter 6 traces the influence on a person's culture of origin and how it marks him more in the present day then may be generally appreciated. Psychological experiments proved that a so-called culture of honor, such as that found in the South, where people of necessity had nothing but their reputations, caused the products of such a culture to be much more aggressive in defending themselves, their reputations and honor.
Chapter 7 traces the influence of Korean culture and deference to superiors as significant facts in a high number of plane crashes in the national airlines. It was only when cultural phenomena such as the inability to contradict a superior were corrected by cultural retraining that Korean Air Lines began to achieve the same safety levels of the airlines of other countries. This chapter is interesting for its treatment of flight KAL 007 alone.
Chapter 8 will have strong interest for most Slashdot readers. There is an Asian saying that no one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year can fail to make his family rich. The hard, intricate work of operating a successful rice paddy, equal in complexity to an organic chemical synthesis almost, is shown to have produced an ability for precision and complexity which outstrips growers of other crops. The fact that Asian languages in many cases use shorter and more logical words for numbers confers a strong early advantage which, like the age advantage in the hockey player example, snowball significantly over time. Gladwell argues Asians are not innately more able at math, but culturally more amenable to it based on the felicity of a language which is to our language as the metric system of weights and measures is to the English.
The final chapters of the book show that inner-city kids placed in intensive study schools achieve as much as kids from rich suburbs. The reason is found to be cultural: the long hours in those schools take up evening hours which would be spent at home and also take up summer hours, which in the special schools are full of math instead of the less than well-directed extracurricular pursuits typically found in the lower-income family home.
On the whole this book is going to provoke some ire and certainly some head scratching. It is bound to bear out in the minds of many Prof. Richard Feynman's assertion, which we may modify to say that giftedness and IQ are not inherent but conferred by accidents or benefits of culture, or at least via mechanisms that are not obvious. Even if such a conclusion sounds laughable to you, this book may change your thinking.
You can purchase Outliers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Outliers also tries to answer such diverse questions as what Gates has in common with the Beatles; why Asians have superior success at math; and the reason the world's smartest man is one of the least accomplished. All of these things are viewed in terms of generation, family, culture, and class. Outliers — those persons of exceptional accomplishment — typically have lives that proceed from particular patterns.
Chapter 1 is an examination of similar towns in Italy with vastly disparate life expectancies and no apparent reason. Though the towns were only miles apart, the life expectancy in Roseto was surprisingly longer-- longer, in fact, than any neighboring town in the region, making Roseto an outlier. The eventual explanation, namely, the prevalence of multigenerational families under a single roof with the attendant reduced stress of lifestyle, while not one of the book's more shocking revelations, nevertheless serves as an example of an outlier and the sometimes hidden causes of their status.
Chapter 2 seeks to answer the curious question why athletes on elite Canadian teams were all born in the same few months of their birth year. In a system in which achievement is based on individual merit, one would assume the hardest work would translate to the best achievement. The fact this criterion on was wholly overmastered by timing of birth was studied and showed that hidden advantage, namely being older and stronger than persons born later in the year of eligibility brought continuous, cascading, even snowballing advantage, which ultimately produced Canada's most elite players. If everyone born, in, say, 1981 was eligible to begin play only in a single year, then naturally the older boys, being larger and better coordinated, would dominate. Hockey player selection in Canada is shown to be a self-fulfilling prophecy, namely a situation where a false definition in the beginning invokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.
Chapter 3 is far and away the most interesting in the book. It sets forth the so-called 10,000 hour rule, and in its course, shows why Bill Gates and the Beatles succeeded for essentially the same reason. Gladwell begins by noting that musical geniuses such as Mozart, and chess grandmasters, both achieved their status after about 10 years. 10 years is roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice. 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness. Both Bill Joy at the University of Michigan and Bill Gates at Seattle's famous Lakeside school, two schools with some of the first computer terminals, had access to unlimited time-sharing computer time at essentially the beginning of the modern industry and before anyone else. Because both were absorbed and drawn into programming, spending countless hours in fascinated self-study, both achieved 10,000 hours of programming experience before hitting their level. Because hitting that level took place at exactly the time need for that level of computer expertise manifested in society, ability came together with need and unique uber programmers were born. The Beatles played seven days a week on extended stints in Hamburg Germany and estimated by the time they started their phenomenal climb to greatness in England that they had played for 10,000 hours. Subsequent studies of musicians in general in music school showed that elite, mid-level, and low-level musicians hewed very closely to the "genius is a function of hours put in and not personal gifts" school of thought: members of each group had similar amounts of total lifetime practice. This book makes a fascinating case that genius is a function of time and not giftedness, validating both Edison's famous saw about 98% perspiration and Feynman's claim that there is no such thing as intelligence, only interest.
The next chapter tells the tale of Bill Langen, whose IQ is one of the highest in recorded history. However, he was a spectacular failure in his personal life. Prof. Oppenheimer, on the other hand ascended to work on the Manhattan Project though in graduate school he had tried to poison his adviser. The difference is shown to result from an astonishing lack of charisma and a sense of what others are thinking in Langen, and an extreme personability in Oppenheimer, which is said to show that success is not a function of hard work or even genius but more of likability and the ability to empathize.
Chapter 5 tells the tale of attorney Joseph Flom, of Skadden Arps Slate Meagher and Flom. According to Gladwell, Flom did not succeed through hustle and ability but rather by virtue of his origins. Intelligence, personality and ambition were not enough, but had to be coupled with origins in a Jewish culture in which hard work and ingenuity were encouraged, and in fact a necessary part of life. This, along with having to scrabble in a firm cobbled together out of necessity because Jews were not hired by white-shoe law firms, gave the partners and unusual and timely expertise: Flom's firm decided it had to take hostile takeover cases when no one else would, and that turned Flom and his partners into experts in a kind of legal practice just beginning to boom when they hit their stride.
Chapter 6 traces the influence on a person's culture of origin and how it marks him more in the present day then may be generally appreciated. Psychological experiments proved that a so-called culture of honor, such as that found in the South, where people of necessity had nothing but their reputations, caused the products of such a culture to be much more aggressive in defending themselves, their reputations and honor.
Chapter 7 traces the influence of Korean culture and deference to superiors as significant facts in a high number of plane crashes in the national airlines. It was only when cultural phenomena such as the inability to contradict a superior were corrected by cultural retraining that Korean Air Lines began to achieve the same safety levels of the airlines of other countries. This chapter is interesting for its treatment of flight KAL 007 alone.
Chapter 8 will have strong interest for most Slashdot readers. There is an Asian saying that no one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year can fail to make his family rich. The hard, intricate work of operating a successful rice paddy, equal in complexity to an organic chemical synthesis almost, is shown to have produced an ability for precision and complexity which outstrips growers of other crops. The fact that Asian languages in many cases use shorter and more logical words for numbers confers a strong early advantage which, like the age advantage in the hockey player example, snowball significantly over time. Gladwell argues Asians are not innately more able at math, but culturally more amenable to it based on the felicity of a language which is to our language as the metric system of weights and measures is to the English.
The final chapters of the book show that inner-city kids placed in intensive study schools achieve as much as kids from rich suburbs. The reason is found to be cultural: the long hours in those schools take up evening hours which would be spent at home and also take up summer hours, which in the special schools are full of math instead of the less than well-directed extracurricular pursuits typically found in the lower-income family home.
On the whole this book is going to provoke some ire and certainly some head scratching. It is bound to bear out in the minds of many Prof. Richard Feynman's assertion, which we may modify to say that giftedness and IQ are not inherent but conferred by accidents or benefits of culture, or at least via mechanisms that are not obvious. Even if such a conclusion sounds laughable to you, this book may change your thinking.
You can purchase Outliers from amazon.com. Slashdot welcomes readers' book reviews -- to see your own review here, read the book review guidelines, then visit the submission page.
Looks like a very interesting book, very much in the flavor of Freakonomics, in that it uses each chapter to explore a completely different phenomenon and simply orbits around a nebulous main argument.
I very much like that approach because it leaves me, as a reader, feeling like I've taken an adventure and seen a lot in the course of a book; it appeals to casual readers who like their nonfiction to be as exciting and as unpredictable as their fiction.
I expect to pick it up from the library as soon as I can. Thanks for your review!
If growing rice leads to some sort of cultural intelligence, why is it that West Africans, who have been growing rice over thousands of years, don't match the intelligence of rui Asians?
Reminds me of stock market games people play. Someone usually winds up increasing their money by a ridiculous factor. The winner just happened to guess a good set of buys/moves. Another analogy is the million monkeys typing - pure chance will eventually produce a winner.
I don't believe in luck - but in chance yes. Successful people usually make their own "luck" by doing things to better their odds. Bill Gates might be an example of both.
..........FULL STOP.
I've spent 10000 hours in slashdot comments and gained nothing...
Some people do everything right, research, come to correct conclusions, and yet random events destroy them.
Other people make a series of long odds, even terrible choices and yet do great because of random events.
Given classic random theory, given a series of 50/50 type decisions, out of 32 people, one person will be completely screwed and one person will win every time. For larger data sets, the lucky runs are only longer.
I'm sure Gates determination and business acumen made a difference. But winning so big had a lot to do with luck.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
This seems to be his third or fourth book of this type. Not that I'm complaining - I've read Blink, and Tipping Point - both very interesting reads. It gives some of the explanations behind behaviours that I've noticed, but hadn't thought about why they occurred.
..........FULL STOP.
You really won't ever be a rich company owner, for the simple reason that you will never ever consider starting up a company, let alone the fact that you don't have the insight of what decision is good and which just consumes time.
Being able to see which decisions are actually relevant is a skill most people don't have, for it requires the "helicopterview" many companies want from management people. If you don't have it, forget about running your own company. You'll fail miserably.
The biggest indicator of this is the large percentage of successful people who fail utterly when they try to reproduce that success a second time.
Surprise! You actually aren't god's gift to business after all.
As far as Bill Gates goes though, if you look at his early history he was indeed in the right place at the right time, but he darn well clawed his way to the top through skill as much as luck I think, and I have a lot of respect for that.
At a very early computer conference, all the other people got up and allowed as how there was going to be plenty of room in this new industry for all the different manufacturers. Only Bill got up and said "you guys are all wrong, there's going to be one winner and the rest will lose".
Say what you want about Bill's business methodologies, but I think he's actually about the poorest example of the "outlier" effect that you can find.
G.
I remember seeing a googletechtalk on this for anyone interested you should be able to find it on youtube. Personally I didn't like the presentation.
Specifically, an example of the Fundamental Attribution Error.
- None can love freedom heartily, but good men; the rest love not freedom, but license. -- John Milton
At first I read this as Outliars. I think that might work too for some "successful" people.
-
As it happens, I have just finished reading Outliers, and I liked it a lot. (I've also liked Gladwell's two previous books, The Tipping Point and Blink.)
I would summarize Gladwell's conclusion slightly differently. I think he would accept that some people are inherently gifted -- in several places, he is careful to say that people like Bill Joy and Bill Gates were very talented. It seems to me the kernel of his argument is that they had inherent talent, but became truly exceptional owing to a combination of favorable circumstances. In other words, their talent was a necessary but not sufficient condition for great success.
It's perhaps similar to what has been said about sex: to turn out really well, it requires both experience and enthusiasm, and no amount of one can compensate for a complete lack of the other. :-)
I agree that intelligence is overrated and interest is key. But you have to have a certain level of intelligence for some pursuits, I think. If you don't have enough intelligence, you have an insurmountable handicap. But once you have enough intelligence, then more intelligence won't help you much. You need to WORK.
This explains why the "losers" in high school didn't become physicists, or cosmologists, but they eventually succeeded at normal occupations. Even though they might not have had as many brains as the smartest, they had enough brains for any normal occupation. And they worked very hard.
The lesson that I draw from this is that I SHOULD have boned that somewhat stupid girl in 10th grade, because she turned out hot and successful even though she wasn't an honors student.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
In the book "The making of the Atomic Bomb" the author, Richard Rhodes, points out something very much like this.
One might think that the distribution of Nobel Prize winning physicists might have a normal distribution, but there is a valley in Hungary (if I remember the book correctly) that has an inordinate amount of Nobel Prize winners.
He makes the case that their elementary level education had a role in this. Students were doing inventive things on their own in math and science at a very early age. As a result, a more natural and internal approach to these subjects followed them through life and put them in a better position to do ground-breaking research.
By the way, if you have not read "The Making of the Atomic Bomb" I highly recommend it. Not just because of its account of the events of the Manhattan Project, but also because it goes into the philosophy of the 1800's which resulted in the pursuit of bigger, better weapons to rage "Total War". The chemical weapons of WWI were a result of this as well.
Either give it away or get top dollar, but never sell yourself cheap.
the "review" mentions Gates too much. he's not that important to Mr. Gladwell's thesis - i believe Gladwell threw Gates in solely for name recognition (seems to be working here)
besides, it was mildly amusing to read about little Billy and little Paulie sneaking about Seattle in the dark looking for a little terminal time wherever they could get it - geeks in their pupal stage. no mention is made of their later exploits as older non-geek business dorks
good book, bad review
Prof. Oppenheimer, on the other hand ascended to work on the Manhattan Project though in graduate school he had tried to poison his adviser.The difference is... an extreme personability in Oppenheimer, which is said to show that success is not a function of hard work or even genius but more of likability and the ability to empathize. I don't know about you, but trying to poison your adviser doesn't sound like evidence of "extreme personability", "likability", or "ability to empathize" to me. Sounds more like "being a sociopath" is an important contributing factor to success! "Lickability", on the other hand, is an important contributing factor in choosing a significant other.
I've abandoned my search for truth; now I'm just looking for some useful delusions.
Please read the comments here before rehashing them.
not necessarily in that order.
Sent from your iPad.
Namely, The Bell Curve and Human Achievement, which came to largely different conclusions, including a strong statistical case that heredity is responsible for 40-60% of human achievement?
Amazon is the original patent troll. You should vote with your money and buy this book anywhere else. And definitely don't buy using Slashdot's link, since Slashdot will get a kickback for that, and Slashdot evidently supports patent trolls such as Amazon.com and the recent attempt by Software Tree to sue RedHat.
a so-called culture of honor, such as that found in the South were people of necessity had nothing but their reputations
Before the war, the South was the rich half of the country.
I've recently read the book, and I found it very interesting. It is well written and the author stays focused throughout the book.
The author argues convincingly for his views and presents multiple examples to back up his ideas. Personally I was intrigued by his idea that people are not born geniuses but are made genius through a series of random events falling out their way. The author doesn't argue that there is no such thing as inherited intelligence nor that everyones faith is determined purely by chance - rather he argues that the outcome is a fine balance between the two effects. To become successful you need high intelligence (on multiple levels) and the right opportunities (which constitute the element of chance).
From a philosophical (or religious) stand point you may not agree with his views, but the book is still a very good read and I highly recommend it.
Just finished the book too and loved it (same for both of his previous books). The book does say that you can succeed by your own merit but the *scale* of your success depends on your "history" or ancestry.
Personally my favorite part was the last chapter about Daisy which I found personal and very touching.
I've seen Malcolm Gladwell do talks about 3 or 4 times and he's very engaging as both a speaker and a writer. I got a free copy of his previous book, Blink, which is about how people can "thin-slice" their experiences and make snap judgements based on gut feelings. I twas a fascinating read, but the only problem that I have with his writing style is that it occasionally gets painfully repetitive. He'll make a point, support it with an argument, make the point again, support it some more, revisit the point and give a summary of his previous arguments, then make more arguments to support his point.
I've been meaning to read Tipping Point and Outliers for a while, but I dunno. I feel like I get a lot more out of his talks (he goes off on tangents, frequently) than I got out of Blink.
...spike
Ewwwwww, coconut...
Did the times make Napoleon, or did Napoleon make the times.
A new book isn't going to settle the debate.
Bill Gates was successful at holding back the software industry and costing us all billions of dollars though needlessly aggressive tactics and the inability of his business model to produce usable software. I wouldn't consider that a success. I suppose it depends what you're trying to accomplish.
From what I understand, (not Canadian) a lot of that has to do with age-based leagues in Canadian Jr hockey. A 6yr old kid who is born in Feb, for example, has to wait until the next season to play because "they're not old enough" age-wise for the league that requires you to be at least 6 years and 6 months to play.
So they're older (or the inverse is true) when they start in that particular league.
Something like that. I hope one of our Canadian members can either blow that theory out of the water or back it, one or the other. ;)
Sent from your iPad.
If we accept the thesis of the book, it offers a refreshing counterpoint to the popular stereotype of "rags to riches" that is too often held up as an achievable ideal.
What's wrong with encouraging people to work hard in order to be successful and famous? Nothing, except that it may be substantially based on a false premise. Sure, hard work is generally (though not always) necessary but it may well prove insufficient. And that's the part that always seems to be overlooked when we celebrate the extraordinary success of a famous individual.
People don't always achieve their dreams, especially if the achievement is statistically improbable. Chance plays a dominant role in the improbable cases. And so, for every single welfare mum who went on to make billions from a book series about a young wizard, there are perhaps hundreds of thousands of welfare mums who have to accept that their most inspired and courageous efforts will probably go unremarked and unrewarded.
Merit is fine, something to be cultivated and rewarded. But success is not proof of merit, and failure should not be cause for censure. That sort of neocon thinking is too simplistic by far.
Parity: What to do when the weekend comes.
By studying successful people without some external reference, one is able to pick and choose traits as one pleases to define success.
In the business world, I would argue access to capital and no compassion, regard for others, and absence of a sense of guilt are the best indicators. See this vague definition of sociopathy http://www.mcafee.cc/Bin/sb.html
In the entertainment world there are **LOTS** of musicians putting in this hypothetical 10,000 hours. Practice/performing only takes one so far. Most of this mythic "10,000 hour club" end up as music teachers.
Bottom line: grouping "successful people" is a values-driven specifically unscientific exercise.
http://www.maxineudall.com/2010/02/should-economists-be-sued-for-malpractice.html
I think that everybody agree that Bill Gates has made his fortune through his business skills and luck not because of his programming skills.
So he may have spent 10,000 hours programming but this doesn't mean that he is a programming genius..
Wow you mean to say that life is mostly about random chance and luck than anything resembling an ordered plan? Holy crap. mind=blown. Gonna have to think about this for a spell. In the mean time, why don't you calculate for me the number of genetic variations that could have happened at birth that would have made you a completely different person. It can't be more than 5 or 6.
some of these assertions seem questionable, but the asian language relation to math is very true. In math and related subjects you really start to see the value of ideogram based writing systems over purely phonetic alphabets. here is a perfect example from japanese: convex = å http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%87%B8 concave = å http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/%E5%87%B9 which is easier to remember or understand?
Someone needs to write a book about total failures, and what NOT to do with your life. I fear it may involve people who spend all day posting on Slashdot.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I've decided that Malcolm Gladwell is a storyteller. As such, he learns what stories resonate with people, and because he's a good storyteller, he's become very successful at spinning his tales.
While I haven't read Outliers, I did read "Blink" and found that while he provided lots of anecdotes to support his premise, there was no mechanism, no measurement, and no way to verify it. In fact, he provided a number of other anecdotes that showed just the opposite.
What he did in that book, I think, was to state a premise that we'd like to believe, that our gut instincts are right, and tell stories to reinforce that, but never go so far as to make a claim that could be verified. I'm not alone in this view.
Based on what I've read so far, "Outliers" seems like more of the same.
Life is ultimately chaotic and pointless.
You can be the right person in the wrong place at the wrong time. You can do everything right and still get fucked. Such is life as they say.
But at the end of the day, given the ups and downs of life, those with the internal fires, the entrepreneurial spirit, and the smarts will do better over time.
not this time... apparently you need at least 10,000 hours of practice before you will get a frosty every time. good luck!
Hell yeah bro, totally. *high five*
Success is a combination of luck and initiative. It is very important that everyone in our society realizes how important the former is. It might help our society to realize that even when people do everything correctly, they can end up in awful situations, and that the opposite is true: Plenty of hacks end up wealthy and successful.
It sickens me when some moderately successful individual makes a comment such as, "I don't want to pay for that guy's [insert social service]. I work my ass off and he doesn't."
It is deplorable! That person could be you!
"There but for the grace of god go I." - John Bradford
That statement could probably be amended slightly, but you get the point.
"Be not afraid of greatness: some are born great, some achieve greatness and some have greatness thrust upon them." (Twelfth Night, Act 2, Scene 5)
It's quite plain to see that the author is talking about greatness. If he's well read, he should know the idea that some are bound to greatness by chance was written long ago.
Explaining some of the happenings of chance that confer this effect is a useful goal. Perhaps knowing more ways to improve one's odds at greatness will allow more people to improve them. Perhaps it will even allow more great breakthroughs.
We all in the modern world stand on the shoulders of giants. Some of us put that to better use than others. Some of us by chance are given different giants, too.
Sure, a Chinese or Japanese child may have an easier number system to learn. A European or American child, though, has a much smaller and simpler alphabet. People born with safe running water and household electrical current live a life different from people who spend part of their time hauling water and burn candles or kerosene lamps for light. Which child do you expect to write the next great computer application? It's probably not one who has think about getting power to cook his food. It'll probably be a child who doesn't have to worry about power for his computer.
Of all those who have most of the advantages of a Bill Gates or a Warren Buffet, how many actually take advantage of all of them?
It seems to me the lesson is that you not only need to be smart, but you need to be willing to do the work to find opportunities, and willing to act upon them. Also, you need to have a little luck to be in the right place at the right time.
Not to beat a very bad fanboi cliche to death, but Steve Jobs vs Bill Gates. Steve saw an opportunity to sell a computer to the masses in the 70s and kick start the personal computer market. Bill saw an opportunity to tie his DOS to the IBM PC when he saw more business people wanted the PC over an Apple II. Steve saw the opportunity to create a graphical UI after visiting PARC and find a way to sell it, but wasn't nearly successful this time, because conditions were not in his favor (thanks to Bill Gates well timed opportunity). Bill then copied Steve's project and used his previous well timed success to do what Steve didn't quite have the leverage to do, get the GUI out to the masses.
Also look at Steve recognizing the market for ripping and mixing CDs, and the coming of the MP3, to create a music player at the right time that's easy to use, and to come up with a marketing plan that made everyone want it.
Both these men have skills and experience I'll never have. But they'd be nothing if the opportunity didn't arise. They'd be even less if the opportunity did arise, and no one took advantage of it. They'd just be here like the rest of us pontificating on how some other guy is a genius or not, struggling to install their copy of Ubuntu or something.
I guess my point is that this isn't something entirely new. This sounds like another book about the butterfly effect, so I'm not sure how useful it would be, though I'm sure its interesting entertainment.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
...he darn well clawed his way to the top through skill as much as luck I think, and I have a lot of respect for that.
I hope you're respecting the skill part, not the clawing part. We should make sure to disentangle the two.
For example, there might have a brilliantly talented and trained placekicker, but we might not want to respect his kicking babies. Regardless of how well the babies go sailing.
I read Malcolm Gladwell's book about a month ago and I just finished Steve Martin's new book, Born Standing Up, this morning. What I found remarkable was that Steve Martin's book exactly parallels the process that Malcolm Gladwell talks about.
Steve Martin's book begins:
"I did stand-up comedy for eighteen years. Ten of those years were spent learning, four years were spent refining, and four were spent in wild success."
There are other parallels such as having the opportunity to work at Disneyland from a young age and being exposed to performance and magic tricks. The most important point is that Steve Martin spent years and years refining his craft.
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Also, interesting is this very positive review of Gladwell's book by Tomas Sowell, an ultra-conservative economist (Gladwell is an obvious liberal)
http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5384/
1) Gladwell's description of the mechanics windshear was inaccurate. Perhaps he understood what he was saying when he wrote it, but the way it reads sound s like he is saying that when a plane is flying into a headwind, the pilots need to use more power, and then if that headwind shears to a tail wind, all of a sudden, the plane is going too fast to land. This is really the opposite of what is true. Pilots don't really care so much about their ground speed as they approach the runway, only their airspeed. You don't use more power going into a head wind, because using more power would increase your airspeed. On really windy days, you can get small airplanes to track backwards over the ground, but they still have a positive airspeed within the normal operating limits. If a headwind shears to a tail wind, you don't have too much momentum, you have too little airspeed.
2) The idea that these non-US countries were less safe to fly in because of their culture of not questioning superiors is also questionable. Each airline has a corporate which ends up defining how crew members interact. Guess what, 40+ years ago, the corporate culture in the airlines in this country (USA) was similar to Korean Air's culture 15 years ago. The US airlines made a point to change their cultures, and safety was enhanced greatly. When the US consultants when to Korean Air, the same thing happened there. But there is no reason to say that the unsafe culture was do to Korean philosophies -- just a less modern attitude toward cockpit resource management.
3) Controlled flight into terrain (CFIT) accidents are always awful to read about. I think Malcolm missed the really big explanation for the CFIT crash that he describes. Historically, the ground proximity warning systems in large aircraft were not vary accurate at all. They were based mostly on rates of change of radar altitude, and were highly prone to calling out warnings when there was no problem, just spurious readings from the radar altimeter. As a result, pilots learned to not take advice from these units seriously. If they had, the accident Gladwell discusses certainly would not have happened. Modern enhanced ground proximity warning systems (eGPWS) use GPS and a database of obstructions, and are very reliable. With a reliable instrument, comes trust, and a pilot today, getting a warning from eGPWS is far less likely to make the same mistake.
If there are so many basic reasoning problems with chapter 7, how many problems are there in chapters outside my areas of expertise?
All this said, I'd recommend the book, it's a NYT bestseller, and it is very well written and thought provoking. It's provoking this discussion, and thats what a good book should do.
Thanks to this book, now I have had to deal with the inverse of the 10,000 hour 'rule', which is being told "if you haven't been doing something for 10,000 you don't know anything about it".
Success is logical as in randomality, but it also has to do with the person pursuing it. If you have a person who is focused, driven, has a desire and a vision to succeed, then success can be achieved in one(1) of three(3) ways of randomality.
1. Person has access to wealth, supplies that are in demand or a network of associations that have wealth or supplies that are in demand.
2. Person comes accross an opportunity that provides he/she the backbone that allows them to further their goals (either legally or illegally).
3. Person creates, recreates, has(like looks), discovers or invents an idea, concept, form of art and/or something that impacts social cultures and is discovered by someone with has either #1 or #2.
That is how it works, you can apply that method to any of todays rich, famous or successful.
P.S. the above is copyright Me(c), 2009. :D
It's perhaps similar to what has been said about sex: to turn out really well, it requires both experience and enthusiasm, and no amount of one can compensate for a complete lack of the other.
Was there a study done which corroborates your assertion about sex turning out well? I haven't ever heard anyone state the two conditions you have here as requirements for a good experience.
Although there is surely a large helping of serendipity in the megasuccess of any creative person, 10000 hours of practice is not "why the Beatles succeeded". I'm sure you could find any number of other groups from that period who had also spent long hours in the Hamburg clubs. They didn't become the Beatles. That was down to a combination of other variables -- one of which just may have been superior talent.
What the research I've seen on this point seems to say is that the 10000 hours may be a necessary condition for megasuccess. But it's not a sufficient condition. And the kids with straight A's in grade school only rarely grow up to be intellectual leaders.
you're right. we should just make everyone's lives miserable so as to evenly distribute "society's" resources. i'll take charge of the allocation governance. we can be sure that i'll be just as miserable as everyone else, can't we? oh, wait this has been tried before in soviet russia? damn, i'm not original either.
and it's impossible that we could increase production so fewer people have to be materially miserable. that's just crazy talk.
"If still these truths be held to be
Self evident."
-Edna St. Vincent Millay
I was a Chinese major, studied and lived in Japan for 4 years and am fluent in both languages. I've also studied a small bit of Korean as well.
I'm not sure how words for numbers could be more "logical" in these languages. In fact, in Korean there are two number naming systems -- one of native origin and the other of Chinese origin -- that can be used for values up to 100. (Japanese has this as well, but only up to 10.) For higher values the Chinese number names are used. So I doubt it has anything to do with language. Rather, I could see the the use of the abacus as a teaching tool as a big advantage, since it seems to confer a visceral knowledge of numbers and calculations that would be hard to acquire otherwise. Many people I know who became proficient with an abacus can visualize one in their head and use that visualization to do calculations.
That said, learning "Indian methods of calculation" seems to have become popular in Japan recently. There are at least two Nintendo DS games that give instruction on how to do arithmetic using methods taught in Indian schools (I own one of them).
.
Blink - go with your first feeling. There, that's the whole 100+ page book in a five word sentence.
Why people continue to fork money over to this guy is beyond me.
Ummm, the French system is worse than the standard system. If the analogy held then Asians would be worse at math.
French units have one single benefit: they are easily convertable. That's only a benefit on paper, and only a benefit when performing unit conversions. Base-10 is utterly horrible for performing physical manipulations (like, say, cutting lumber or dividing liquids).
And of course many things in real life don't work out cleanly anyway. There's a reason why non-base-10 radians are so useful. A calorie is 4.1868 joules: both measure the same thing and both are French units and both have clean definitions--and yet they work out to have a nasty conversion anyway.
The Darwin Awards have been doing that for us for years.
"All great wisdom is contained in .signature files"
May the Maths Be with you!
By strange coincidence I just finished reading it.
I would of summarized it as "to be amazingly successful you need to be in the right place at the right time and be prepared to put 10,000 hours of your time into learning your profession before you are in your mid 20s".
Which is kind of common sense.
But it is a genuinely engaging and interested point.
And it goes without saying that a complete idiot in the right place and the right time will probably still make a hash of it.
It's interesting that the author attributes the outliers' success partially to their circumstances, as if each of these individuals was somehow fated to pursue their exact paths regardless of the time period they lived in.
It seems at least as plausible to me that part of their talent lay in recognizing the opportunity which they pursued. It reminds me mostly of how many scientific breakthroughs are pursued at the same time by many thinkers in the field. The climate is right for that kind of breakthrough, and talented individuals recognize the potential breakthroughs - and then make them. You could read breakthroughs two ways: 1) the individuals were "lucky" to have lived right before the breakthrough was made, or 2) the individuals were talented enough that they would have had a reasonable change of making a breakthrough, and the timing just influenced which breakthrough was made by them.
Furthermore, there seems to be a difference between attributing outliers' success to external factors and explaining a population's success via cultural factors. Cultural factors are not external to the population in the same way that luck is external to an individual outlier, so at first glance, it seems like these chapters do not speak to each other much.
Plenty of people have a killer business instinct. Few are in the position to capitalize on it the way Gates did.
Gladwell never claims that it's all blind luck for guys like Gates and Joy. Rather, it's talent PLUS practice PLUS temperament PLUS blind luck.
As a business owner, I can authoritatively say you are full of it and your statement sounds like a way you justify why people don't succeed.
It doesn't take blind luck - luck is useless because...
...and yet you are not anywhere near as rich as Bill Gates...
It sounds more to me like you are an illustration of exactly what Gladwell is talking about.
The book's use of Bill Gates as an example of the 10,000 hour rule is rather poor. Bill Gates did not build Microsoft by being a good programmer. He built it by taking other people's good programs. He didn't even need any skill to identify "good", because he took those that lots of people were using. He let the public determine what was good and leveraged that.
I tried to find out what "Indian methods of calculation" means but it mostly lead to pages in Japanese (and my Japanese is nearly worthless now) or to pages about psychic numbers and such. Care to give some info about what that method is actually about?
Survivorship bias is caused by looking at the winners at the end of a period and then tracing backwards to find causative factors. It suffers from two failings. It does not consider those who started at the same time with the same qualities but failed to succeed. One needs to either do a forward-looking study with matched groups of identical traits and see if the groups with the traits succeed, or one has to go back and rebuild old data to include the individuals with similar traits that did not succeed. When survivorship bias is controlled for, usually statements about the cause of the effect disappear and turn out to be unsubstantiated. This is why historical medical analysis, such as taking certain vitamins to not get a disease or live longer, do not hold up when put to forward looking controlled studies. At the time of Gates' beginning, many other young people were playing with computers and programming. There were many other companies like Gates' at the same time. Some of them had the same advantages and luck as Gates', but failed.
The second failing is data mining. It occurs when one uses historical data and attempts to find some causative relationships. For example, if Gladwell looked at 100 successful individuals, the average odds are, let us say at a ten percent statistical confidence level, that 10 people will fit his criteria. It is these ten people he writes about, but it is nothing but the effect of probability. Of course, he does not mention the ones he looked at that he could not fit into his preconceived idea. It is like taking 100 coins and separately recording the results of flipping each one. About 12 coins, on average, will come up with three heads each in the first three tosses. To later say that these coins are different or more successful than the others without more info is meaningless. This is a common problem with stock market advice. Looking back over any period one can find stock relationships. However, those relationships will no longer hold going forward and were just a statistical fluke of the old data. This is why people who think they have found a pattern in the stock market can never consistently make money later.
His argument about soccer players was incorrect, as others have pointed out. The birth month was necessary but not sufficient. Just because all players were born in a particular pair of months does not mean that anyone born in those month can play professional soccer. The unfortunate outcome of this though will be that parents will start to purposely hold their kids back for some perceived sports advantage. 21 year old 6th graders will become common.
Anyone who has ever actually played sports will tell you that hard work can only take you so far. You really do need the physical tools as well. Which is why there aren't 5'10" no jumping centers in the NBA.
The same is true intellectually. As a computer geek back in the 60s & 70s I wrote a CAI program for special ed kids. Some of them worked as hard as any kids I've ever seen, but simple arithmetic was about as much as they could do.
Larry Ellison, founder and CEO of Oracle, was born on August 17, 1944 Sergey Brin, co-founder of Google, was born on August 21, 1973 Larry Page, co-founder of Google, was born on March 26, 1973 Steve Wozniak, co-founder of Apple was born August 11, 1950 Jerry Yang, co-founder of Yahoo, born November 6, 1968 Mitch Kapor, founder of Lotus Development Corp, born November 1, 1950 You were saying, Mr. Gladwell? I didn't even have to reach for those.
The idea that being "great" at something is a result of a lot of hard work put into it as early as possible reminds me of something my father used to say about military strategy. As he put it, the basic formula for victory was "Be there firstest with the mostest." If you've already honed your skills when your peers are just starting out, it's easy to see how you might develop an unshakable lead.
My question would be what stops the process of reinvention, by which I mean accumulating the skills later and still making a mark? is it internal or external? Is is peer group, societal pressure, lack of motivation, time allocation, or something else? Or does it happen all the time without us taking much note of it?
Actually, Bill Joy was successful because he had Government funding to give software away. Before "vi", there was the RAND Editor, which was better, but had a substantial per-seat cost. Before Joy did a TCP implementation, there were three others, but two of them (BBN and 3COM) cost several thousand dollars per machine. It's great when you can buy market share with Government money.
Java was successful because Sun spent $20 million launching a free product. Nobody had ever done that before for a programming tool.
Ha....Offtopic....you can't even get modded down right.
Sounds like a long and fairly useless exercise in common sense. People who succeed are those who work hard and are lucky to be in the right place at the right time... wow, real work of genius, somebody submit this piece for the nobel prize.
I do congratulate the guy on being a skilled enough writer to convince large amounts of people that it's worth buying a book that simply restates what 90% of humanity already knows.
allocation of society's resources toward themselves
"Society" does not have resources that people "allocate to themselves". That one phrase gives away your basic worldview, and explains the vehemence you feel toward anyone who believes that they can achieve individual success - that any one can earn what they have.
External factors do exist. No one with any sense would deny that. But do you really believe that individual skill and effort has no effect on that individual's personal outcomes? That their actual outcomes are truly defined by external factors not within their control, and not, perhaps, by their ability to foresee, plan for, and possibly deal with those facts?
The view that individuals never actually deserve to have more than others, that they just grab an unfair cut from a collectively-owned pool of "resources", is really just hatred of others for being successful.
Envy is such an ugly emotion.
One man's religion is another man's belly-laugh. - LL
If something is past its expiration date, you increase the price.
Bill Gates, give me a break...
His parents were the richest people on the Pacific Rim at the time...
Given that kind of support (and the knowledge that you can't fail no matter what)
how can you not succeed ? Same goes for D Trump, junk Bonds salesman, son of a...wait for it, millionaire (billionaire ? Real Estate investor...) Ugh.
Iconizing and Idol whorship...blech...
End of Line.
I totally agree with you. If a business and its shareholders want to pay their executives 1 hojillion dollars, it's their decision. The executives are an investment, like any other. If the executives bring enough income to the company to justify it, the company wins, and if they don't, the company loses. Or fires them.
If the company is foolish enough to pay the execs based on short-term gains which ultimately cost them billions, the company loses. Everything works itself out.
What breaks this system is when the company makes horrific decisions and the taxpayers bail them out. Now we're paying the huge salaries and there's no penalty for bad investment. Guess what that creates? (Hint: not "valuable jobs and products.")
I am Asian.
Chapter 3 is far and away the most interesting in the book. It sets forth the so-called 10,000 hour rule, and in its course, shows why Bill Gates and the Beatles succeeded for essentially the same reason. Gladwell begins by noting that musical geniuses such as Mozart, and chess grandmasters, both achieved their status after about 10 years. 10 years is roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice. 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness.
I used to be really good at DDR. In Konami's official Internet Ranking, I placed 10th place in North America, and 98th place World Wide. I hit my peak after about 2 years of practice.
I'm a bit past the 10th year of practice now (I started playing around 1997-1998), and I'm nowhere near my previous level. I can't even claim to be within the top 10 of my province anymore, let alone all of North America.
The fact that Asian languages in many cases use of shorter and more logical words for numbers confers a strong early advantage which, like the age advantage in the hockey player example, snowball significantly over time.
I really don't know what the author is referring to here. I think the system used by most western cultures is the best numbering system I know. You can judge the magnitude of a number based on the number of digits it contains. You can't do that with roman numerals, and you can't do that with Asian numbering systems. Hopefully I won't need to convince you that the system used by the Romans was terrible.
In Asian languages 234 is written as äOEç(TM)¾äåå, or literally translated: "[2][100][3][10][4]". Doesn't this seem reminiscent of the Roman system? "CCXXXIV"? The real innovation with the western system was that the position of a digit gave its magnitude. 234 = 2 * 10^2 + 3 * 10^1 + 4 * 10^0. This is what made it so much easier to work with over the Roman system, where you basically had some rules about adding and subtracting digits together (C means 100, so CC means 100 + 100; IV means 5 - 1 = 4). The Asian system is similar to the roman system, but uses multiplicate and addition (äOE means 2 and ç(TM)¾ means 100, so äOEç(TM)¾ means 200; ç(TM)¾äOE means 100 + 2).
Yeah, that statement struck me as odd too. So I googled "malcolm gladwell outliers number system".
http://ruckingfidiculous.blogspot.com/2009/01/outliers-by-malcolm-gladwell.html
So the argument is that there are no "-teen" and "-ty" to trip people up. I dunno. Doing arithmetic is more about internalizing Arabic numerals in a base-10 number system than anything else, so I can see the connection, but it's tenuous.
Pedagogical methods are more of a factor, I'd say. I never went to Kumon, but some other people I knew certainly did. Drills, drills, and more drills. Ugh. It works, though.
Sane men know that luck is the residue of design. Success is not guaranteed, but it nonetheless is distributed along a curve which closely follows those individuals who play the hand life deals them in a certain manner, and away from those who play them in certain other ways -- or simply throw the cards on the table and whine about it.
Making the leap from "success is not guaranteed" to "It's all about luck" is the action of those who expect things to be handed to them without effort on their part, and are angry when it isn't; it is a rationalization of the same type and motivation as "The Devil made me do it", or "It's genetic!" or "It's because I'm black/white/red/plaid".
Their siren call is "I couldn't help it!" The fear often heard in that screech is genuine, though; it is the dread fear of that awesome moral responsibility which is self-authorship -- that each one of us is what we made of ourselves.
I couldn't find a Bill, but I found a Chris Langen. Wikipedia says he was referenced in Outliers...and the article doesn't describe a personal failure to me, rather the opposite, having overcome an abusive childhood to creating a foundation for gifted children to winning big on a gameshow.
Trailer-trash Dog Brainonaire movie anyone? :-)
Q: What do Linux users say when the meet each other on the street?
A: Nothing! Linux users don't leave their mom's basement!
The link doesn't work unless you drop the final slash; http://www.capmag.com/article.asp?ID=5384
"Slashdot - News and Chat Sites Deviant". (Click "homepage" link above for details).
I've read couple of these books, but not "Outliers". I found a bit annoying but couldn't place my finger on it until I read Joel's Review. He's right on the money - the author just states the obvious.....
...richie - It is a good day to code.
The author of this book is playing into everyone's hope that you can control your life.
But as most psychologists know, genes account for most of the variations in human nature, not experience.
Here are just a few of the papers for those who want academic proof.
They show that intelligence, personality, temperament, occupational, and leisure time interests are mostly influenced by your genes.
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/3397862
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/7750369
http://bernard.pitzer.edu/~dmoore/psych199s03articles/Bouchard.pdf
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1147437&cid=27056793
See End of Days admit to using multiple accounts to "mod himself up" via multiple username accounts he has here to 'support himself', and to mod others down as well, after he was caught stalking and harassing others repeatedly no less via said nefarious means (transparent though & easily caught). He's talking about being successful here, when the only thing he was successful in here on this website @ least, lol, was being caught doing the lame things he did above... Man - What a loser, and a stupid one at that.
A big difference between American- and eastern-heritage students is family support of education.
Typical US-heritage students are expected to, in addition to studying, be working to earn part of their university costs (and to have done so during the high school years leading up to it). They're also expected to have considerable extra-curricular activity.
Typical Asian-heritage students have exactly ONE responsibility until they have graduated and become employed professionally: LEARN. The family fully supports the child completely (though perhaps not in royal style), leaving him much more time for studying.
Result: Asian-heritage students can put a LOT more concentration into learning than American-heritage students. This snowballs over time. And it really shows, especially in those subjects where performance can be measured objectively.
Bantam Dominique roosters crow a four-note song. Once you've heard it as "Happy BIRTHday" you can't NOT hear it that way
I think he means how the number system proceeds logically in decimal increments instead of centennial increments. In Japanese you essentially have 1-10, 100, 1000, 10000, etc. English has new words for each decade up to 100 and doesn't start to "build" numbers until 100 "one hundred twenty three"...which would be "one hundred two ten three" in Japanese. Remember how counting to 100 seemed like such a daunting task? Japanese kids only have to remember 1-10 and 100. They learn earlier than English speakers things like "Fifteen" is one ten and one five and so forth.
I think that by "logical" they mean that the words for numbers follow the base-10 system as do written numbers. The idea is that exceptions like "eleven" and "twelve", especially so early on in the counting sequence, make learning how to count past 10 (and therefore place value) difficult.
"the world's smartest man is one of the least accomplished."
I'm happy, and that's what's important to me.
I am not left-handed, either!
Can't help thinking the decisive factors for getting at the helm of a project to build the bomb of the day were not exactly compassion and empathy but more in the province of "demonstrably having had no qualms about killing", and probably a presumed yearning to succeed big time on a second chance at that...
And now, looking at my logic, I'm thinking that it's not at least one case, it's only one case. Once the sample size is greater than the number of wins required in a row, the line flattens. For N coin tosses, the chances of winning T tosses in a row will always be 1/2^T, regardless of the size of N as long as N>T.
And N>T is such an obvious assumption that I feel that my previous post, which I thought was insightful at the time, is not really all that great. Sorry for adding to the noise.
The CB App. What's your 20?
This seems to ignore the director circuit - directors on the boards of large companies is a very small, close-knit group that often make decisions to further their own group.
Have a look at the list of boards that a director of a large public company is on, ostensibly as proof of their capability, but also representative of the highly inbred and insular nature of the group.
This group evolves from and rewards the executives who it sees as supporting the group, not some blind egalitarian principle of capitalism.
Shareholders provide the funds, and this is controlled by majority shareholders, and, yup, the same directors again on different boards.
Bit like the way government works I suppose.
Why can't people just learn there is no such thing as luck or coincidences? It's all the law of attraction!
Comon people, open your minds
.. write a book about it.
Since majority are unsuccesful, half of that majority will buy that book. If you sell it in america, that's a whole lot of money.
In my country, people are writing books on how to make money on internet. Google ads, etc.. and swimming in money cuz of it, even if there's no real trick to it.
That's what I think about this book, even if I didn't read it. Whole lot of BS. There's nothing in it that, intelligent, thinking, human being doesn't know for itself, without anyone writing it.
Regarding success itself... you need to have some brain, some skill, a lot of will and enthusiasm, confidence, balls, money (you can't do anything without money, that's the reason people from poor country's and poor people in general, find next to impossible to succeed, and they'r vision of success is to work for other people).
I know a lot of smart people, people that had a chance, could do great things, but instead.. they live 'without electricity' in some villages, and are broke cuz there's no job, and they are screwed by politics (war, etc.) in general.
So give me money, give me all resources and education I need, make my parents rich (so I don't have to worry about food and future and failure), and I'll succeed. Only really stupid people can't succeed in those conditions.
First off, the Edison quote is "1% inspiration and 99% perspiration." This is not to say that inspiration (presumed here to be a product of giftedness) is somehow dispensible. Both are required, so you can't really say that the 1% component is somehow irrelevant.
Sounds like Langen may have had Asperger's Syndrome, or another similar disorder. It also sounds like Gladwell is cherry-picking his anecdotes to amplify his point.
Shorter, I can buy. More logical is a subjective assessment based on criteria we're not privy to. As this is being debated in other threads, I can only conclude that I'm not the only person who finds this claim suspect. While some are attempting to play the role of apologist for this viewpoint, it's not clear to me which of their arguments is the one that Gladwell is using to justify this statement. Furthermore, the comparison with metric units vs. English units isn't very illuminating -- lots of people I know would prefer doing engineering calculations in English units rather than metric, and in truth, the ease of unit conversion in the metric system isn't such a huge advantage in the real world when doing such calculations. The problems always seem to come in when conversions are happening between systems of units (e.g., going from English to metric).
Which also completely ignores many studies that show that there is a genetic component to IQ. While IQ is variable, with environment playing a substantial role, it's well established that environment is not the sole factor in intellectual development. According to some studies, the contribution of genetics to IQ is as much as 75% (i.e., 75% of all IQ variances can be attributed to genetic differences). I think the reviewer here may be conflating "success" (what the book is about) with "intelligence" (i.e., giftedness and IQ, which seem to be prerequisites for success but which the book argues are not the dominant factors).
It has also been said many times, here on Slashdot and elsewhere, that IQ is the best single predictor of future success -- this seems to be derived from The Bell Curve by Herrnstein and Murray. This claim has been attacked numerous times, so I'll leave it to the statistics folks to argue that one. But you can't just ignore the study altogether.
On a closing note, the review could stand a few extra commas in strategic locations, and maybe some thoughtful reordering of a few sentences to make them clearer.
Feynman's claim that there is no such thing as intelligence, only interest
Wow, this is what I've always felt. Gotta love the Feynman.
" Throughout history, poverty is the normal condition of man. Advances which permit this norm to be exceeded -- here and there, now and then -- are the work of an extremely small minority, frequently despised, often condemned, and almost always opposed by all right-thinking people. Whenever this tiny minority is kept from creating, or (as sometimes happens) is driven out of a society, the people then slip back into abject poverty.
This is known as "bad luck.""
-- RAH
We are each allowed to define personal success any way we please. I live in a society that would like to throw people like me in prison for a long stretch (longer than most murderers get) AND seize all my property, for the crime of gardening. Given that fact, why would I want to do anything that might benefit such a society? So I define success as a life of relative comfort, and nothing more. Anyone who thinks my potential is wasted is right, for multiple definitions of that word.
I've put in my 10,000 hours of surfing, when do the cheques roll in?
Everybody seems to think I'm lazy I don't mind, I think they're crazy
Can anyone shore up the claim that Feynman said this? A bit of googling turned up nothing.
When IBM was looking for an operating system for the PC they approached Digital Research who expressed little interest. Microsoft then jumped at the opportunity. IBM foolishly let Microsoft keep ownership of the software. At that time software was something you gave away to sell the hardware. Growing Microsoft from what it was then to what it is now is certainly at great tribute to Bill Gates' skill. I don't see how very much of his 10,000 hours programing translated into his management skills.
He gave interesting talk at TED, can watch him at:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/malcolm_gladwell_on_spaghetti_sauce.html
I'd never heard of the genius-level IQ "Bill Langan", and google reveals very little. Is it possible the reviewer meant he bouncer-philosopher "Christopher Langan"? http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Christopher_Langan
for more on the "Indian methods of calculation", please google for "vdedic mathematics" or 'vedic maths' interesting stuff.
I live in the Gulf and everyday I wonder why this places sucks as hard as it does. Chapter 6 explained clearly why no matter what you do the middle east and south Asia will always be deeply fucked. It depressing but if you have ever driven in the gulf and wondered what was wrong with all these people now you know.
The End of Days admits his posting via diff. multiple registered account names (each is he), to mod himself up no doubt, to make it appear others supported him as well as using ac posts done by 'The End of Days' to do the latter also here yesterday -> http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1147437&cid=27056793 That was laughable and low, as well as stupid in being caught doing that.
by Jared Diamond.
Everyone in this thread should go read it. It clears a lot of things up (and you don't have to muddle your way through imagined reasons for seeming differences between first and third world people anymore).
"English system" is "standard"? Yes, in US, Liberia and Myanmar. I guess lumberjack and liquid dividers' lobby is still too strong.
http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/1/17/Metric_system.png
To learn how to figure out the systems that drive this universe works, you need 10,000 hours of scientific observation and thinking.
Not dogma, not conclusions, not written notes, not diagrams, not analyses, but 10,000 hours of recognizing patterns and scientifically explaining them, making analogies, extrapolating a set of patterns in one field to another field, in imagination, to see if it fits with some observations in the other field.
BUT,
Remember, 10,000 hours spent observing wrongly or irrationally produces an expert in irrational and unscientific thinking! Quite mathematically.
And 10,000 hours of obsessed thinking produces a permanent thought-habit of that particular obsession. Again, dangerous.
So when you choose your subject of study or field of effort for 10,000 hours, make sure it is not occult, crooked or opportunistic. Being scientific, wise and peaceful is far far more useful and effective than being an obsessed inventor. Sometimes, creative inventors are faced with the worst frustrations of intellectual life.
Ask Elizabeth Gilbert, of "Eat Pray Love" fame.
Scientific answers for everything will help you explain and understand systems that you dont know much about, much quicker than if you were untrained.
A last thing, always ever compete with yourself alone when in intellectual compay. Competing with others is the job of lowly traders and commercial minded people, not of scientists. Good scientists never inhibit the transfer of knowledge among other scientists. Intellectual Property is a poison that has destroyed clean scientific cooperation to quite an extent And the people who benefit from Intellectual Property are not scientists, but investors and business executives. If you want to become a pure scientist or an applied scientist (research/engineering), remember this: IP is a plague that will *dramatically* reduce your ability to understand and adapt to new knowledge because you've taught your brain to put roadblocks in your thought process, diversions, distractions towards the greed chemcials and gratification circuitry in your brain. It's not the curcuitry that produces real insight into new knowledge without experiment.
TO be a good intuitive problem solver, you must be possess a completel open mind about the field of your study. If you choose to study life itself, it is mandatory that you seek personal assistance from an established thinker - there are many of them approachable today - blogs, email, websites and online videos.
If you adopt a few checks routinely, becoming a thinking man, an analyst, a scientist is probably the most intellectually and *ethically* rewarding way of life. Been there, seen that. It's cool!
Again, dont do anything in the extreme, and dont count the hours, minutes or seconds. Making 10,000 a tangible target is essentially aborting the mission at the start.
Don't measure the fruits, water the roota - take care of the pennies and the pounds will take care of themselves.
Don't indulge in much irrational or fantasy thought, although you must read/watch averity of science-fiction and learn things - patterns and routines - from it.
law and business fraternity.
Power circles. Money circles. Expert advise of someone ELSE who had spent more than 10,000 hours making money. That helps majorly because that means standing on the shoulders of giants!
In that sense, Open source code already adds 10,000 hours to your program :-)
Your chance of you program working well is suddenly much higher because a lot of your code is already 10k compliant.
Opensource adds this awesome 10k compliance to every derivative program. Now the question is, did RMS know this 10k compliance standard ?
Sure he did - they used to share code to stop reinventing the wheel.
so, open source software is an **outliers factory**
w00t!
I loved this book. As a teacher it altered a lot of my opinions on education and affirmed others. This book should be mandatory reading in school boards and teacher's colleges everywhere. After reading the book I read several of his sources and wrote my own paper on the topic of age segregation in schools. Age segregation is just one of the many topics (I think its really the first he talks about) he uses to build his argument. My favorite book of 2008.