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In Search of the Outlier’s Code
By Neil Peterson | December 12, 2008
American culture has always focused heavily on success through individual effort and merit. In the late nineteenth century, this was symbolized in the popular stories of Horatio Alger, whose characters triumphed over adversity on the basis of “luck and pluck.” (Usually the “pluck” factor outweighed luck and played the greater role in the hero’s eventual success.)
One book that is making the rounds this season that challenges that deeply held notion is Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Outliers attempts to provide clues as to why some people achieve extraordinary success. It focuses on new research that demonstrates these factors. The findings he presents are based on the research of a variety of sociologists, psychologists, economists and historians and run counter to many of our intuitive ideas about success.
Interview with Malcolm Gladwell by CNN’s Anderson Cooper
The book comes up with some startling conclusions about the factors that can lead to individual success:
Unusual opportunities to practice and hone a skill - He uses the examples of Bill Gates, the Beatles and Mozart who had the chance by dint of birth, culture, timing or luck to intensively cultivate a skill that allowed them to rise above their peers.- Cultural influences – For instance, he provides a detailed analysis of the unique culture and skills of Eastern European Jewish immigrants to explains their rise in 20th-century New York – initially in the garment trade and later in the legal profession. He also uses culture to explain why Asian children score higher on math tests. To do this, he looks at the labor required to cultivate rice as it has been done in East Asia for thousands of years; and attempts to correlate that with the perseverance and tenacity that Asian children often demonstrate in tackling tough problems in math and science.
- It takes a village and some luck – Gladwell uses case studies ranging from Canadian junior hockey champions to the industrial titans of the Gilded Age, from Asian math whizzes to software entrepreneurs to counter the myth of individual merit and explore how culture, circumstance, timing, birth and luck can account for success.
While the book has generally received favorable reviews, his conclusions will probably not be popular with many who are closer to the Horatio Alger prescription for being successful. My own suspicion is that there is no magic way of accounting for or predicting success.
Genetics is teaching us that while single genes can perform critical functions, more often genes work in complex networks to maintain health or cause disease. And these networks are tuned differently in different individuals. The determinants of success also likely vary between individuals; there just is no such thing as a “one size fits all” formula for success though it is comforting to believe there is.
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Topics: Business, Education, General, Perseverance, Reading, Self-improvement | No Comments »