Why do certain people succeed? Why do some rise above others? What makes them, in effect, outliers, unique and distant from the masses? These are the questions Malcolm Gladwell hopes to answer in his new book "Outliers: The Story of Success." Gladwell, the erudite New Yorker staff writer, has become familiar to many. His first two books, "Tipping Point" and "Blink" have sold nearly five million copies. They eloquently address complex pop-psychology topics establishing their creator as a writer of first-class talent, with considerable ability to distill research.
By this criteria, "Outliers" does not disappoint. Gladwell weaves entertaining anecdotes along with obscure research findings, while trying to connect them into surprising point. His approach is something like this: if you are from Canada, and dream of becoming a professional hockey player, much will depend on the month you were born. An interesting question leads to an unlikely answer. Your mind blown, the table is set, and with this beginning Gladwell uncovers that success owes as much to dumb luck as it does to raw skill. In fact, we find that success is born from many things-ability, timing, opportunity, culture, and chance, to name a few. The interesting question of "why success" leads to unlikely answers that seem surprising, but they're really not that surprising at all.
We're aware of the old proverb that success has many fathers, but failure is an orphan. Or, as Jared Diamond put it: success is dependent upon nothing going wrong. "Outliers" is billed as "the international bestselling guru's" answer to "the ultimate question: why are people successful?" But the answer seems to be nothing we didn't know before. Success is complicated. It takes more than skill. It may be true that in America there persists the romantic idea that ability alone enables you climb the ladder, but how many people really believe this, unless, perhaps, you were born on top of the ladder already? The rest of us have suffered under a supervisor who only had that position because that person was related to the owner of the company, or watched someone else get an opportunity because of some family connection. We all immediately recognize the injustice because we saw that they were on their way to outlierhood, while the rest of us cobbled along.
Gladwell recognizes the unfortunate fact that many people with the skills to succeed never have the chance to hone them. They born at the wrong time, born into the wrong environments. The book then is also addressing "why don't more people succeed?" The answers, of course, are painful, and "Outliers" seems anxious to raise the awareness that, with a little work, more people could be empowered. But I get the sense that "Outliers" was trying hard to argue a point that is too nebulous to pin down, rather than applying any real rigor to the social debate. The book purposefully avoids any conflicting concepts and almost every assumption drawn from the selected anecdotes and research could be explained in other ways.
Did the fact that the Beatles honed their skills over thousands of hours in Hamburg explain their increased chance at success? Probably not, since many other talented British bands also played in Hamburg. There are a million factors as to why the Beatles, and not some other group, became the biggest British band of the 1960s. Just as there are a million reasons why Bill Gates, and not someone else, became one of the richest men in the world. To attempt to survey a handful of exceptional people and find the common factors behind their success is both too complicated and too simplistic. And for every one example for one conclusion, there is one for the opposite, and so "Outliers" is forced to settle into the comfortable area that success is born from many things, a few of which are highlighted in the book. This is a proposition that, conveniently, can never be refuted.
Many have and will continue to enjoy Gladwell's books. With their now ubiquitous and pithy titles, it is not hard to envision an entire box set someday sitting on the mantle places of upper middle class homes across the country. Gladwell has created a brand. The topics are complex, the titles are short, and the books are somewhere in the middle. This is both a blessing and a curse. Gladwell has propelled himself into rarefied literary air, and he would be the first to admit that he got there, like any other outlier, by considerable skill, but also by a lot of luck. "Outliers", and its general assumptions, while correct, may not have the social impact Gladwell desires. The conclusions, the socialistic truth that no outlier succeeds alone, are valid more now than ever. Gladwell could easily have moved the debate in the right direction, but "Outliers" seems more interested in proving the author correct, than applying anything too rigorous to the debate. His books, specifically this book, run the risk of being too slick, too easy. We all want to know how to succeed. Gladwell knows this too, and he tells us enough to be thoughtful, but not enough to sound any alarms. The individual research samples in "Outliers" are thought provoking but combining them into a holistic message seems to fall short. The book, like a horoscope, says a lot, while not saying much at all. Above all, it lets you walk away satisfied.