Thoughts on Outliers

Just finished reading Malcolm Gladwell‘s Outliers. According to Gladwell, an outlier

is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience.

The big idea in the book is that you need at least 10, 000 hours of exposure (I will not call it experience) in a particular art/science/talent before you can make it big. The claim has been substantiated by citing examples from lives of Bill Joy, Bill Gates, Beatles etc.

The book also claims that success is a function of not only an individual’s brilliance or talent but host of other factors that might include opportunities, ethnicity, time when someone is born and even arbitrary reasons (not necessarily all of them, or in that order).

Here are the lines that I underlined while I was reading the book.

• Network effect plays an important role
• As WEB says, even ovarian lottery plays a critical role.
• Self fulfilling prophecy – a situation where a false definition in the beginning evokes a new behaviour which makes the original false conception come true.
• “teachers often confuse maturity with ability”
• “It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success.”
• “Success is the result of what sociologists like to call ‘accumulative advantage’”
• “we are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail”
• “(success is a) combination of ability, opportunity and utterly arbitrary advantage”
• “Achievement is talent plus preparation”
• “Successful people don’t do it alone. Where they come from matters. They’re products of particular places and environments”
• “…buried in that setback was a golden opportunity”
• “Those three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward – are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”
• “success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages”
• “success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard …”
• “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them”

Lots of ideas and insights. And here are my thoughts on the book and the idea of 10, 000 hours and notion that sucess depends on multiple factors.

• I think with Internet, even if you lost the ovarian lottery and you can still offset a few disadvantages. Though you will still need to get those 10, 000 hours of “exposure”.
• You need to be able to connect with apparent “successes” if you have any hopes of offsetting those “accumulated disadvantages”.
• And finally I was wondering, what is that one thing that I have done for more than 10, 000 hours? 10, 000 mean 3 years of full time activity or 10 years of part time activity. I have been blogging PART TIME for 5 years, writing PART TIME for 6 years, gathering information FULL TIME for more than 10 years. Which of these can be a commercially viable activity?

I would recommend the book for sure. The Outliers is an easy to read book with lots of examples and interesting anecdotes (like the other two Gladwell books – The Tipping Point and Blink). And btw the book also says “the higher your (IQ) score, the more education you’ll get, the more money you’re like to make, and – believe it or not – the longer you’ll live”.