Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell - First post!

Well, this is it. My first blog post on my very own blog. Sure, I had a blog before, about videogames, but that was in essence a blog for someone else. It was restrictive on content, style, and a variety of other things which, taken in conjunction, pushed me away from that site and made writing for it a chore.

So here I am, on my own blog. Basically, if I have a strong opinion, it will probably get posted here, especially if it falls within the purview of the title subject. This blog will vary wildly in length and content, ranging from a few hundred words to lengthy dissertations; from Battlestar Galactica to the latest Mario game to Malcolm Gladwell. And speaking of whom!



Gladwell wrote the book in question at the title of this post, Outliers. I should mention to begin that I am a big fan of Gladwell's work. His deceptively simple prose belies a usually sophisticated message, and always breaks complex ideas down into manageable, easy-to-swallow morsels. I should also mention that I studied Sociology in college, which has a lot to do with why his subjects are always so fascinating to me.

I read Blink ages ago, and more recently decided I should go on another Gladwell bent, and Outliers was the first book I decided to read, his most recent. While I enjoyed the book a great deal, as it went on I became more and more disappointed in it. To those who don't know, Outliers is about success, or more precisely, why successful people are successful. The broad conclusion here is that, as he puts it, success is "a group project". According to the book, individual success stories often have less to do with an individual conquering the odds due to hard work and talent, and more to do with uniquely favorable circumstances combined with that hard work.


At first, I was enraptured by his examples of success which ranged from Bill Gates to Canadian hockey players to New York Jewish lawyers, and especially with his idea that 10,000 hours of dedicated practice are necessary to master nearly anything. I found it fascinating that such a number could appear as a viable benchmark for such disparate skills as musicianship, fiction writing, chess, and team athletics. However, this idea also suffered from one of the main problems of this book: It's not very well explained. Which is to say, it's not explained enough. 


As my mind tried to grapple with how the 10,000 hour idea could be applied to different disciplines, I came up with a slew of questions, including: What constitutes practice? (Is it simply doing the thing you want to practice? Do you have to want to get better?) How compressed must this 10,000 hours be? (Could a 70 year old man be a master at nearly everything he wants to be? Or master his hobby inadvertently?) And, perhaps most importantly, if 10,000 hours are all that are needed to be a master at something, why does talent fade? By that logic, everyone would get better at everything until they die. Obviously it's not true of athletes because bodies age, but why wouldn't it be true of music or writing?


Gladwell uses the Beatles as an example of the 10,000 hour rule, pointing to the fact that they had been performing as a band for about 10 years (which is about the amount of time it takes to reach 10,000 hours) when their greatest artistic achievements were produced. But he never explains why they get worse after that, why Wings wasn't better than the Beatles, or why the Rolling Stones produced their best material 40 years ago. Or even why every band who doesn't simply play for 10,000 hours reaches the heights of the Beatles. I kept waiting for these questions to be answered, but only more mounted. To boil down the problems of the book: Gladwell never really discusses the flip side to success.


To me, this is borderline unconscionable. To posit a theory of success without discussing failure simply makes your theory incomplete. Gladwell does briefly discuss Chris Langan, the genius with an IQ 40 points higher than Einstein and who never rose above the title of "bouncer". But the Langan section is more about reinforcing the overall idea that individual merit doesn't matter as much as circumstance, which is fine, but it sheds no more light on failure than any other part of the book. Worse, Gladwell seems to attribute failure to circumstance and circumstance alone, which reveals just how thin his premise on failure is compared to his theory of success.


Outliers also doesn't explain fluky success stories. Did all of the one-hit-wonders of the world practice for 10,000 hours? What did Paris Hilton practice at? It just gets more complex from there. George W Bush certainly rose to incredible heights due to his circumstances and hard work, but I would hesitate to call him a "success". Same for crappy bands like Creed and shows like Two and a Half Men. Success is a bit more complicated than Gladwell lets on.


I'm sure this review has come off overwhelmingly negative, which doesn't encapsulate my overall opinion of the book, since I actually liked it overall. My wife can tell you about how many ideas from Outliers spilled over into regular conversation, and it's busting at the seams with interesting anecdotes and stories. It can easily be described as an fascinating and informative read. It just wasn't quite as earth-shattering as I hoped, like how I felt about Blink.


Ironically, it was my circumstances that caused the book to ultimately fail for me. Having studied sociology extensively in college, the main point of the book - that circumstances have more to do with success than the individual - was already well-tread ground. Knowing that central pillar already, the supporting architecture seemed somehow incomplete.