Outliers

Outliers-The story of success by Malcom Gladwell

We all have grown up reading the rags to riches stories, success stories of ordinary people turned Outliers. We all have seen the ‘Heads’ part of these achievers but Malcom has managed to observe and show us the ‘Tails’ part of these stories. That’s what the book is all about.

In the book Malcom has used convincing statistics, interesting observations and great simplicity in the diversified examples of the counterintuitive factors of the distinct cases.

Case I

Roseto Volfortore, a town near Rome has people with very good health. In Roseto, virtually no one under fifty-five has died of a heart attack. For men over sixty five, the death rate from heart disease in Roseto is half that of the US as a whole. The death rate in fact from all causes is 30% to 35% lower than the anticipated. In the survey it was found that there was no suicide, no alcoholism, no drug addiction and very little crime. The people were dying of old age. That’s it.

The mystery has nothing to do with diet or exercise or genes or location. It is Roseto itself. The secret is in the way the people enjoy the community. The way they visit one another, stop to chat on the street or cook for one another in their backyards. Three generations are found living happily under one roof. They have picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discourages the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful overcome their failures.

A very profound lesson to learn from Malcom. I never thought about health in terms of community.

Case II

In the list of the top 75 richest people in the human history, an astonishing fourteen are American born in the same decade, 1830 to 1840. In 1860’s and 70’s the American economy went through perhaps the greatest transformation in its history. This was when the rail roads were built and when Wall Street emerged. The people born in late 1840’s missed it. They were too young to take advantage of that moment. The people born in 1820’s were too old to grab the opportunities. What truly distinguishes these top billionaires is not just their talent but also their extraordinary opportunities.

The same way see the list of birth years of the IT studs

Steve Jobs – 24^th Feb 1955

Bill Gates – 28^th Oct 1955

Eric Schmidt – 27^th April 1955

Bill Joy – 8^th Nov – 1954

Vinod Khosla – 28^th Jan 1955

Scott Mc Nealy – 13^th Nov 1954

Paul Allen – 21^st jan 1953

Steve Ballmer – 24^th March 1956

If January 1975 was the dawn of personal computer age, then who would be in the best position to take advantage of it? A person too old in 1975, would already have a job in IBM out of college and a person who started his career at IBM  had real hard time making transition to the new world.

 Bill Gates is portrayed as a brilliant computer programmer whose intelligence and ambition outshined others. Apart from the innate qualities that gave him the success, Bill Gates lucked into the opportunity to use computers at the University of Washington for hours on end, which no other computer programmer got. By the time he turned 20 years in 1975 he had a practice of 10,000+ hours

Case III

The other case that I liked is of KIPP School located in one of the poorest neighborhood of New York City. There is no entrance exam or any other admission pre-requisite. Students are chosen by lottery. Three fourth of the students come from single parent homes. Parents of the students are poor which is evident from the fact that ninety percent students qualify for the ‘Free lunch’. What KIPP is famous for is mathematics. At KIPP, the belief is that a student should not solve math questions in hurry in the initial few years. They want the student to keep solving till she gets it right.

The question is how do the students of motely group of randomly chosen kids of lower income group from dingy apartments in one of the country’s worst neighborhood, whose parents in an overwhelming number of cases, never stepped in colleges – do as well in Mathematics as the students of the wealthy parents of kids in the private schools in NY?

The Asian, worldview was shaped by the rice paddy. In the Pearl River delta, mostly more than two crops were planted together and land was fallow only briefly. In fact because of the nutrients carried by the water used in irrigation, the more a plot of land is cultivated, the more fertile it gets. But in western agriculture opposite is true. Unless a wheat or cornfield is left fallow every few yards, the soil becomes exhausted. The hard labor of spring planting and fall harvesting is followed by slower pace of summer and winter. This is the logic the reformers in KIPP applied to the cultivation of the young minds. They kept smaller vacation and slightly longer daily working hours.

The cause of Asian math superiority became more oblivious. Students in Asian schools didn’t have long summer vacations. Why would they? Cultures that believe that the route to success lies in rising before dawn 360 days a year are scarcely going to give their children long summer off. The schools in the US is, on an average 180 days long. The South Korean 220 days and the Japanese 243 days.

For its poorest students America doesn’t have School problem. It has a summer vacation problem and that’s the problem the KIPP School set to solve. They decided to bring the lessons of the rice paddy to the American inner city. What the extra time does is allow for more relaxed atmosphere, time to review, to do things at much slower pace. It looks counterintuitive but we do things at a slower pace, we get thoroughness.

The practice at KIPP has resemblance with that at a school, in Berkley, where Schoenfeld teaches a course on problem solving, the entire point of which he says, is to get the students unlearn the mathematical habits they picked up in the way to university. He gives a math problem and gives two weeks’ time. The belief is that success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty two minutes to make sense of something that most students would give up on after thirty seconds.

These are the kind of cases the book is about!

Reading this book, I remembered the statement of Steve Jobs…

It is easy to connect the dots looking at the back. The challenge is in connecting the dots looking ahead.

Disclaimer:

The objective of writing the review is to preserve the good points mentioned by the author. In the process of doing so, I have used my opinion, experience and discretion to land on a point.

Vinay Wagh

Bulls Eye, Nasik.