[ Self Help E-books ] Outlier - the secret of some IT geniuses

Have you ever thought about how the successful people made a success in life? It might be their originality, persistence, resilience from failure, or just a fortune inheriting from their parents that made them so prosperous. But Malcolm Gladwell has different ideas about it. He says that success is less a matter of individual merit than a number of factors that are interlocked at the right moment so successful people are products of particular places and environments. In his book Outliers, Malcolm insists that the successful people had two extraordinarily important things that most of us couldn't have perceived; opportunity and legacy. Let's see what they are and how they work.

 Ⅰ Opportunity  In this chapter, Malcolm constantly emphasizes the timeliness. Talented as you are, it is hard for you to succeed in any fields if there is a lack of timeliness. To seize the opportunity, it matters critically when and where you were born. You need to be in the right time and at the right place. That is the point of it. There is the Matthew Effect. In order for us to understand the term, it can be helpful to quote the Bible - Whoever has will be given more, and they will have an abundance. Whoever does not have, even what they have will be taken from them. Matthew 13:12 

Malcolm demonstrates some most successful hockey players in Canada to show the Matthew Effect. We can easily understand this term by 'an accumulated advantage.' The most successful hokey players listed by Malcolm are surely talented but they also have the benefit of their birth dates. In fact, most of them were born in January, February, and March. It is just that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. So however gifted in playing hokey you are, it is possible that you cannot have the benefit of better coaching and all the extra practice under your belt if you were born in December. The closer your birth date is to the eligibility cutoff, the more chance you will get to enter hockey teams. To take the opportunity, it is also important to ascertain whether you devoted 10,000 hours to what you desired or what you were avid for, which means you are prepared. When you are ready, you can tell a golden opportunity whenever it comes. That's how the successful people did. They just kept practicing and practicing, and when the time came for them to get the chance, they grasped it without thinking. Though, according to Malcolm, in addition to 10,000 hours the particular era played a decisive role. In the 1860s and the 1870s, when the American economy underwent the greatest transformation in history, business tycoons like John D, Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, and Jay Gould, etc, came into the world. Likewise, Steve Jobs and Bill Gates also achieved the greatness when they were young bloods who took the lead in the epicenter of Silicon Valley in the 1990s when personal computers came in to wide use.

The third opportunity, Malcolm says, is family background. The way your parents taught you is momentous. One’s IQ is merely a threshold. What is important is how you were raised. Let’s suppose there are A and B whose IQs are really high. Despite the fact that both of them have an extraordinary intelligence, their fates can be dramatically different because of this third opportunity, family background. Actually, A is Christopher Langan and B is Robert Oppenheimer. They both are genius but it was only Oppenheimer who left his name on history. Unlike Oppenheimer, Christopher Langan was born in poor family and his parents did nothing for him. They didn’t teach him how to meet the challenge so he was brought up to be submissive to authority in the face of difficult circumstances. Even though Chris has an exceptionally high IQ and is considered a genius, he cannot make his works published and just study alone. We can see a fascinating study conducted by the sociologist Annette Lareau in this book. According to her, wealthy parents have different parenting-style from poor parents. For example, if their children were not doing well, the wealthier parents challenged their teachers. On the contrary, the poor parents are intimidated by authority. They react passively and stay in the background. Therefore, children born in wealthy family learn the practical knowledge from their parents – how to say your symptoms to a doctor or how to request another test from a teacher - which is necessary to live in the real world. Though Chris is a man with a one-in-a-million mind, he hasn't left behind remarkable achievements because he didn’t get any of practical knowledge from his parents. So, Genius alone is not enough.

Last person who appears in this Opportunity chapter is a lawyer, Joe Flom. In the 1940s and the 1950s, employment conditions of major law firms was pretty strict. When you want to be an associate, you should have a good personality, proper social background, and be graduates of the right schools. Jow Flom who is Jewish, fat and awkward couldn’t get a job in none of the major law firms, so he had to practice as a lawyer in a startup firm. Joe helped expand the law firm by doing every work that came into the door, most of which major law firms evaded. Litigation was one of them. Finally, Joe Flom became unsurpassable in litigation so it was no wonder that he was appointed as a name partner of a major law firm. Malcolm points out that offsprings whose parents engaged in clothe industries achieved a high social status. That specific job has three things – autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward. These are components that make people involved with the work take pride. Whether parents’ work fulfill them has an impact on their children. For this reason, it is important to make children feel that their parents have a meaningful job.

 Ⅱ Legacy   In this part, Malcolm stresses out cultural legacies. They have deep roots and long lives. They insistently persist, generation after generation, and are so powerful that we cannot make sense of our world and human behavior without them. A Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede conducted enormous amounts of research and established 'Hofstede's Dimensions', which are among the most widely used paradigms in crosscultural psychology. They consist of five dimensions but Malcolm introduces only three dimensions of them in Outlier - Individualism-Collectivism scale, Uncertainty Avoidance, and Power Distance Index. Hofstede argued that cultures can be usefully distinguished according to how much they expect individuals to look after themselves. He called that measurement the "individualism-collectivism scale." The country that scores highest on the individualism end of that scale is the United States and Guatemala is at the opposite end of the scale. Another of Hofstede's dimension is "uncertainty avoidance." It shows how well a culture tolerate ambiguity. According to Hofstede's database, the top five "uncertainty avoidance" countries are Greece, Portugal, Guatemala, Uruguay, and Belgium. And bottom five - that is, the cultures best able to tolerate ambiguity - are Hong Kong, Sweden, Denmark, Jamaica, and Singapore. Above all, Malcolm thinks the third dimension, Power Distance Index(PDI), is the most noticeable thing. Power distance is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority. Some features we can observe in low-power distance index countries are that power is something of which power holders are almost ashamed and they will try to underplay as well as try not to look powerful. Sweden and Austria are in low PDI and at the opposite side are South Korea and Colombia. Many airline crashes are connected to this last dimension. Of course, many complex accumulative factors contribute to the tragedy, but the gap in power distance index between pilots can cause an irrevocable result. Malcolm cites the famous crash as an example. In January of 1990, the crash of the Colombian airliner Avianca flight 052 took place. The captain of the plane, Laureano Caviedes, was New Yorker and the first officer, Mauricio Klotz, was Colombian. When the first officer from the high-power distance culture noticed a danger in a cockpit, he told it to the captain with mitigated speech. It was because in the high PDI cultures, the mitigated speech is usually used to express one's subordinate to a superior. Klotz expected the captain to give him a clear order on how to deal with the danger. But Laureano, the captain, was from low PDI cultures so he didn't see any hierarchical gap between themselves and what the colombian officer said couldn't make him feel it was emergency. The miscommunication between them led to the lethal accident, killing half of the passengers aboard. In this chapter, Malcolm says that it is not negligible to know there is a cultural difference in speaking to authority. To be a successful pilot, your acting based on the cultural context is integral.

I have been always curious about the reason why Asian students are better at math tests than any other country students. Turns out, it is also because of a legacy. Asia has a simple number system. Also Asian people lived the life of rice farmer for three thousand years. They had to work really hard from dawn till dusk. There is an evidence that Asian farmers spent three times more time growing rice than their western counterparts. Asian agriculture required its people to be patient and persistent to reap grain. With that legacy, their Asian descendents have those attributes in their blood. When they are confronted with demanding math problems, they would rather try to solve them with persistence than just give up in five minutes.

Reading Outlier from cover to cover, we can understand success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities. And also we should remember what we inherited from our ancestors. Because all these things lie on the path to success.