Outliers

This first chapter examines how opportunity is meted out by looking at the Canadian Hockey League, which grooms young hockey players for careers. The assumption is that the best players in the league rise through the ranks by virtue of innate ability and hard work. A psychologist named Roger Barnsley, however, was at a game once when his wife pointed out the birth dates of the players on each team. Barnsley’s subsequent research showed that most of the elite players had birthdays early in the cutoff period for each year. When they were scouted as children, these extra months of development gave them an edge; once in the system, they received the best training, building on their advantages. With each passing year, these advantages widened the gap between them and the group of players below them.

In sociology, this is called the “Matthew Effect,” named after the biblical verse Matthew 25:29, which reads, “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” In other words, those who have advantages get more advantages. This, Gladwell argues, is the true source of success and applies to other areas of competition, such as school, where it affects the outcome of standardized tests and college admissions in the US. As a result, “the talent of essentially half” of such groups is “squandered” (31). 

This chapter focuses on how much time is required in any field before someone is considered an expert. One study of violinists at a Berlin music academy showed that the sole difference between levels of musicians was the amount of time they practiced. Elite players reached 10,000 hours; good but not elite players put in 8,000 hours; and those with modest talent who would go on to teach rather than perform logged a bit more than 4,000 hours. The researchers could find no evidence of violinists who were “naturally talented”—that is, all the elite players met the 10,000-hour minimum.

After discussing the above, Gladwell looks at the cases of two giants in the computer field: Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems and Bill Gates of Microsoft. He notes that 10,000 hours is a lot of time; no one can reach that who has other distractions in their life. Thus, it means one has enough leisure time to put in those hours, and leisure time in turn requires a certain level of financial security. This speaks to a person’s background: their family and the circumstances in which they were raised.

Both Joy and Gates certainly had talent and ability, but many other factors aligned in just the right way to usher in their success. Joy was at the University of Michigan when it became one of the early adopters of time-sharing for computers. This sped up the process and allowed users to gain more knowledge in less time. Through a quirk in the sign-in procedures at the university’s computer center, he spent as much time there as he wanted, putting in 10-hour days without paying. Likewise, Gates grew up in a wealthy suburb and went to a private school that had a far-sighted computer club. At a time when most universities had not yet switched to time-sharing for their computers, Gates’s club bought access to one of the few that had. Later, the mother of one of his classmates hired him to work at her fledging computer company. He also lived close to the University of Washington, whose computer center he used late at night when he was still in high school. All these gave Joy and Gates enough practice time so that when opportunities came along, they could take advantage of them.

The last piece in the puzzle of success is being in the right place at the right time. Gladwell provides a list from a study of the 75 richest people in human history. Tellingly, almost 20 percent were Americans in the mid-19th century. That generation benefited from the opportunities presented by the economic transformation of the Industrial Revolution and advances in transportation and communication. A similar kind of “perfect storm” happened in the nascent computer industry in the 1970s, which people like Joy and Gates capitalized on. Had they come along earlier or later, they might not have been the captains of the industry.