It’s a five paragraph Autobiographical essay, so here’s some facts about me. I left my parents and friends two years ago and move to the US by myself looking for freedom( cause I was in a very restricted country). I wanna be a Dr and live the american dream. the other thing about this essay is that we are supposed to also write our thoughts about 5 pages out of a book which is the following:
Bestselling Author of The Tipping Point and Blink
Outlier
1. Something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body.
2. A statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample.
Why do some people succeed far more than others? There is a story that is usually told about extremely successful people, a story that focuses on intelligence and ambition. In Outliers Malcomb Gladwell argues that the true story of success is very different, and that if we want to understand how some people thrive, we should spend more time looking around them – at such things as their family, their birthplace, or even their birth date. The story of success is more complex – and a lot more interesting – than it initially appears.
Outliers explains what the Beatles and Bill Gates have in common, the extraordinary success of Asians at math, the hidden advantages of star athletes, why all top New York lawyers have the same resume, and the reason you’ve never heard of the world’s smartest man – all in terms of generation, family, culture, and class. It matters what year you were born if you want to be a Silicon Valley billionaire, Gladwell argues, and it matters where you were born if you want to be a successful pilot. The lives of outliers – those people whose achievements fall outside normal experience – follow a peculiar and unexpected logic, and in making that logic plain Gladwell presents a fascinating and provocative blueprint for making the most of human potential.
In The Tipping Point, Gladwelll changed the way we understand the world. In Blink he changed the way we think about thinking. Outliers will transform the way we understand success.
THE ROSETO MYSTERY
When heart attacks were an epidemic in the under 65 age group during the 1950’s why were the inhabitants of Roseto, Pennsylvania not dying of heart attacks? In fact, Dr. Wolf stated that “these people were dying of old age. That’s it,” not of heart attacks even though they consumed a high cholesterol diet.
Here’s what an investigation into the mystery uncovered:
What Wolf began to realize was that the secret of Roseto wasn’t diet or exercise or genes or location, It had to be Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their backyards. They learned about the extended family clans that underlay the town’s social structure. They saw how many homes had three generations living under one roof, and how much respect grandparents commanded. They went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just under two thousand people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world. The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were from, because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the hills.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they wouldn’t be able to understand why someone was healthy if all they did was think about an individual’s personal choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond the individual. They had to understand the culture he or she was a part of, and who their friends and families were, and what town their families came from. They had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are (9-11).
PART ONE – OPPORTUNITY
The Matthew Effect. “For unto everyone that hat shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath” – Matthew 25:29
What do the most successful and elite Canadian ice hockey players have in common? It was not until the mid 1980’s that a Canadian psychologist named Roger Barnsley first drew attention to the phenomenon of relative age. What they have in common is “January, February and March birthdates” (21-22). In Canadian hockey, in any elite group of players – the very best of the best – 40 percent of the players will have been born between January and March, 30 percent between April and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10 percent between October and December (22-23).
The explanation for this is quite simple. It has nothing to do with astrology, nor is there anything magical about the first three months of the year. It’s simply that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1. A boy who turns ten on January 2 then could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of the year – and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelve month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity (24).
The way that Canadians select hockey players is a beautiful example of what the sociologist Robert Merton famously called a “self fulfilling prophecy” a situation where “a false definition, in the beginning … evokes a new behavior which makes the original false conception come true.” Canadians start with a false definition of who the best nine and ten year old hockey players are. They’re just picking the oldest every year. But the way they treat those “all-stars” ends up making their original false judgment look correct. As Merton puts it: “This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as proof that he was right from the very beginning” (25).
And what happens when a player gets chosen for a rep squad? He gets better coaching, and his teammates are better, and he plays fifty or seventy-five games a season instead of twenty games a season like those left behind in the “house” league, and he practices twice as much as, or even three times more than he would have otherwise. In the beginning, his advantage isn’t so much that he is inherently better but on that he is a little older. But by the age of thirteen or fourteen, with the benefit of better coaching and all that extra practice under his belt, he really is better, so he’s the one more likely to make it to the Major Junior A league, and from there into the big leagues (24-25).
Barnsley argues that these kinds of skewed age distributions exist whenever three things happen: selection, streaming, and differentiated experience. If you make a decision about who is good and who is not good at an early age; if you separate the “talented” from the “untalented” and if you provide the “talented with a superior experience, then you’re going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date.
In the United States, football and basketball don’t select, stream, and differentiate quite as dramatically. As a result, a child can be a bit behind physically in those sports and still play as much as his or her more mature peers. A physically immature basketball player in an American city can probably play as many hours of basketball in a given year as a relatively older child because there are so many basketball courts and so many people willing to play. It’s not like ice hockey, where you need a rink. Basketball is saved by its accessibility and ubiquity.
European soccer is organized like hockey and baseball – and the birth-date distributions in that sport are heavily skewed as well. In England, the eligibility date is September 1, and in the football association’s premier league at one point in the 1990’s there were 288 players born between September and November and only 136 players born between June and August.
THE 10,000-HOUR RULE
There is such a thing as innate talent. Moreover, achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
A study in the 1990’s by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson divided Berlin’s elite Academy of Music school’s violinists into three groups. Group one was the stars, destined to become world class soloists. The Second group was composed of those judged to be merely “good.” The third were students unlikely to play professionally and who intended to be music teachers. All were asked the same question: Over the course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practiced (38)?
Everyone from all three groups started playing at roughly the same age, around five years old … everyone practiced around two or three hours a week. By the age of eight, the students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve, sixteen hours a week by age fourteen, and up and up, until by the age of twenty they were practicing – that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better – well over 30 hours a week. In fact, by the age of 20, the elite performers had each totaled 10,000 hours of practice. By contrast, the merely good students had totaled 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just over 4,000 (38-39).
The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals,” musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise in any area: ten thousand hours. Even Mozart did not produce his greatest works until he had been composing for more than twenty years. Mozart – the greatest musical prodigy of all time – couldn’t hit his stride until he had his 10,000 hours. Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good. (39-40). It’s impossible to reach that number of hours by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you … Most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program – like a hockey all star squad – or if they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours.
The Beatles had been performing together for 10 years before they produced their greatest works. But it was Hamburg Germany that honed the Beatles talent. John Lennon said: We got better and got more confident. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. It was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.
In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”
They played for eight hours a night seven days a week. By the time of their first burst of success in 1964, the Beatles had performed live 1,200 times. Most bands don’t do that in their entire career. The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart.
“They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,” Norman went on. “They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers – cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them” (49-50).
Bill Gates’ year of birth (1955) made him the right age to learn computer programming at the beginning of the computer era and by 1975 (the peak of Silicon Valley success) he was the right age to enter that field and compete successfully. Gates was also lucky enough to have wealthy parents who sent him to the elite Lakeside High School that had access to a time sharing computer terminal in 1968 and the mothers at the school had the money to pay for the school’s computer fees. Other lucky breaks include the fact that Gates got the opportunity to work weekends and nights at C-Cubed which needed someone to check its code. Gates was also lucky to find out about ISI, who needed someone to work on its payroll software, and the other lucky break was that Gates happened to live within walking distance of the University of Washington, which happened to have free computer time between three and six in the morning. Moreover, when TRW needed programmers, Bill Gates and another kid from Lakeside happened to be the best and Lakeside allowed those two students to spend their spring term miles away, writing code. All of these lucky breaks gave Gates extra time to practice. By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard to start his own software company, he had been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past his 10,000 hours. How many teenagers in the world had the kind of experience Gates had? If we put the stories of hockey players and the Beatles and Bill Gates together, what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities (54-55).
All of the outliers we’ve studied so far were the beneficiaries of some kind of unusual opportunity. Lucky breaks don’t seem like the exception with software billionaires and rock bands and star athletes. They seem like the rule.
