Gladwell’s final chapter outlines the culture legacy and happy accidents which led to his success. Then the book provides a “reading group guide” which includes “a conversation with Malcolm Gladwell” and “questions and topics for discussion.”
Gladwell explains that he wrote Outliers because we was not satisfied with conventional explanations of why people succeed. He says that he knows several people who are smart and ambitious (the usual rationale) and who aren’t as successful as Bill Gates et al. He thinks habits and personality traits alone can’t explain success, that we have to consider culture and family and timing.
“My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is…we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds – and how many of us succeed – than we think. That’s an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.”
Amen.
Tuesday, July 26, 2011
Friday, July 22, 2011
More School More More More
South Bronx students can be chosen by lottery to attend KIPPS middle school (Knowledge is Power Program). The student body is African-American and Hispanic, most are from single-parent homes, nearly all are very poor. These kids excel at math. Gladwell says this is because the KIPPS program believes in the influence of cultural legacy, and instills one in its students.
Early school reformers (the product of that laid-back western culture legacy, remember) thought too much school was bad for children. Hence our long summer vacation and comparatively short school day. Asian students have longer school days in a longer school year. Western families who can afford it can approximate this by making sure their kids have educational activities (summer school and camp, music or dance lessons, etc.) when they aren’t in class. KIPPS students have school from 7:25 am to 5 pm, then homework clubs or sports until 7 pm, then several hours of homework each night. They also go to school on Saturdays (9 am to 1 pm) and in summer through July (8 am to 2 pm). This provides opportunity for a less hurried pace for teaching and learning, space for kids to reflect and synthesize, and for focus on academics. The new kids have trouble adjusting to this rigorous schedule, but eventually see the benefit of sticking with it.
Because of their math scores, KIPPs graduates get scholarships to “better” private high schools and more than 80% of them go to college, apparently not a traditional destination for kids from the South Bronx. “Success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed…Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them (p. 267).” Gladwell tells us this is the secret: to replace the lucky accidents of birth timing and location, and the accidental presenting of opportunities, with socially provided situations that level the playing field. Situations like KIPP, which brings ”a little bit of the rice paddy … [and] the miracle of meaningful work (p. 269).”
Early school reformers (the product of that laid-back western culture legacy, remember) thought too much school was bad for children. Hence our long summer vacation and comparatively short school day. Asian students have longer school days in a longer school year. Western families who can afford it can approximate this by making sure their kids have educational activities (summer school and camp, music or dance lessons, etc.) when they aren’t in class. KIPPS students have school from 7:25 am to 5 pm, then homework clubs or sports until 7 pm, then several hours of homework each night. They also go to school on Saturdays (9 am to 1 pm) and in summer through July (8 am to 2 pm). This provides opportunity for a less hurried pace for teaching and learning, space for kids to reflect and synthesize, and for focus on academics. The new kids have trouble adjusting to this rigorous schedule, but eventually see the benefit of sticking with it.
Because of their math scores, KIPPs graduates get scholarships to “better” private high schools and more than 80% of them go to college, apparently not a traditional destination for kids from the South Bronx. “Success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed…Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities – and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them (p. 267).” Gladwell tells us this is the secret: to replace the lucky accidents of birth timing and location, and the accidental presenting of opportunities, with socially provided situations that level the playing field. Situations like KIPP, which brings ”a little bit of the rice paddy … [and] the miracle of meaningful work (p. 269).”
Tuesday, July 19, 2011
The Influence of Culture on Success, Part II
Let’s take a look at a happier result of cultural legacy. Why are South Asians so good at math? Because they come from a culture where rice is grown. What?!
Gladwell loves making connections that seem nonsensical on their face, and then unraveling the connections so that they become believable. Here’s how growing rice and ace-ing calculus are connected. Rice-growing, it turns out, is really hard work and involves pretty sophisticated manipulation of the variables affecting rice propagation. According to Gladwell, it’s ten to twenty times harder than working a corn or wheat field of the same dimensions. The more effort a rice farmer puts into his crop, the better yield he gets, so there is a clear relationship between effort and reward. The farmer has to understand and correctly manipulate things like transplanting seedlings by hand, the slope of the paddy bottom, irrigation, distance between seedlings, weeding, removal of bugs from each plant by hand, etc. Harvesting done quickly allows one to plant another round of crop for more rice from the same paddy. Altogether, an Asian rice farmer spends about 3,000 hours a year working the paddies. When the farmer isn’t tending his rice paddy, he is busy with other activities that support his family.
Contrast this with the western independent farmer, who spends about 1200 hours a year growing his crop, aided by machinery, working less hard during the long winter months. In the “formative years” in which western culture developed, farmers were largely serfs who followed orders and didn’t have much control over decisions affecting their crops. They didn't have to think for themselves, in other words.
Thus, children of south Asia grew up in a culture that practiced and valued hard work that never ended and required hard thinking, whereas European and American children grew up in a culture in which some fields were left fallow to allow them to rest and become reinvigorated, farmers had slack periods during the winter months where they did less work, and people left complex decision-making in the hands of authority figures. Gladwell follows up this information with the observation that Asian students have a reputation for spending more time in campus libraries, studying, than other students and says, in the same paragraph, “Virtually every success story we’ve seen in this book so far involves someone or some group working harder than their peers …Working really hard is what successful people do (p. 239).”
Before I continue, I feel the need to make a personal observation here. I am the grandchild of Ohio farmers. My mother’s people raised geese, chickens, and cows, and worked a large kitchen garden. My stepfather’s people grew corn, timothy, hay, and beans and raised chickens and cows. When the men weren’t tending to animals and crops, they were busy with maintenance on the equipment and buildings, and held down paying jobs doing things like selling farm equipment or managing a railroad crew. My maternal grandmother was a nurse when she wasn’t busy raising children, weeding, canning, and caring for animials. So I take exception to Gladwell’s characterization of western farmers as people who were less hard-working than their Asian counterparts. But that’s just me.
Success is a function of persistence and willingness to work hard, to not be defeated by frustration. I read someplace (can’t remember where) that the degree of one’s success is influenced by the amount of discomfort one is willing to endure in the beginning (i.e., “paying dues”).
Gladwell gives us the example of how students perform on the TIMSS, a math and science test given to elementary and middle school student globally every four years. Before they begin answering the math and science questions, students are confronted with a 120 item questionnaire. There is a direct correlation between how many items students answer, and their math ranking on the TIMSS. An exact correlation. “Countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire and the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems (pp. 147-8).” These countries are: Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. “What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. (pp 148-9).”
Gladwell loves making connections that seem nonsensical on their face, and then unraveling the connections so that they become believable. Here’s how growing rice and ace-ing calculus are connected. Rice-growing, it turns out, is really hard work and involves pretty sophisticated manipulation of the variables affecting rice propagation. According to Gladwell, it’s ten to twenty times harder than working a corn or wheat field of the same dimensions. The more effort a rice farmer puts into his crop, the better yield he gets, so there is a clear relationship between effort and reward. The farmer has to understand and correctly manipulate things like transplanting seedlings by hand, the slope of the paddy bottom, irrigation, distance between seedlings, weeding, removal of bugs from each plant by hand, etc. Harvesting done quickly allows one to plant another round of crop for more rice from the same paddy. Altogether, an Asian rice farmer spends about 3,000 hours a year working the paddies. When the farmer isn’t tending his rice paddy, he is busy with other activities that support his family.
Contrast this with the western independent farmer, who spends about 1200 hours a year growing his crop, aided by machinery, working less hard during the long winter months. In the “formative years” in which western culture developed, farmers were largely serfs who followed orders and didn’t have much control over decisions affecting their crops. They didn't have to think for themselves, in other words.
Thus, children of south Asia grew up in a culture that practiced and valued hard work that never ended and required hard thinking, whereas European and American children grew up in a culture in which some fields were left fallow to allow them to rest and become reinvigorated, farmers had slack periods during the winter months where they did less work, and people left complex decision-making in the hands of authority figures. Gladwell follows up this information with the observation that Asian students have a reputation for spending more time in campus libraries, studying, than other students and says, in the same paragraph, “Virtually every success story we’ve seen in this book so far involves someone or some group working harder than their peers …Working really hard is what successful people do (p. 239).”
Before I continue, I feel the need to make a personal observation here. I am the grandchild of Ohio farmers. My mother’s people raised geese, chickens, and cows, and worked a large kitchen garden. My stepfather’s people grew corn, timothy, hay, and beans and raised chickens and cows. When the men weren’t tending to animals and crops, they were busy with maintenance on the equipment and buildings, and held down paying jobs doing things like selling farm equipment or managing a railroad crew. My maternal grandmother was a nurse when she wasn’t busy raising children, weeding, canning, and caring for animials. So I take exception to Gladwell’s characterization of western farmers as people who were less hard-working than their Asian counterparts. But that’s just me.
Success is a function of persistence and willingness to work hard, to not be defeated by frustration. I read someplace (can’t remember where) that the degree of one’s success is influenced by the amount of discomfort one is willing to endure in the beginning (i.e., “paying dues”).
Gladwell gives us the example of how students perform on the TIMSS, a math and science test given to elementary and middle school student globally every four years. Before they begin answering the math and science questions, students are confronted with a 120 item questionnaire. There is a direct correlation between how many items students answer, and their math ranking on the TIMSS. An exact correlation. “Countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire and the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems (pp. 147-8).” These countries are: Singapore, South Korea, Taiwan, Hong Kong, and Japan. “What those five have in common, of course, is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet-rice agriculture and meaningful work. (pp 148-9).”
Friday, July 15, 2011
The Influence of Culture on Success, Part I
First, a grumble. Part Two of this book is slllllooooowwwww. It’s like Gladwell is padding to get his word count up. He actually takes 47 pages to make one point. And that point is the topic of this post: cultural legacy.
Gladwell tells us that “…it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-great-grandparents grew up (p. 170).”
Plane crashes are an example of the effects of cultural legacy. First, we need to know the typical factors present in crash scenarios. These include poor weather, the plane is behind schedule so pilots are hurrying, the pilot is tired, the pilot and co-pilot have never flown together before, and in the events leading up to the crash seven consecutive human errors are made, not significant individually but fatal cumulatively, and these are errors of cooperation and communication. It comes down to the relationship between the pilot and co-pilot. “Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up…combating mitigation has become one of the great crusades in commercial aviation in the past fifteen years…teach[ing] junior crew members how to communicate clearly and assertively (p. 197).”
Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede developed a database in the 1960s and 70s based on his work for IBM’s HR dept. He analyzed ways in which cultures differ from one another. Per Gladwell, “today ‘Hofstede’s Dimensions’ are among the most widely used paradigms in crosscultural psychology (p. 202).” Two dimensions of interest in the consideration of cultural legacies are the individualism-collectivism scale (how self-reliant one is expected to be) and the power distance index (attitudes towards authority). It turns out that in the cases of the airlines with the worst crash records, the co-pilots were from a nation in which it was important to be deferential to authority. So, if a pilot is making mistakes, even fatal errors, the co-pilot was either too subtle when telling him so or was too evasive in how he spoke with air traffic controllers who could have averted the disasters. That’s one example of the effect of cultural legacy. In the next post, we’ll look at more positive examples.
Gladwell tells us that “…it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-great-grandparents grew up (p. 170).”
Plane crashes are an example of the effects of cultural legacy. First, we need to know the typical factors present in crash scenarios. These include poor weather, the plane is behind schedule so pilots are hurrying, the pilot is tired, the pilot and co-pilot have never flown together before, and in the events leading up to the crash seven consecutive human errors are made, not significant individually but fatal cumulatively, and these are errors of cooperation and communication. It comes down to the relationship between the pilot and co-pilot. “Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up…combating mitigation has become one of the great crusades in commercial aviation in the past fifteen years…teach[ing] junior crew members how to communicate clearly and assertively (p. 197).”
Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede developed a database in the 1960s and 70s based on his work for IBM’s HR dept. He analyzed ways in which cultures differ from one another. Per Gladwell, “today ‘Hofstede’s Dimensions’ are among the most widely used paradigms in crosscultural psychology (p. 202).” Two dimensions of interest in the consideration of cultural legacies are the individualism-collectivism scale (how self-reliant one is expected to be) and the power distance index (attitudes towards authority). It turns out that in the cases of the airlines with the worst crash records, the co-pilots were from a nation in which it was important to be deferential to authority. So, if a pilot is making mistakes, even fatal errors, the co-pilot was either too subtle when telling him so or was too evasive in how he spoke with air traffic controllers who could have averted the disasters. That’s one example of the effect of cultural legacy. In the next post, we’ll look at more positive examples.
Wednesday, July 13, 2011
New Equation: Timing + Role Model + Meaningful Work = Success
I offer for your consideration three quotes from Gladwell. The first reiterates his idea that when and where we are born impacts our chance of success. The second and third posit that watching one's parents or other role models engage in meaningful, complex and autonomous work drives a child to succeed.
"The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with (p. 137)."
"...three things - autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have it if is to be satifying (p. 149)."
"...what happened to the children growing up in those homes where meaningful work was practiced...learned...if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires (p. 151)."
While i don't disagree with the above quotes, I have two thoughts to share: first, is Gladwell saying that a child will not succeed if these conditions are not present? and second, his implied definition of success rests heavily on success by societal standards -- in our consumist society, success as defined by material, economic and institutional standards.
"The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with (p. 137)."
"...three things - autonomy, complexity and a connection between effort and reward - are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have it if is to be satifying (p. 149)."
"...what happened to the children growing up in those homes where meaningful work was practiced...learned...if you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires (p. 151)."
While i don't disagree with the above quotes, I have two thoughts to share: first, is Gladwell saying that a child will not succeed if these conditions are not present? and second, his implied definition of success rests heavily on success by societal standards -- in our consumist society, success as defined by material, economic and institutional standards.
Friday, July 8, 2011
Taking Stock
To recap what we've learned so far: "Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities." It seems to be highly important to:
- be born to supportive parents and good role models
- enter school at a time when good schooling is available during one's formative years
- be smart enough (but not necessarily overly smart) to learn some useful skill or improve some desirable talent
- recognize and leverage opportunities
- come of job-hunting age when the economy/society desires the skills/talents one has acquired
- become a mature adult at the beginning of some type of financial, industrial, professional, or intellectual revolution which depends on the skills you've acquired.
Wednesday, July 6, 2011
It's Timing AND a Family Role Model
Back again to the importance of when one is born. It seems this even outweighs one's socioeconomic origins. Whereas we saw the hyper-intelligent Chris Langan fail at life because he grew up in an impoverished household that did not nurture him, support his talents, or teach him to seize advantages or overcome adversity, we now learn that being born into poverty does not in itself doom one to mediocrity.
To illustrate this point, Gladwell uses the example of New York lawyers. A lot of the most successful corporate laywers in NYC have this in common: they are Jewish men, born in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the mid-1930s, and have immigrant parents who worked in the garment district. These rich lawyers grew up in lousy socioeconomic conditions with what would appear to be major obstacles to success (like being ethnic, non-Protestant, and lacking upper-class social connections). Not just a few successful New York corporate lawyers, but a LOT of them. So what gives?
These children and grandchildren of Jewish garment workers in 1930s America (specifically New York) acquired practical intelligence (what Chris Langan with his 195 IQ lacked) by watching their elders exhibit autonomy, adaptive and complex thinking, imagination, assertiveness, and a willingness to work very, very hard. They learned that effort brings reward. They watched family members who found themselves in a new land, with little or no English, and no money, take the skills they had and make themselves successful. Gladwell's account is fascinating.
To illustrate this point, Gladwell uses the example of New York lawyers. A lot of the most successful corporate laywers in NYC have this in common: they are Jewish men, born in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the mid-1930s, and have immigrant parents who worked in the garment district. These rich lawyers grew up in lousy socioeconomic conditions with what would appear to be major obstacles to success (like being ethnic, non-Protestant, and lacking upper-class social connections). Not just a few successful New York corporate lawyers, but a LOT of them. So what gives?
These children and grandchildren of Jewish garment workers in 1930s America (specifically New York) acquired practical intelligence (what Chris Langan with his 195 IQ lacked) by watching their elders exhibit autonomy, adaptive and complex thinking, imagination, assertiveness, and a willingness to work very, very hard. They learned that effort brings reward. They watched family members who found themselves in a new land, with little or no English, and no money, take the skills they had and make themselves successful. Gladwell's account is fascinating.
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