Review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: A Real Success Story…

Thursday, February 12, 2009 – 12:43 pm

In terms of their success, The Beatles and Bill Gates have something in common. Hard work and dedication to be sure, yet there was something more nebulous working in the background: luck.

As Malcolm Gladwell describes in his latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, the path to success rarely conforms to the standard story we tell ourselves about highly successful people.

The American rags-to-riches tale goes something like this: a child is born into an unassuming family but through a mixture of intelligence and ambition, they reach the pinnacle of their chosen field. What is missing from this story is how culture, timing, family, history and all those thousands of things that generically add up to “luck” contribute to the process of making any one individual a success.

For an example of how chance plays a large role in determining future success, let’s examine the quality of education that a student receives. It is generally agreed that a solid elementary school education is one of the cornerstones for all subsequent development and achievement. A lot of trees have been cut down to publish reports of how best to give all children this important foundation.

In examining a study that looked at elementary school performance of kids from low, middle, and high income households in Baltimore’s public schools, Gladwell concludes that regardless of income, kids learn at roughly the same rate while they are in school.

The key phrase is “while they are in school.” Our schools work. The problem is that kids spend a lot of time out of school. In looking at California Achievement Test scores taken at the end of the school year and then again at the end of summer break, the study Gladwell cites indicates that “virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of differences in the way privileged kids learn while they are not in school.”

Through no fault or lack of ambition on the part the children from low income families, when summer break arrives they find themselves with no access to books, learning materials, enriching activities, and so on. When school starts up again in the fall, these kids are academically significantly behind their wealthier counterparts. Repeat this cycle over several years and we systematically leave behind those kids who, in their own right and given equal chances, would be our nation’s future leaders.

So the question for the Spokane business community is this: Are we systematically depriving ourselves of the deepest and widest possible talent pool by not fully acknowledging the role that luck plays in presenting us with a capable, inquisitive and creative workforce? If we are, what can we do to fix it?

If you’d like to get you hands on Outliers, both the Spokane Public Library and the Spokane County Library System have multiple copies in their collections.

As an aside, I’d love to hear what other folks out there in Launchpad land are reading right now. Maybe we need to start our own Launchpad community, no? There is a great post from Seth Godin’s blog just a few days ago regarding reading. “The #1 habit successful people share with me is this: They read books to learn. They do it often and with joy. It’s cheap (or free, at the library or online) and portable and specific.”