INSTANT BOOK SUMMARY

Transcription

1 INSTANT BOOK SUMMARY

2 Outliers has been described as a literary means to repeated epiphanies. While we cannot cover everything in 5 pages, I do have the best takeaway points from the book all set for you. Enjoy! Mark Mark Halpern, CFP We ve got it all wrong Every year, biographies of successful people line the shelves of bookstores and purchased by the millions. The theory behind this is, if we study how people become successful we too can become successful. However, that theory is recently being questioned by prominent experts including Malcolm Gladwell who think the aforementioned readers are following along without question. To illustrate the problem with that type of thinking, here s a story from another book, The Black Swan: More than 2,000 years ago, the Roman orator, thinker, stoic, manipulator-politician, and (usually) virtuous gentleman, Marcus Tullius Cicero, presented the following story: Diagoras, a nonbeliever in the gods, was shown painted tablets bearing the portraits of some worshippers who prayed, then survived a subsequent shipwreck. The implication was that praying protects you from drowning. Diagoras asked, where were the pictures of those who prayed, then drowned? Here s the point: the graveyard of failed people will be full of people who shared the same traits as the ones we hold up to be the standards of success. Nassim Nicholas Taleb, the author of The Black Swan, will tell us that the difference between those successes and failures is luck. By the time you read this summary of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, you ll see that luck is indeed a big part of the story...but not the whole story. What follows are five of the reasons for success, and they aren t what you may think they are.

3 When you were born March 11 starts around one side of the Tigers net, leaving the puck for his teammate January 4, who passes it to January 22, who flips it to March 12, who shoots point-blank at the Tigers goalie, April 27. April 27 blocks the shot, but it rebounds to Vancouver s March 6, who shoot. Medicine Hat defenseman February 9 and February 14 dive to block the puck while January 10 looks on helplessly. March 6 scores! That was a real play by play taken from a Major Junior A hockey game, with the day a player was born substituted for their name. Notice anything odd? Well, as it turns out, if you are born in the earlier part of the year, you are much more likely to make it to Junior A, and then subsequently on to the NHL. Sociologist Robert Merton famously called this phenomenon the Matthew Effect 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 he hath. Here s how it works players start getting selected for all-star hockey teams when they are anywhere from 7-10 years old. The cutoff date for those teams is January 1. Children who are born in the early part of the year are, on average, bigger and stronger than those who are born later in the year because they have many extra months of development over their peers. So, these bigger, stronger kids get selected for the teams. Subsequently, they get better coaching, more practice time, and the development gap widens even further. By the time these kids are years old, this gap has become too large to overcome. The self-fullfilling prophesy is complete. Lest you think this is a Canadian phenomenon, this type of thing also happens in baseball, soccer, and perhaps most troubling, education. It s not only the time of year that has something to do with success, it s also the time in history. Consider a couple of peculiar facts: If you study the list of the richest people in the history of the world, from the time of Cleopatra to today, you d find that 14 Americans born in a narrow 9 year window in the 1800s made the top 65. When you take a look at the top dogs in modern technology history, like Bill Gates, Paul Allen, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy and Eric Schmidt, they were all born between 1953 and Making them just old enough to take advantage of the computing revolution.

4 Culture and ethnicity Not only does it matter WHEN you were born, it also matters WHERE you were born. For instance, the difference between being born in Korea instead of the United States, and becoming an airline pilot, would be very significant. Especially to the people who were the passengers of these pilots between 1988 and Why? If you were a passenger on Korean Air during those times, you would have been 17 times more likely to have crashed than if you were a passenger on an airline like United. Why? It turns out that it has to do with something called the Power-Distance Index. In cultures with a high Power Distance Index, authority rarely gets questioned. So if you happen to be on a plane where the second in command knows that something is seriously wrong, but the pilot disagrees, nothing gets done to solve the problem. And then the plane crashes. that can support that? If culture can have a dramatic impact in life and death situations, might it have something to do with the success (or not) of initiatives in your company? Something to think about. Here are a few other culture and ethnicity bits for you to chew on. Why are Asians so good at math tests? Culture. No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich. Essentially they have a culture that was forged in the rice paddies where you had to work your ass off in order to survive. It turns out that Asians essentially stick with a problem until it s solved, whereas somebody from North America tends to give up on the problem, even though they are probably plenty smart enough to solve the problem. As it turns out, if you look at the record of plane crashes by country, and line them up against the PDI s of the pilots in those countries, they tragically match up quite closely. Although Gladwell didn t really include this in his book to be thought about this way, consider this: if we are in an economy where we are expected to innovate ourselves to success, do you have a corporate culture

5 Being smart enough Speaking of being smart enough, that brings us to the third major success factor: how smart do you really need to be in order to be successful? One of the things we like to romanticize about some of the great successes in history is how smart they were. But let s take a closer look at that. IQ has a threshold where it stops becoming a predictor of success at any level. A British psychologist breaks it down like this: A mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is as likely to win a Nobel Prize as is one whose IQ is 180. As it turns out, once you have an IQ of about 120 (the amount you ll need to get into a professional or graduate program), having additional IQ points doesn t translate into any measurable realworld advantage. Here s an example from the real world. The University of Michigan law school has a policy of affirmative action. 10% of students come from racial minorities. If the standards for grades and test scores for these students hadn t been relaxed, only about 3 percent of them would have been admitted. So, you would imagine that those 7 percent that got in with relaxed standards probably wouldn t do as well in the real world when they graduated. Well, you d be wrong. As it turns out, they were just as successful as the white graduates. So, if you only have to be smart enough to be a world class success, you should never, never even let your child, co-worker, or colleagues use the excuse that they aren t smart enough (unless they have an IQ of less than 120, in which case it just may be true). The 10,000 hour rule Don t fret however, because perhaps you can make up for the challenges that come from your date of birth, ethnicity, or even your IQ by taking advantage of this predictor of success the 10,000 hour rule. When you take a look at the most successful people in history, you ll find that they spent at least 10,000 hours perfecting their craft, Gladwell says. So, this one is pretty simple you gotta find something you love and work your ass off. Plain and simple.

6 Putting it all together Meet Joe Flom. When he passed away last February he was the last living named partner of one of the most powerful law firms on Wall Street Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom. He had a lot going against him a poor child of garment workers, a Jew at a time when Jews were heavily discriminated against, and grew up in the Depression. A real against all odds kind of story. Right? WRONG. It turns out that all of the things he had going against him, were actually advantages in his climb to success. No time for all the details, but here s the most interesting part. When Flom started his law career, most firms were considered white shoe firms, with their Persian rugs and mahogany book shelves. If you were anything but a Caucasian with family connections and a bit of personality, you didn t get hired. As it happens, these old firms had a very specific idea of what they did and didn t do. They were corporate lawyers, and handled all the tax and legal work behind the issuing of stocks and bonds. They certainly didn t do litigation or hostile corporate takeovers that was beneath them. So, Flom became quite good at the dirty work, and started to get the calls from the white shoes when they outsourced this work. In the 1970s and 1980s the legal landscape changed. All of a sudden, hostile takeovers and litigation became the two things that every law firm wanted to do. Who was the expert? Our good friend Joe Flom and other firms that had to do the dirty work for the white shoes. The final conclusion Be like Stuart Smiley. look at yourself in the mirror every morning and say I m good enough, I m smart enough, and darn it, people like me Get Culture Right. Culture can cause planes to fall out of the sky, and likewise can destroy your company if people don t feel like they can speak up. Be like Joe Flom. There are plenty of industries right now that are on the verge of extinction. Find out what comes next for those industries and put in your time becoming an expert in that field. Find your lucky charm. No matter what you do, a healthy dose of good luck will go a very long way.