Outliers is a fantastic book by Malcolm Gladwell. In the book, Gladwell looks at those who have risen to a place of prominence and offers an explanation for how they did it. He covers a number of people from different time periods, cultures, and classes, doing his best to show the common traits between highly successful people.
One of Gladwell’s most frequently mentioned points has to do with the sheer amount of work required to master something, which he says is around 10,000 hours. Those 10,000 hours have to contain a great deal of hard, consistent, and dedicated practice for someone to become a true outlier. Even people who are exceptionally gifted, such as Mozart, still have to put in the hours in order to reach their full potential. Sheer genius and ability aren’t enough without putting in the time.
Of course, it’s much easier to get in all those hours of practice and fly as high as you can if you’re in a good position in life. Having a particular advantage over others (such as how Bill Gates was able to work regularly with computers when they were still scarce and expensive) leads to more opportunities. Those opportunities then open up chances for you to accumulate even more advantages, and so on. This may sound concerning, but Gladwell gives a few examples of how even people who appeared to be in a bad position ended up being in the right place at the right time to get ahead after logging their 10,000 hours. He also shows that nobody becomes an outlier without a lot of help from others who steer them in the right direction and give them the tools they need to succeed.
Gladwell also talks about how some cultural norms can either offer enormous advantages or create major disasters. For the former, Gladwell uses the example of how it’s extremely common in China for people to have a solid work ethic. This allows Chinese people to excel at nearly anything they do, whether it’s creating and sustaining rice paddies (an incredibly involved, difficult, and time-consuming way of life) or being among the best in the world at mathematics. Their work ethic is such that they’re more likely to stick with something until they get it than people from cultures without a similar work ethic. When it comes to disasters, Gladwell looks at how Korean Air went from having an incredibly high number of plane crashes to becoming a remarkably safe airline. He talks in this section about how the level of deference to those in “authority” varies between cultures. In the case of Korean Air, the flight crew came from a country with a great deal of deference to their superiors, meaning that the first officer and navigator wouldn’t give orders to the captain or the people in the tower even if they thought there was a problem. This, combined with terrible weather, long working hours, malfunctioning instruments, and a few other factors lead to one crash after another until those issues were sorted out once and for all.
I particularly liked how Outliers shows the complexity of life and that one simple explanation is often insubstantial for accurately describing anything of significance. There are a lot of things going on at any given point in history and looking at just one or two of them while ignoring the rest leaves out a lot of important information; the more ways you can look at any given situation, the better your chances of finding out what’s actually happening, and the truth is often quite different than it initially appears to be. I learned a lot more from this book than I thought I would and I feel like it gave me a better understanding of the way the world works (and it’s written in plain English, which made it a fairly easy read). If any of this sounds interesting to you, then I recommend checking out the book and seeing how it affects your perspective of the world.