On Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

Does the year you're born make any difference in your success?

 

It's a question that will come up for anyone reading Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers.

 

Even though there's something about Gladwell's books that make me feel like I'm supposed to read them in an airport, I was able to fight that feeling long enough to get through it this past Thanksgiving weekend. The book - which is about the true story of success - is every bit as interesting and entertaining as Tipping Point and Blink, and is just as easy of a read.

 

A few random thoughts on the book and what it says about the requirements for success:

It requires about 10,000 of practice to be good at pretty much anything.

Many, many aspects of life depend on external forces and timing.

 

Along the same lines, it'd be interesting to find the outliers' outlier, the ones who've been successful outside of some massive environmental updraft.

 

The book reminded me of one of my long held philosophies of life, one which crystallized when I read Sun Tzu's Art of War.  Sun Tzu writes about how to use the terrain to your advantage and how you should arrive early to the battlefield (you can read the full text by following the links this sentence). 

I've always mushed those together into the philosophy that you should, as much as possible, position yourself in contexts where the environment is working for you.   If you're prepared and operating from the right platform(s) then you're basically swimming with the current.

I guess this is a more tactical application of the same basic thinking as Gladwell's Outlier philosophy, but in my case, I can (to some degree) control the environment into which I place myself, whereas in many of the Outlier examples many of the critical variables are decided for me (like the year I'm born).

 

So, whereas I think Gladwell makes some wonderful points, there's a sense in the book that much of success is decided for you.  I prefer to believe there's a lot more under my control, if I'm just creative about how I approach the problem and do what I can to have the terrain fight for me.