Outliers
The Story of Success
As with all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, this is a fascinating read—exploring the underpinnings of what *really* makes great people great. In short: It’s more complicated than we think and it’s *definitely* not simply innate talent. Culture and hard work and other often wacky variables play a pivotal role. Big Ideas we explore: The 10,000 Hour Rule, no naturals + no grinders, The Beatles (and their 1,200!! shows before they hit it big), Bill Gates sneaking out of bed in high school and the three keys to meaning.
Big Ideas
- Exhibit a: 10,000 HoursThank you, Dr. Ericsson.
- No Naturals. No GrindersBut a lot (!) of hard work.
- The Beatles+ Their 1,200 (!!!) shows.
- Bill GatesSneaking out of bed to code.
- MeaningAutonomy. Complexity. Connection.
“This is a book about outliers, about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary. Over the course of the chapters ahead, I’m going to introduce you to one kind of outlier after another: to geniuses, business tycoons, rock stars, and software programmers. We’re going to uncover the secrets of a remarkable lawyer, look at what separates the very best pilots from pilots who have crashed planes, and try to figure out why Asians are so good at math. And in examining the lives of the remarkable among us—the skilled, the talented, and the driven—I will argue that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of things. …
In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and patronage. The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.”
~ Malcolm Gladwell from Outliers
As with all of Malcolm Gladwell’s books, this is a fascinating read—exploring the underpinnings of what *really* makes great people great.
In short: It’s more complicated than we think and it’s *definitely* not simply innate talent. Culture and hard work and other often wacky variables play a pivotal role.
Gladwell gives us a backstage look into the lives of everyone from the Beatles and Bill Gates to Mozart and other extraordinary performers.
As you may know, this is the book that popularized the 10,000 hour rule of talent acquisition. Check out the Notes on other books that feature the 10,000 hour rule including: Talent Is Overrated by Geoff Colvin, Mindset by Carol Dweck, The Talent Code and The Little Book of Talent by Dan Coyle, Bounce by Matthew Syed, So Good They Can’t Ignore You by Cal Newport, Mastery by Robert Greene, and The Rise of Superman by Steven Kotler.
As you’d expect, this book is packed with Big Ideas. (Get a copy here.) I’m excited to share a few of my favorites we can apply to our lives today so let’s jump straight in!
out·li·er -, lī(-ə)r noun
1: something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample
Download MP3
Download PDFThe problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.
Get the BookExhibit a: 10,000 Hours
“Exhibit A in the talent argument is a study done in the early 1990s by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and two colleagues at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. With the help of the Academy’s professors, they divided the school’s violinists into three groups. In the first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world-class soloists. In the second group were those judged to be merely ‘good.’ In the third were students who intended to be music teachers in the public school system. All of the violinists were then asked the same question: over the course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practiced?
Everyone from all three groups started playing at roughly the same age, around five years old. In those first few years, everyone practiced roughly the same amount, about two or three hours a week. But when the students were around the age of eight, real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve, until by the age of twenty they were practicing — that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better — well over thirty hours a week. In fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice. By contrast, the merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just over four thousand hours.”
Exhibit A.
The classic research done by K. Anders Ericsson that Gladwell helped make so popular.
The quick recap: Ericsson visits Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. With the help of Professors, they divide the violin students into three groups: potential Stars + Good performers + future Teachers.
The students’s abilities correlated with the cumulative practice time—they all started at a similar rate at a young age with the best performers significantly ramping up their weekly practice hours over time.
10,000 hours for the Stars.
8,000 hours for the Good performers and only 4,000 hours for the future Teachers.
(Wow.)
Note our definition of “practice” here: “they were practicing — that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better.”
Some call it deliberate practice. Others purposeful practice.
You can call it whatever you want but the idea remains: When we talk about putting 10,000 hours into mastering your craft, we’re not talking about the time you’re Tweeting and emailing.
We’re talking about the time you dedicate to “purposefully and singlemindedly” doing what you do “with the intent to get better.”
Stretching yourself into that sweet spot just outside your comfort zone (Steven Kotler tells us 4% past your current abilities)—enough so you’re stretching but not snapping.
I love the way Matthew Syed (former Olympic table tennis star) puts it in Bounce: “‘When most people practice, they focus on the things they can do effortlessly,’ Ericsson has said. ‘Expert practice is different. It entails considerable, specific, and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well—or even at all. Research across domains shows that it is only by working at what you can’t do that you turn into the expert you want to become.’
Ericsson calls it ‘deliberate practice,’ to distinguish it from what most of the rest of us get up to. I am going to call it purposeful practice. Why? Because the practice sessions of aspiring champions have a specific and never-changing purpose: progress. Every second of every minute of every hour, the goal is to extend one’s mind and body, to push oneself beyond the outer limits of one’s capacities, to engage so deeply in the task that one leaves the training session, literally, a changed person.”
Plus: “World-class performance comes by striving for a target just out of reach, but with a vivid awareness of how the gap might be breached. Over time, through constant repetition and deep concentration, the gap will disappear, only for a new target to be created, just out of reach once again.”
If you’re serious about mastering your craft it’s time for some practice, practice, practice.
And then some more practice, practice, practice. And then… :)
P.S. In Mastery, Robert Greene tells us that the purpose of our life is to discover and then dedicate our lives to fulfilling what he calls our “Life Task.” (<— Love that.)
He tells us that the true Masters—who have committed to their Life Tasks—don’t care whether it’s 10,000 hours or 20,000 hours because they’ve figured out what they’re here to do and are ALL IN on making it happen. Of course, society tells us it should be easy but we know better.
Per Greene: “In our culture, we tend to denigrate practice. We want to imagine that great feats occur naturally—that they are the sign of someone’s genius or superior talent. Getting to a high level of achievement through practice seems so banal, so uninspiring. Besides, we don’t want to have to think of the 10,000 to 20,000 hours that go into such mastery. These values of ours are oddly counterproductive—they cloak from us the fact that almost everyone can reach such heights through tenacious effort, something that should encourage us all. It is time to reverse this prejudice against conscious effort and to see the powers we gain through practice and discipline as eminently inspiring and even miraculous.”
P.P.S. Here’s another interesting stat from that research that Tom Rath shares in Eat Move Sleep (see Notes): “If you go back to Ericsson’s landmark 1993 study, there was another factor that significantly influenced peak performance: sleep.
On average, the best performers slept 8 hours and 36 minutes. The average American, for comparison, gets just 6 hours and 51 minutes on weeknights.
The person you want to fly your airplane, operate on your body, teach your children, or lead your organization tomorrow is the one who sleeps soundly tonight. Yet in many cases, people in these vital occupations are the ones who think they need the least sleep. And more than 30 percent of workers sleep less than six hours per night.”
10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
Plus: 8 hours and 36 minutes of sleep. :)
No Naturals. No Grinders.
“The striking thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any ‘naturals,’ musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any ‘grinds,’ people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn’t have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
The idea that excellence at a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of excellence. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
No naturals.
No one magically rose to the top without a ton of practice.
No grinders.
No one put in a TON of effort and failed to get to the top ranks.
In short: Once you had enough ability to get into a top music school (important caveat!), the harder you worked the better you were.
And, important note: The best didn’t just work a little harder they worked much, MUCH harder.
There’s that magic number again.
10,000.
The Beatles and their 1,200 shows
“The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, five or more hours a night. On their second trip, they played 92 times. On their third trip, they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg gigs, in November and December of 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Do you know how extraordinary that is? Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart.”
The Beatles.
Now THEY were certainly gifted, right?!
Well, yah. (Hah.)
AND… The actualization of those gifts was a function of 1,200 (!!!!!!!!!!!) live performances before they had their first burst of success.
1,200. Can you imagine that?
1,200 LIVE SHOWS.
Then they arrived in the US and became “overnight” successes.
Gladwell shares: “‘They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,’ Norman went on. ‘They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers—cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz, too. They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.’”
P.S. Interestingly, btw: Gladwell shares that from the founding of the band when Lennon and McCartney started playing together until “their arguably greatest artistic achievements—Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band and The Beatles [White Album]—is ten years.”
P.P.S. Those live shows were performed at a nonstop strip club. “They kept going back because they got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex.” Hah. Good incentives for young aspiring rock stars, eh?
btw: That’s pretty much the perfect embodiment of Steven Kotler’s point in The Rise of Superman (see Notes for more on how to make the 10,000 hours fun): “Forget 10,000 hours of delayed gratification. Flow junkies turn instant gratification into their North Star—putting in far more hours of ‘practice time’ by gleefully harnessing their hedonic impulse.”
Bill Gates sneaking out of bed to program
“‘It was my obsession,’ Gates says of his early high school years. ‘I skipped athletics. I went up there at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or thirty hours in. There was a period where Paul Allen and I got in trouble for stealing a bunch of passwords and crashing the system. We got kicked out. I didn’t get to use the computer the whole summer. This is when I was fifteen and sixteen. Then I found out Paul had found a computer that was free at the University of Washington. They had these machines in the medical center and the physics department. They were on a twenty-four-hour schedule, but with this big slack period, so that between three and six in the morning they never scheduled anything.’ Gates laughed. ‘I’d leave at night, after my bedtime. I could walk up to the University of Washington from my house. Or I’d take the bus. That’s why I’m always so generous to the University of Washington, because they let me steal so much computer time.’ (Years later, Gates’s mother said, ‘We always wondered why it was so hard for him to get up in the morning.’)”
Imagine THAT.
Bill Gates SNUCK OUT OF BED AT NIGHT SO HE COULD GO CRANK OUT SOME PROGRAMMING. (Hah.)
Gotta love the hustle.
And… An important theme of the book we haven’t touched on yet is the fact that, although it’s obviously not just about innate talent, it’s ALSO not all about pure hustle.
The Outliers we admire got some extraordinary opportunities. Bill Gates was one of the few people who had access to the computers he worked on (at his high school + UW). Had Bill Gates been born anywhere else, he wouldn’t have even had the chance to hustle the way he did and log the crazy number of programming hours (10,000++) that positioned him so well.
Another example Gladwell uses is elite hockey players. When you look closely at the data, you see that the stars are nearly all born around the same time—right before the cut-off for an age group. Those kids are nearly a year older and bigger than the (unlucky) kids born right after the cut off. They get preferential treatment, more opportunities to play + practice. You compound that over the critical formative years and that leads to remarkable differences.
As I read the book, I sketched out a set of intersecting ven circles: “luck + hustle” and “talent + opportunities + hustle.”
Later in the book Gladwell makes the important distinction: “Lucky is winning the lottery. They were given an opportunity, and they seized it.”
Simplified practical moral of the story: Let’s capitalize on our talents as we appreciate the opportunities and seize them.
And, here’s the thesis of the whole book in a nutshell: “We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.”
Meaning = Autonomy + Complexity + Connection
“Those three things—autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward—are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying. It is not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five. It’s whether our work fulfills us. If I offered you a choice between being an architect for $75,000 a year and working in a tollbooth every day for the rest of your life for $100,000 a year, which would you take? I’m guessing the former, because there is complexity, autonomy, and a relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work, and that’s worth more to most of us than money.
Work that fulfills those criteria is meaningful. … When Louis Borgenicht came home after seeing that child’s apron, he danced a jig. He hadn’t sold anything yet. He was still penniless and desperate, and he knew that to make something of his idea was going to require years of backbreaking labor. But he was ecstatic, because the prospect of those endless years of hard labor did not seem like a burden to him. Bill Gates had that same feeling when he first sat down at the keyboard at Lakeside. And the Beatles didn’t recoil in horror when they were told they had to play eight hours a night, seven days a week. They jumped at the chance. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”
Autonomy. Complexity. Connection between effort and reward.
The three qualities that give our work MEANING. With meaning, hard work is joyful.
Let’s cultivate that meaning as we have fun admiring the Outliers and rolling up our sleeves, rubbing our hands together and getting to work if we aspire to be one. :)
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