Lucky

Malcolm Gladwell uses birthdays, tight-knit communities and circumstance to show why
some make it and others don’t in
Outliers: The Story of Success

by JULIET WATERS

An outlier is a statistical anomaly. To illustrate the term, Malcolm Gladwell uses a small rural Italian-American community in Pennsylvania that defies all the rules we take for granted about health and well-being.

Roseto is a quarry and mill town populated mostly by citizens who can trace their heritage back to a late 19th-century wave of immigration from Southern Italy. The dietary and exercise practices are pretty much in line with the rest of North America. Rosetans eat too much saturated fat, smoke and struggle with the same levels of obesity. Yet, they have an astonishingly low mortality rate, no suicide rate, no alcoholism, no drug addiction and little crime. Most Rosetans live well into their 80s with virtually no heart disease.

Researchers interested in this town ruled out every possible explanation from genes to climate. Rosetans who moved away suffered the same health problems as normal Americans, as did people who lived in towns nearby. There was only one thing that distinguished Rosetans from the rest of the country: their sense of family and community. For centuries, they’d preserved the same tightly knit egalitarian paesani culture, which encouraged generations of families to live close by and which, according to Gladwell “discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures.”

Outliers is interested in what we can learn from other statistical anomalies: individuals who achieve extraordinary success, airlines that have killed an extraordinary number of passengers and years that produced an extraordinary number of millionaires. The book, however, is subtitled “the story of success.” Gladwell offers convincing theories about why so many NHL players are born in January, and why so many people born in 1935 became high achievers. Gladwell’s most recurring and explicit theory is that while success requires talent, intelligence and hard work, it’s mostly the product of circumstance and luck.

Bill Gates has obvious intelligence, but he couldn’t have worked hard learning computer code if the mothers at his Seattle prep school hadn’t had the foresight to fund a computer club unlike any other in North America. By the time he was ready for university, he’d logged so many hours of computer programming, there wasn’t much he could be taught.

Wayne Gretzky has talent, but would he have had enough to make it into the major leagues if he’d been born December 26 instead of January 26? The cut-off dates for boys’ hockey leagues is December 31. Most professional hockey players were the oldest in their boys’ leagues, and were already recruited for special coaching by the time they were starting school. Kids born after March will always have to work harder to make it into the junior leagues.

Same goes for most kids in “gifted” school programs. Most of them have birthdays early in the school year, giving them an advantage over equally intelligent first graders who are almost a year younger. In North American public schools, there are a lot of bright kids born in the summer who are not getting the same educational advantage as others.

The implicit theory that ties all this information together is that we can use the knowledge gained from outliers to create a culture that diminishes failure and promotes success in ways that are more egalitarian. By the time that most of Gladwell’s readers have finished this highly readable, enjoyable and convincing book, they will be feeling optimistic about the possibility of creating a new world that will engineer more success for everyone.

Most of them, I’m guessing, will have forgotten all about the Rosetans. Remember them, the tight-knit quarry town who lived happier, healthier lives than anyone else? They managed this—the theory goes—because success and failure were irrelevant to their sense of community. Gladwell, unfortunately, doesn’t offer much of a theory about how to engineer that.

OUTLIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS BY
MALCOLM GLADWELL, LITTLE BROWN,
HC, 309 PP $30.99