More on Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success

When I was in my early teens I secretly stayed up very late one night to watch The Fountainhead simply because I was a Gary Cooper fan. At that point in my life I had not heard of Ayn Rand and found the movie laughably silly. For those who don't know the story, Howard Roark is an architect hired to design "Cortlandt Homes", a huge housing project. Long story short: when the financiers motivated by budgetary concerns start "cutting corners" in Roark's opinion, he uses dynamite to blow up the half-finished project. Never-mind anyone else. The investors didn't count. The workers who relied on the project for their paychecks didn't count. The businesses supplying construction materials didn't count. Ditto for the families planning on moving there after completion.

Nothing mattered but Roark's huge adolescent ego.

I was about 12 or 13 and completely appalled by his behavior.

Atlas Shrugged is a similar story. In it a group of scientists and tycoons decide in equally petulant fashion that they will "simply take their ball and go home", when society refuses to capitulate to their capricious demands. So what happens? Well, according to Ayn Rand everything in the world grinds to a halt. In her bizarre world view, no replacements are available amongst the rest of humanity to rise up to the occasion and take over from the cry-babies who have gone home in a snit.

So, here's some food for thought based on Gladwell's latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success. Do successful men and women grow up in a vacuum before unleashing their greatness upon the world? In other words, was Ayn Rand correct about the great not owing anything to society as a whole for their individual success? Think Atlas Shrugged or The Fountainhead. Or are the so-called "greats" products of their society and the opportunities afforded to them by it?

Here's Gladwell's thinking on how hockey stars emerge over time:

Consider, for instance, those hockey stars. Relying on the work of a Canadian psychologist who noticed that a disproportionate number of elite hockey players in his country were born in the first half of the year, Gladwell explains what academics call the relative-age effect, by which an initial advantage attributable to age gets turned into a more profound advantage over time. Because Canada’s eligibility cutoff for junior hockey is January 1, Gladwell writes, “a boy who turns 10 on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn’t turn 10 until the end of the year.” You can guess at that age, when the differences in physical maturity are so great, which one of those kids is going to make the league all-star team. Once on that all-star team, the January 2 kid starts practicing more, getting better coaching, and playing against tougher competition—so much so that by the time he’s, say, 14, he’s not just older than the kid with the December 30 birthday, he’s better. The solution? Double the number of junior hockey leagues—some for kids born in the first half of the year, others for kids born in the second half. Or, to apply the principle to something a bit more consequential (to non-Canadians, at least), Gladwell suggests that elementary and middle schools put students with January through April birthdays in one class, the May through August birthdays in another, and those with September through December in a third, in order “to level the playing field for those who—through no fault of their own—have been dealt a big disadvantage.”





Then there's the question of why so many Asian students excel at mathematics:

And then there are the math geniuses who, as anyone can’t help noticing, are disproportionately Asian. Citing the work of an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladwell attributes this phenomenon not to some innate mathematical ability that Asians possess but to the fact that children in Asian countries are willing to work longer and harder than their Western counterparts. That willingness, Gladwell continues, is due to a cultural legacy of hard work that stems from the cultivation of rice. Turning to a historian who studies ancient Chinese peasant proverbs, Gladwell marvels at what Chinese rice farmers used to tell one another: “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.”





Here are a few more highlights from Gladwell:

In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell posits alternative theories for how successful people got to where they are.



Bill Gates

As a kid growing up in Seattle in the late sixties and seventies, Gates had extensive access to a state-of-the-art computer lab, the likes of which very few in his generation would know anything about until years later.



The Beatles

In the early years, when they took up residency in the clubs of Hamburg, Germany, they had to play very long sets, in a wide variety of styles, forcing them to be creative and excel at experimenting.



Chinese Students

They work much harder at their studies and exhibit greater patience in problem-solving than their American counterparts thanks to their cultural legacy of long days toiling in rice paddies.



Youth Hockey Players

Kids born in the early months of a year are put in the same league as kids born later in the year, a slight edge in physical maturity that gets compounded over the years into a decisive advantage in skill.



So the question is then: Are the successful truly independent of the society within which they grew up or do they owe their success, at least in part, to the benefits, attitudes, and advantages it bestowed upon them?

Read the entire article, Why Success Is More Circumstantial Than Personal.

Who is right? Malcolm Gladwell or Ayn Rand?