Main Street Journal: On the Shelf: Outliers

The following article is taken from the January 2009 issue of the Main Street Journal. Click “Subscribe Online” above to start your subscription.

On the Shelf: Outliers
By: Jonathan Lindberg

On February 7, 1964, The Beatles landed at JFK Airport to a sea of screaming fans, bringing with them Beatle mania. What only the most diehard fan knows is that The Beatles had been formed seven years earlier. They had started by playing in pubs and bars. In Hamburg, Germany they played exotic clubs, often working seven days a week, often playing eight straight hour sets.

They played every song they knew and were forced to write their own material. Though their style went through several changes, along with their name (Johnny and the Moondogs), it was Hamburg and the pubs that made The Beatles. So that by the time they recorded their most critically acclaimed album (Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band, 1967), the group had been together for over ten years and had played, practiced and wrote together for countless thousands of hours.

At least ten-thousand hours to be exact.

In his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown, 285 pages) Malcolm Gladwell argues that there is no such thing as an ‘overnight success’. In fact, one chapter is titled, The Ten-Thousand Hour Rule. In order for anyone to reach the height of success in their particular field, one must devote at minimum ten-thousand hours to their craft.

Gladwell leans on The Beatles for example. However, he also argues his case with the likes of Mozart and Bill Gates. Many of us know Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard and started Microsoft. What few of us know is that Gates was given the rare opportunity as a teenager to devote large portions of his day to computer programming. He attended an exclusive private school in Seattle that offered him rare access to rare programmable computers. It is no coincidence that Paul Allen, the co-founder of Microsoft, was also a part of this programming club. The University of Washington continued this progress, allowing Gates and Allen access to one of the few university computer programs in the country. By the time Gates started Microsoft, he had spent well over ten-thousand hours behind the computer, something only a handful of Americans his age could boast of.

Success is no accident, Gladwell argues. It has as much to do with opportunity as talent. There are numerous factors to success, more than just skill and energy. Did you know that there was a perfect time to be born to become an American tycoon? Of the hundred wealthiest people in all human history, fourteen of those individuals were born in America between 1831-1840. With the rapid growth of the economy during the industrial revolution, individuals born during those years reached business maturity at just the right time. To be born before or after seems to cut one out. 1831-1840 were the years in America when the opportunity for success was most ripe.

Back to computer programmers, the oil barons of our generation. Gladwell also argues there was a perfect time to be born, between 1953-1956. Bill Gates, Microsoft, 1955. Paul Allen, Microsoft, 1953. Steve Jobs, Apple Computers, 1955. Eric Schmidt, Google, 1955. Bill Joy, Sun Microsystems, 1954. If you were born before 1953, you were probably married with kids by the time the computer revolution occurred and were working somewhere safe like IBM and were molded into form. If you were born after 1956, you were too late, unable to get in on the ground floor. Sure, you can find patterns with numbers to argue your case in many directions. However, Gladwell seems to have stumbled on something. Bill Joy was only one of four founders of Sun Microsystems, the king of Silicon Valley software companies. The other four founders? Scott McNealy, born 1954, Vinod Khosla, 1955 and Andy Bechtolsheim, 1955.

This is not to discount talent and hard work. Sure there were American titans born outside the years of 1831-1840. There were computer tycoons born later than 1956. What Gladwell argues is that the “accidents of time and place and birth” – legacy, location, timing and heritage play important roles in reaching the heights of success.

Gladwell, like Thomas Friedman and other idea writers paint with broad strokes. They don’t bother with specifics, rather they examine trends. What makes Gladwell unique is his heavy use of sociology and genealogy to make his points. Outliers has two sections, the first is entitled Opportunity and the second Legacy.

These, Gladwell argues, as much as anything, lend to success.

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