09.03
Last month I made a comment on Twitter – that nowadays, the chances of getting a great job after college, is becoming similar to making it in the music industry – and the comment made my friend Chris recommend that I read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. Check out the excerpt below, and consider purchasing the book on Amazon.
Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers
“Lift up your heads,” Robert Winthrop told the crowd many years ago at the unveiling of a statue of that great hero of American independence Benjamin Franklin, “and look at the image of a man who rose from nothing, who owed nothing to parentage or patronage, who enjoyed no advantages of early education which are not open – a hundredfold open – to yourselves, who performed the most menial services in the businesses in which his early life was employed, but who lived to stand before Kings, and died to leave a name which the world will never forget.”
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 extraordinary opportunities 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.
Biologists often talk about the “ecology” of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down the roots, and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid? This is not a book about tall trees. It’s a book about forests — and hockey is a good place to start because the explanation for who gets to the top of the hockey world is a lot more interesting and complicated than it looks. In fact, it’s downright peculiar.
Outliers was a great eye opener; and I recommend it to everyone else who’s striving to achieve greatness, or people interested in the social sciences.
It made me reflect on my own current successes, and recognize that I would not be where I am today without the path my family provided for me, the many opportunities that presented themselves to me, and the relationships I’ve made. And it also made me open my eyes to look even harder for opportunities that will come my way to guide me to greatness.
Have you read Outliers? If so, what did you take from it?
