When we learn about someone who’s extremely successful—an outlier—we often want to know what that person is like. We assume that they must be exceptionally gifted, intelligent, or passionate, and that these personal qualities are the keys to their success. This is the basis of the idea of the self-made man (or woman), who has earned their success and is in control of their destiny.
However, in Outliers, Gladwell argues that the self-made man is a myth. Instead, he says success depends just as much on factors that lie beyond the individual and the individual’s control, including where and when they were born, what kind of family they were born into, how they were parented, and how much money their family has.
(Shortform note: The myth of the self-made man is central to American culture. Around the time of America’s founding, Immanuel Kant promoted the idea that a person is “what he makes of himself,” as he and his fellow Enlightenment philosophers ushered in a growing secularism. Scholars suggest that when the nation’s founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that people are entitled to the “pursuit of happiness,” they shifted from a Christian focus on reaching heaven to a secular emphasis on attaining earthly success through ambition and autonomy.)
Gladwell is a journalist; author of several best-selling books, including The Tipping Point and Blink; co-founder of Pushkin Industries; and host of the podcast Revisionist History. By the time Outliers was published in 2008, he’d garnered international fame and millions of fans for his accessible blend of storytelling and social science research. Seemingly in response to this acclaim, Gladwell dedicates the epilogue of the book to examining the unique circumstances that contributed to his own success.
Gladwell makes a case for the “nurture” side of the nature versus nurture debate—that environment and circumstance are at least as important as innate ability. His argument focuses on opportunities and culture. First, we’ll explore the importance of opportunities and the types of opportunities that significantly impact success. Then, we’ll examine how various cultures shape people’s behaviors and trajectories.
The Nature vs. Nurture Debate
The book’s focus on “nurture” elaborates on a New Yorker article in which Gladwell disputed the idea that a person’s intelligence is tied to their race—a controversial implication of the “nature” argument.
Specifically, the 1994 book The Bell Curve asserts that genes primarily determine a person’s intelligence and that the intellectually elite naturally rise to power in the United States. This echoed statements by Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Watson, who co-discovered DNA, and by prominent psychologist Arthur Jensen, who concluded that racial differences in American children’s test scores were attributable to genetics rather than circumstances. These views drew fervent criticism for suggesting that Black Americans are intellectually inferior to whites.
However, in 2003, psychologist Eric Turkheimer revealed an important caveat to the nature argument: He concluded that DNA determines a person’s potential, but that their environment determines whether they reach that potential. Gladwell builds on this principle in Outliers.
In Part 1, Gladwell argues that people can’t become successful without the opportunity to become successful. While a person’s individual attributes—like talent and work ethic—may determine their potential, external factors determine who has the opportunity to reach their potential and who faces roadblocks.
Furthermore, Gladwell writes that people who get opportunities early in life have a huge advantage over those whose opportunities come later, because:
1. They create self-fulfilling prophecies. Children who believe they’re talented or smart act as if they are, which leads them to actually develop the talent or intellect they believe they already possess. Likewise, children who believe they’re unremarkable tend to embody that identity.
(Shortform note: In Mindset, psychologist Carol S. Dweck reveals a caveat to this: Children who are praised for being smart tend to shy away from difficult tasks for fear of failure because they want to uphold their identity as a smart person. This reaction comes from a fixed mindset, a belief that innate abilities (like intelligence) are unchangeable. By contrast, children who are praised for their effort develop a growth mindset, a belief that you can build upon your natural abilities by working hard and challenging yourself.)
2. They benefit from accumulative advantage, meaning that early opportunities lead to more opportunities, creating a snowball effect of compounding advantages. By the same token, the Matthew effect also describes how small disadvantages tend to snowball into larger ones.
(Shortform note: Research shows that the concept of accumulative advantage—a principle called the Matthew Effect—applies to many areas of life, including education and wealth distribution. However, the reality is more complex than the model suggests; for example, if the rich got endlessly richer, and the poor endlessly poorer, then there would be more trillionaires and more people in hopelessly desperate conditions.)
Gladwell explores three types of opportunities that contribute to success:
Gladwell argues that we often attribute success solely to talent and forget that the hours we put in matter just as much as, if not significantly more than, the natural gifts we start with. Talent gets your foot in the door, but practice becomes the determining factor in how successful you are.
Furthermore, Gladwell points out that having the time to practice enough to master a skill is a luxury afforded only to the privileged. He cites studies showing that most experts practiced for at least 10,000 hours to master their craft, which averages nearly 20 hours every week for 10 years. Not everyone has the same opportunity to dedicate so much time to focused practice.
The 10,000-Hour Debate
K. Anders Ericsson, the psychologist who led the study from which Gladwell gleaned the 10,000-hour rule, has criticized Gladwell for misrepresenting his research findings. Ericsson argues in Peak that Gladwell failed to specify that the type of practice is far more important than the amount—namely, mastery requires deliberate practice, an intensely focused and effortful form of practice that constantly pushes the practitioner to stretch their abilities.
In response, Gladwell has clarified that he wasn’t suggesting that 10,000 was a universal magic number (even though he writes in Outliers that it’s “the magic number of greatness”). Instead, he seems to use the theory to reinforce the importance of time in achieving success, and that time is a privilege.
Gladwell writes that the opportunity to practice 10,000 hours typically emerges from two external factors:
1. Financial privilege—Carving out 10,000 hours of practice in childhood requires your family’s emotional and financial support. For instance, it’s difficult to devote time to practice if you have to work an after-school job to pay for your lessons or contribute to family expenses.
(Shortform note: In line with his argument about the compound effect of early advantages, Gladwell focuses on accumulating 10,000 hours of practice in childhood, in order to achieve mastery by adulthood and, presumably, embark on a successful career. However, the link between time and privilege is also true for adults.)
Time Poverty Is Often Part of a Vicious Cycle of Poverty
Research bears out that time poverty often goes hand-in-hand with income poverty. For example, if you are income-poor and your car breaks down, you can’t afford the repairs unless you clock extra hours at work—but you can’t put in those extra hours because you have to spend more time commuting by bus until your car is fixed.
Moreover, time and income poverty compound to create bandwidth poverty, when the pressing needs of the moment deplete your mental capacity for the long-term planning and self-control needed to address some of your time and money issues, creating a vicious cycle. To bring this back to Gladwell’s argument, even if you carved out some time to practice your skill, your bandwidth poverty would make it nearly impossible to put forth the intense focus required for meaningful deliberate practice.
2. The month of your birth—According to the relative age effect (RAE), children have an advantage when they’re born during the early months of an age grouping, such as in school years and youth sports age classes. Gladwell argues that the January 1 cut-off date in Canadian hockey youth leagues helps explain why 40% of Canada’s elite hockey players are born in the first three months of the year.
(Shortform note: While numerous studies confirm that RAE impacts children’s physical ability, academic performance, and even popularity in school, researchers have also concluded that birth month is just one factor in a child’s success. A study of eighth-grade students highlighted that socioeconomic background and the quality of the school are important factors in their performance, noting that the effect of RAE on student achievement decreases the longer children are in school.)
3. The year of your birth—Gladwell posits that your birth year may provide unique opportunities to practice. For example, several successful computer programmers, including Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, were born between 1952 and 1958, which meant that they came of age during the dawn of the personal computer in 1975.
(Shortform note: Contrary to Gladwell’s argument that these innovators’ success stemmed from the luck of being born at the right time, psychologist Richard Wiseman counters that “lucky” people actually make their own luck by exposing themselves to diverse people and experiences, trusting their instincts, being optimistic about their outlooks, and finding lessons and opportunities in failures.)
In addition to the opportunity of time, Gladwell argues that successful people have the opportunity of intelligence. But rather than the innate type of intelligence measured by IQ tests (analytical intelligence), he asserts that extraordinary success in life is often the result of practical intelligence, or social savvy, which enables you to accurately read people and situations and adjust your response to get what you want. Practical intelligence encompasses negotiation skills, the ability to self-advocate, and the conviction that you deserve to pursue what you want (Gladwell calls this a positive form of entitlement).
(Shortform note: Analytical and practical intelligence are two of three types identified in psychologist Robert Sternberg’s model of intelligence. The third type is creative intelligence, which entails thinking outside the box to come up with innovative solutions.)
Gladwell asserts that practical intelligence is cultivated through a parenting style that’s typical of middle- and upper-class families. He cites a study by sociologist Annette Lareau, who defined two distinct parenting philosophies that correlate with social class: Middle- and upper-class parents take a hands-on approach, which Lareau dubs concerted cultivation. These parents nurture their children’s interests, explain their decisions rather than making commands, expect their children to have opinions and negotiate, and model how to respectfully stand up to authority figures. As a result, children develop practical intelligence.
(Shortform note: Concerted cultivation has come to be categorized as a form of “intensive parenting,” which has evolved to encompass “helicopter parenting” (incessantly hovering over children), “snowplow parenting” (clearing obstacles from children’s path), and “drone parenting” (technology-assisted helicopter parenting). Paradoxically, in contrast to concerted cultivation, which pushes children to take an active role in their own self-advocacy, research shows that these more-intensive variants actually produce children who are less competent, confident, mature, independent, and responsible than their peers.)
By contrast, Gladwell writes, Lareau asserts that working-class parents take a hands-off approach, which she calls accomplishment of natural growth. These parents consider their children’s interests to be facets of their personality rather than sources of potential talent, command rather than explain, discourage children from disagreeing with adults, and are passive around authority figures. As a result, children are typically more creative and independent, but less adept at negotiation and self-advocacy, which are key to outlier-level success in adulthood.
(Shortform note: Since Lareau published her findings, some aspects of the accomplishment of natural growth strategy—and their associated benefits—have declined in practice. First, some experts suggest that intensive parenting (closely related to concerted cultivation) is increasingly becoming the norm at every socioeconomic level. Second, the broader availability of technology means that most children (especially low-income kids and teens) are spending more time in front of screens and less time outside, where they traditionally developed independence and creativity during unstructured play.)
So far, we’ve looked at the opportunities provided by privilege and good fortune. But Gladwell argues that difficult circumstances can also bring unexpected opportunities. He illustrates this point by examining the life of Joe Flom, a lawyer who grew up in poverty during the Great Depression to become a partner at one of the largest and most powerful law firms in the world.
Although Gladwell frames Flom as an outlier, he clarifies that Flom is representative of an inordinate number of highly successful lawyers who had the same hidden opportunities: being Jewish, the child of garment workers, and born in the 1930s.
Gladwell writes that when Flom entered the job market, he faced discrimination for being Jewish. Not only was he excluded from elite firms, but also from the type of law they practiced: handling taxes and legal work for corporate stocks and bonds. Flom could only find work at less-distinguished firms doing litigation cases (lawsuits) and proxy fights, the legal side of a hostile takeover. This area of law was considered low-class, and it was not in high demand at the time.
However, in the 1970s, corporate takeovers increased dramatically. Suddenly, everyone needed litigation lawyers, and Jewish lawyers had already accumulated their 10,000 hours of litigation and proxy-fight practice. Thanks to his initial disadvantage, Flom became one of the few experts in a sought-after specialization and achieved great success.
(Shortform note: Although Gladwell argues that the hiring discrimination that Flom faced turned out to be an advantage in his career, workplace prejudice overwhelmingly harms its targets. Directly, it causes minority groups to have higher rates of unemployment and poverty than majority groups. Indirectly, workplace discrimination and economic instability also negatively affect health.)
Flom’s parents worked in the garment industry, working long hours in poor conditions for little pay. However, Gladwell argues that the work had three components that not only provided lessons that they taught their children but also made the work meaningful, which showed their children that even difficult work could be joyful if it had meaning. Those three components were:
1. Autonomy—Unlike other trades, you could start a garment business fairly easily and independently. The overhead cost was relatively low—all you needed was a sewing machine, some fabric, and the ability to sew. Jewish garment workers highly valued this autonomy.
(Shortform note: In Drive, Daniel H. Pink emphasizes that autonomy is critical for enduring motivation, job satisfaction, high performance, and psychological health at work.)
2. Complexity—Garment workers had to learn every aspect of the industry, from manufacturing to market research. They passed their business knowledge on to their children.
(Shortform note: Flom’s story is an exception to Gladwell’s argument that middle- and upper-class children typically benefit from their parents’ business skills. Because of the particular industry his parents worked in, Flom learned these skills despite being poor.)
3. A relationship between effort and reward—If garment workers stayed up late sewing more dresses, they’d make more money the next day. The correlation between increased effort and increased reward was clear and tangible, instilling Flom with a belief in the value of hard work.
(Shortform note: This type of contingent reward—similar to commissions for salespeople—is motivating in “algorithmic” tasks, such as assembly-line work or sewing dresses. However, research shows that contingent rewards are less effective in complex or creative “heuristic” work, such as innovating or solving novel problems.)
Flom was born in the 1930s, which was a “demographic trough,” or small generation, due to the fact that many families couldn’t afford to have more children during the Depression. Although being a child in the Great Depression brought certain challenges, Gladwell writes that being born in a demographic trough has its advantages. Children of this generation benefited from small class sizes, excellent teachers who would have been professors if not for the Great Depression, low university tuition (presumably to attract more students), and little competition for jobs.
(Shortform note: Flom’s generation, the Silent Generation, was one of the smallest in the US, with about 50 million births. In stark contrast, about 75 million babies were born in the years that followed, during the Baby Boomer Generation. On one hand, Boomers faced fiercer competition in college and in the workforce, which one sociologist argues has made Boomers consistently less happy than other generations. On the other hand, because of the generation’s size, Boomers had a strong impact on national culture, especially with the rise of activism and counterculture during the 1960s and ‘70s.)
In addition to the opportunities you have during your own lifetime, Gladwell posits that the culture of your ancestors (even the aspects you no longer practice or ascribe to) influence your present-day behaviors in ways that impact your trajectory. In Part 2, Gladwell explores how such cultural legacies promote or impede our success by examining three distinct cultures:
Each example shows that, to be successful, it matters where you’re from—not only geographically but also culturally.
The first culture Gladwell describes is what sociologists call the culture of honor, in which your self-worth is based on your reputation. In this culture, you’re more likely to fight someone who challenges you and, therefore, jeopardizes your reputation. These cultural norms impact how you respond in certain situations, which can affect your life trajectory.
Gladwell explains that honor cultures developed out of herding lifestyles: Animals can be stolen, so herders had to demonstrate aggression and strength to protect themselves and their livelihoods. People who descend from herdsmen tend to carry on these cultural norms, even if they aren’t herders.
As an example, Gladwell cites evidence that in the American South, murders occur more frequently than in the rest of the country and tend to involve two people who know each other and are involved in a personal conflict (presumably involving honor, respect, or reputation). He points out that many southerners are descendants of immigrants from rocky, harsh terrains in Scotland, England, and Ireland, where the culture of honor is fierce.
The Culture of Honor Protects Status
The culture of honor is also prevalent in urban, low-income neighborhoods—but not necessarily because residents are descended from herders. Instead, experts say that this culture developed in response to stigmatization based on factors like income, social class, race, and education. Stigma takes a toll on people’s psychological safety, and thus they can develop hyper-vigilant responses (often including violence) to threats to their honor and sense of worth.
Social stigma may also be a factor in the rise of a culture of honor among herders, who generally occupied a lower, poorer class within society. Some experts argue that herders’ aggression was intended not only to protect their livelihoods but also to defend their status.
The second type of culture that Gladwell examines is the culture of deference, or cultures with a higher Power Distance Index (PDI), which measures how hierarchical a country is and how its citizens value authority. In high PDI countries, employees are often afraid to express disagreement with managers, power in organizations is not equally distributed, and people in power hold special privileges.
(Shortform note: In the US, a relatively low PDI country, successful business people are often those who challenge authority—both directly and figuratively, in terms of challenging the status quo.)
Gladwell explains that people in high PDI cultures use mitigated speech to avoid making direct statements to their superiors as a show of deference. For example, “Let’s turn right” is mitigated speech because it’s phrased as a suggestion; in contrast, “Turn right” is not mitigated speech because it’s a command.
(Shortform note: Gladwell notes that communication in high PDI cultures is receiver-oriented, meaning that it’s the listener’s responsibility to interpret a message. In The Culture Map, Erin Meyer describes this as a feature of high-context cultures, where people communicate not just through words, but also through shared cultural understanding, etiquette, and norms. By contrast, in low-context (or transmitter-oriented) cultures, it’s the speaker’s responsibility to explicitly state all relevant information.)
Gladwell points out that a high PDI can be problematic—even dangerous—when mitigated speech downplays the importance and urgency of a message in serious situations. As an example, he highlights Korean Air’s high rate of plane crashes between 1988 and 1998, largely because copilots and crew members used mitigated speech instead of pointing out dangers or disagreeing with pilots in emergency situations.
However, Gladwell describes how the airline turned this around by acknowledging the influence of the culture of deference and making English the language of their flight communications. In the Korean language, there are six levels of conversational address of varying degrees of intimacy and deference, and copilots used more deferential levels of address when speaking to the captain. English removed this obstacle, allowing copilots to speak to their superiors in a direct way without feeling disrespectful. In essence, this gave flight crew members permission to adopt a new culture, if only for the time they were in the air.
(Shortform note: Even before making the cultural shift in flight communications, Korean Air took another dramatic step and brought in foreigners to advise on flight safety and hold senior staff positions—a decision that ran counter to a cultural tendency toward self-reliance.)
With this example, Gladwell argues that your culture is not your destiny, and that being aware of your cultural limitations is the first step to overcoming them.
(Shortform note: Whereas Korean Air had to acknowledge the limitations of its internal culture of deference, international companies have to understand the differences between their internal culture and the cultures of the countries into which they expand. In No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings describes how Netflix accommodated employees from high PDI cultures by adapting its approach to candid feedback, a pillar of the company’s culture. Hastings created opportunities for formal feedback, which was more comfortable than delivering impromptu feedback, and employees from low PDI cultures learned to somewhat mitigate their speech when giving feedback to colleagues from high PDI cultures.)
The third culture Gladwell explores is the culture of diligence and hard work that’s prominent in many Asian countries. Whereas the culture of honor stems from herding ancestors, he asserts that a culture of diligence is a legacy of rice farming.
Gladwell explains that rice farmers historically possessed neither the money nor the space for big plots and machinery, so they depended on their skills and long, hard hours (averaging 3,000 hours per year). This differs from Western farming, which typically involves larger plots of land, large equipment, and long stretches of idleness during the winter (averaging 1,200 working hours per year).
Furthermore, like the garment workers we discussed earlier, rice farmers saw the clear relationship between increased effort and increased wealth because landlords often allowed them to keep or sell whatever they produced above what was required as rent. This also cultivated their diligence.
(Shortform note: In addition to diligence, some theorize that rice farming also fosters a culture of cooperation that persists among their non-farming descendants. Earlier in the book, Gladwell describes this correlation among farmers more generally, contrasting agriculture’s culture of cooperation with herding’s culture of honor. It’s reasonable to extend that logic and assume that farming rice, which requires elaborate irrigation systems that demand more coordination than other crops, would create a higher level of cultural cooperation.)
Gladwell posits that this culture of diligence partially explains why Asian students score in the 98th percentile in math on international comparison tests. He writes that students who excel at math are those who have the diligence to spend a lot of time figuring out how to solve a problem.
(Shortform note: Experts offer several other possible explanations for Asian students’ high performance in math. One is that Chinese teachers use the traditional “chalk-and-talk” approach, in which they instruct while students listen. While schools in many English-speaking countries have moved toward more collaborative and student-led learning, research shows that students benefit more from teachers’ explicit instruction and problem intervention in chalk-and-talk classrooms. Another hypothesis is that Confucian values that are prominent in Asian cultures emphasize effort and practice, which seems to overlap with Gladwell’s culture of diligence.)
Gladwell writes that understanding the external factors that influence success allows us to create circumstances that give more people opportunities to use and develop their gifts. Such changes could create a world where outliers—the extraordinarily successful—cease to be outliers at all.
(Shortform note: The business world is increasingly taking concrete steps to provide more equal opportunities to diverse job candidates and employees. Their strategies include training recruiters and hiring managers to pull from diverse candidate pools, training employees and managers to spot and report discrimination, pairing underrepresented employees with mentors, and ensuring that the board of directors is diverse.)
Outliers is a collection of stories, each exploring a variety of external factors that contribute to success. Malcolm Gladwell argues that extraordinarily successful people—or outliers—reached that point not just because of hard work and determination, but also thanks to luck, timing, and opportunities. He challenges the notion of self-made success through anecdotes and insight from various disciplines, including history, sociology, and psychology.
Gladwell is a New Yorker staff writer and author of several bestselling books that have earned him worldwide fame and millions of fans for his captivating style of writing and unusual subjects. Gladwell blends storytelling with social science research to offer new perspectives on topics such as how trends catch on and when to trust your intuition. His books—which include five New York Times bestsellers and have sold millions of copies in dozens of countries—have popularized concepts such as the “broken windows theory,” the Pareto principle, the “stickiness factor,” or the “talent myth.”
His parents—a British math professor and a Jamaican psychotherapist—nurtured Gladwell’s natural curiosity from a young age. (In fact, he was such an avid reader that he says his mother let him skip school when he wanted to because she knew he would spend his off-day reading at home.) Gladwell enrolled in college at just 16, earning a bachelor’s in history from the University of Toronto. After struggling to land a job in advertising, as he’d hoped, he began his writing career.
Gladwell has published seven books and co-founded the podcast and audiobook production company Pushkin Industries, where he hosts the podcast Revisionist History. Additionally, an Outliers series is reportedly in development for HBO Max.
Despite Gladwell’s broad acclaim, he’s also been widely criticized for misusing academic research. Specifically, critics claim that he cherry-picks evidence to support his theses, often using small, obscure, and unreliable studies and failing to present contradictory research. Some critics have even dubbed him “America’s Best-Paid Fairy-Tale Writer.”
In response, Gladwell has said that he is primarily a journalist and a storyteller who wants readers to consider new perspectives on cultural phenomena. When describing his approach, Gladwell says that he enjoys playing with ideas and that his books give him a forum to “think in public.” While some argue that Gladwell’s wide popularity and powerful platform turn his published ponderings into the public narrative, he has been reluctant to shoulder that burden—instead, he puts the onus on readers to recognize that he’s offering an alternative or expanded view, rather than delivering a definitive explanation.
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Outliers was published in 2008 by Little, Brown and Company, a division of the Hachette Book Group. It is available in hardcover and paperback, and as an ebook and audiobook.
Outliers was Gladwell’s third non-fiction book, after The Tipping Point and Blink. Like his books before and since, Outliers was a New York Times bestseller. On one hand, this book features Gladwell’s signature writing style—narrative-nonfiction punctuated with social psychology—and fits the pop-economics genre he created with his previous books. However, it is also somewhat of an outlier: In the “Reading Group Guide” at the end of the book, Gladwell writes that this book puts more emphasis on people and their stories, rather than concepts and principles.
Although Gladwell’s focus on success in Outliers was personally relevant, given the extraordinary success he’d achieved after publishing his first two books, the book was also culturally relevant after the relative prosperity of the previous decades.
As the United States enjoyed a healthy economy through the 1980s and ‘90s, pop-cultural images were glitzy and idealized. Americans worked longer hours, made bigger paychecks, and bought bigger cars and homes (cue the birth of the McMansion). At the same time, technology—from the personal computer to the cell phone—became a larger cultural and economic presence, while tech stars like Bill Gates and Steve Jobs became household names. It may be no wonder, then, that Gladwell uses Bill Gates as an example of an outlier in the book.
Although the early 2000s began with the dot-com boom and 9/11, they also spawned reality TV (Survivor premiered in 2000), social media (Friendster, MySpace, and Facebook launched in 2002, 2003, and 2004, respectively), and blogs. Collectively, these platforms created a new brand of supposedly self-made fame and success, arguably based more on exposure than talent. However, just a month before Outliers was published, the stock market crashed and an era of prosperity transitioned to an economic recession.
When Outliers was published in 2008, it made a strong case for the “nurture” side of the nature vs. nurture debate—that a person’s success relies at least as much on environmental factors as on genetics—at a time when there was broad support for the “nature” argument.
In 1994, a book titled The Bell Curve argued that intelligence is largely determined by genes and that the intellectually elite naturally rise to power in the United States. The book drew fervent criticism for suggesting that Black Americans are intellectually inferior to whites and calling for an end to affirmative action. This view echoed statements by Nobel Prize-winning scientist James Watson, who co-discovered DNA (Watson maintained this view as recently as 2019), and by prominent psychologist Arthur Jensen, who concluded that racial differences in American children’s test scores were attributable to genetics rather than circumstances.
In 2003, psychologist Eric Turkheimer revealed an important caveat to the nature argument: He concluded that DNA determines a person’s potential, but that their environment determines whether they reach that potential. Gladwell continued to pick apart the idea that a person’s intelligence is tied to their race in a New Yorker article published less than a year before Outliers.
This book appears to elaborate on the New Yorker piece, while also giving some context to Gladwell’s own success, which had ballooned by this point to a level far beyond what most writers enjoy. In the book, he writes about the unique circumstances that benefited him—for instance, if his mother had been born a few years earlier, she wouldn’t have gotten a high school education.
Following the success of The Tipping Point and Blink, Outliers debuted in the number-one spot on The New York Times bestseller lists. It held the top position for 11 weeks, and the paperback version remained on the list for 274 weeks.
Some critics say that the optimism in Gladwell’s books is a major reason for his broad success. Where conventional ideas can be disheartening, Gladwell’s counterintuitive arguments on everyday phenomena tend to be hopeful. As he writes in the Reading Guide at the end of Outliers, each of his books (up to that point) offered alternative views of the world:
The success of Gladwell’s books helped to popularize a subgenre of nonfiction books similarly based on unconventional arguments. Those books include:
Gladwell has such a distinct style that much of the praise and criticism for Outliers is consistent with reviews for nearly all of his work.
Paradoxically, Gladwell has said that his approach aims to help people understand the whole story by revealing things they didn’t know. He says that the new information is not meant to show people that what they thought was true is actually wrong—rather, that it’s incomplete.
Interestingly, some readers criticize Outliers for doing the opposite: They complain that the notion that someone’s environment and circumstances play a substantial role in their success is obvious, even though Gladwell presents it as a contradiction to the self-made man myth.
Gladwell opens Outliers by defining an outlier and using an example to demonstrate that external circumstances are often equally or more influential in creating outliers than innate traits. He explains that this is his thesis for the book.
Gladwell focuses on two types of external factors: opportunities and cultural legacy. In Part 1, he examines various types of opportunities that enable people to reach outlier-level success; these include the timing of their birth and their family’s style of parenting. In Part 2, he presents three types of cultural legacies and how those legacies foster social norms that impact an individuals’ behavior and trajectories. In the epilogue, Gladwell examines the opportunities and circumstances that contributed to his own success.
In his signature style, Gladwell centers each chapter’s principle around a case study. From the rags-to-riches story of a Jewish lawyer in Chapter 5 to the harrowing tale of a plane crash in Chapter 7, Gladwell uses colorful storytelling and rich details to bring these anecdotes—and the principles they support—to life.
Whereas Gladwell opens each chapter with a scene introducing his case study and then extracts the principle, we first explain the principle in each chapter and use the case study to support it. We’ve also omitted the epilogue, in which Gladwell applies the principles established throughout the book to his own life. Although his autobiographical examination is interesting, it ultimately adds little to his core argument.
Finally, we’ve included commentary that adds context to the case studies, provides nuance to the principles, and offers alternative explanations for Gladwell’s conclusions.
In Part 1, Gladwell explores the importance of opportunity in setting the stage for success. These opportunities come in many different forms, as we’ll explore below. But before we start breaking down the components of the outlier’s success, let’s look at what an outlier is.
Gladwell defines outliers as people who reach a level of success so extraordinary that it’s statistically improbable.
We typically assume that outliers must be exceptionally gifted, intelligent, or passionate. Gladwell notes that this belief promotes the idea of the self-made man (or woman), who relies on their innate intelligence and perseverance to succeed. According to this mythology, the self-made person has earned their success and is in control of their destiny.
However, Gladwell argues that success depends just as much on factors that lie beyond the individual and their control, including their culture, community, and family. Upon further inspection, there are hidden advantages, exceptional opportunities, and cultural legacies that contribute to the outlier’s success.
Origins of the Self-Made Man Myth
In taking on the myth of the self-made man, Gladwell is challenging an idea central to American culture. In fact, the term “self-made man” was coined by a US senator and epitomized by Benjamin Franklin.
In the 1700s, around the time of America’s founding, Immanuel Kant promoted the idea that a person is “what he makes of himself,” as he and his fellow Enlightenment philosophers ushered in a growing secularism. Scholars suggest that when the nation’s founders wrote in the Declaration of Independence that people are entitled to the “pursuit of happiness,” they shifted from a Christian focus on reaching heaven to a secular emphasis on attaining earthly success through ambition and autonomy. This view was echoed in writings that portrayed America as a utopian, practically classless society that promotes social mobility and individual choice.
The myth of the self-made man relies on this view of a classless America where exceptionalism is the rule. However, those portrayals are illusions—and, as a result of these myths, many Americans feel little sense of collective responsibility for individual outcomes, and many are blind to the structural roadblocks that prevent equal opportunities for all.
The first outlier that Gladwell examines is the small Pennsylvania town of Roseto, where research suggested that tight-knit community relations were responsible for residents’ remarkably low levels of disease, crime, alcoholism, and suicide.
Gladwell explains that in the 1880s and ‘90s, hundreds of immigrants from Roseto, Italy arrived in America and established Roseto, Pennsylvania. They developed their new American home in the style of their Italian hometown: Their houses were close to each other, multiple generations often shared a home, and people visited each other constantly. They respected elders, acted modestly about differences in wealth, and actively participated in church and civic organizations.
Gladwell writes that by the late 1950s, a local doctor noticed that, as a group, Rosetans had unusually good health. So, in 1961, researchers conducted a 50-year study of Roseto’s residents.
Among the researchers’ findings, they discovered that no one under 55 showed any signs of heart disease, and men over 65 died from heart disease at half the rate of the US population. This was a big deal: At the time, heart disease was the leading cause of death of men under 65.
However, Gladwell says, the most surprising finding was that researchers ruled out diet, exercise, genetics, and geographic region as causes for Rosetans’ stellar health. Instead, they concluded that Rosetans’ health could be credited to the town’s robust sense of community. This health phenomenon is known as the Roseto effect.
Create Your Own Roseto Effect
Subsequent studies have confirmed that social ties are at least as important as diet and exercise for long-term health—and you don’t have to live in a community as unique as Roseto to reap the benefits. While many Rosetans lived with extended family and had community ties that stretched back generations, anyone can develop a social network that helps keep them healthy.
A 2016 study from the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences revealed that having strong social connections throughout life improves health and increases longevity. Researchers focused on the link between social ties and health during adolescence, midlife, and later in life. They found:
In adolescence, a large and varied social network benefits cardiovascular health and metabolism, which also reduces “predisease pathways,” or biological responses that become the seeds for diseases that emerge later in life. On the other hand, social isolation is as much a risk factor for inflammation as lack of exercise.
In midlife, the quality of relationships has greater health impacts than the quantity (whereas adolescents and elderly people benefit most from a larger web of relationships). On the flip side, stressful relationships put adults at higher risk of inflammation and abdominal obesity.
In late life, broad social networks appear to decrease the likelihood of hypertension and obesity. By the same token, social isolation creates a greater risk of hypertension than diabetes.
Gladwell presents the Roseto effect as evidence that an outlier becomes an outlier due to environmental benefits rather than individual choices and attributes. Rosetans ate fatty foods, drank alcohol, smoked, and didn’t exercise more than the average American—but the benefits of their close-knit community apparently outweighed those individual choices.
Rosetans Are Gladwell’s Outliers—Not Roseto
While the town of Roseto is an outlier because the collective health of its residents stands out compared to other communities, it doesn’t exactly hold up as an example of environment trumping innate attributes. If Roseto were the outlier in Gladwell’s sense, then the town’s surroundings and circumstances would be responsible for its residents’ good health; those external factors might include influence from surrounding cities, state politics that impact the town, and the national economic conditions.
Instead, the individual residents represent Gladwell’s principle, and the community as a whole is merely part of the environment that makes them outliers.
In Part 1, Gladwell argues that people can’t become successful without the opportunity to become successful. These opportunities come in many forms, and in this and the next few chapters, he examines different types of opportunities, including:
While a person’s individual attributes—like talent and work ethic—may determine their potential, Gladwell asserts that external factors determine who has the opportunity to reach their potential, and who faces roadblocks. In other words, it’s impossible to achieve success if you don’t have the chance to put your skills to work.
Furthermore, Gladwell writes that people who get opportunities early in life have a huge advantage over those whose opportunities come later, because early opportunities:
Seemingly Minor Aspects of Upbringing Can Have Big Impacts
In addition to the benefits that Gladwell describes, your childhood experiences and environment have an outsize impact on your life trajectory because they shape your foundation as a person—they can endow you with valuable tools or burden you with additional challenges. Research shows that the ways in which your upbringing impacts your trajectory in life can be physiological or psychological, and often unexpected. For instance,
If you grew up watching your parents work out arguments collaboratively and constructively, you’re more likely to have high self-esteem, strong social skills, emotional security, and a solid academic performance.
Kids of high-income parents have higher SAT scores than their low-income peers.
If you grew up in a low-income household, you’ll have a lower working memory—which lets you hold multiple ideas in your head at once—as an adult.
If you’re the son of a working mother, there’s a greater chance you’ll spend more time taking care of your kids and contributing to housework as an adult.
If you’re the daughter of a working mother, you’re more likely to work in a management position and make more money than daughters of stay-at-home moms.
Gladwell states that children who are taught (directly or indirectly) that they’re gifted, talented, or smart tend to live up to that expectation. They believe that they are talented and therefore act like they are talented, which leads to them developing actual talent. This is a self-fulfilling prophecy, meaning that belief influences reality.
Likewise, children who are told that they’re unintelligent or unremarkable tend to believe and embody that description.
Nuances of Self-Fulfilling Prophecies
In Mindset, psychologist Carol S. Dweck describes how self-fulfilling prophecy has a substantial impact on children—and some of her findings may be surprising. Paradoxically, Dweck’s research revealed that children who are praised for being smart tend to shy away from difficult tasks, rather than rising to the challenge. These children want to uphold their reputation for being smart, so they avoid doing anything that risks failure, for fear of showing shortcomings in their intelligence.
Dweck concluded that this reaction comes from a fixed mindset, a belief that abilities (like intelligence) are unchangeable; when you view your abilities as unchangeable, you feel you must constantly prove yourself. By contrast, a growth mindset is based on the belief that the abilities you’re born with are a starting point, which prompts you to work hard, seek challenges that stretch you, and welcome mistakes as opportunities to learn. The two different mindsets dictate people’s aspirations and how they approach success, failure, and effort.
In sum, this type of self-fulfilling prophecy depends on whether parents praise children for their talent (fixed mindset) or their effort (growth mindset).
In addition to self-fulfilling prophecies, Gladwell writes that early opportunities lead to more opportunities, creating a snowball effect. In other words, the benefits of one small advantage compound over time to create exponentially greater success. This is called accumulative advantage, or the Matthew effect. By the same token, the Matthew effect also describes how small disadvantages tend to snowball into larger ones.
(Shortform note: This principle is also called cumulative advantage, which sociologist Robert Merton coined in 1968 when he described how scientists who are already well-known often receive more credit than their co-authors in group studies. The term “Matthew effect” refers to a Bible verse in the book of Matthew: “For to everyone who has, more will be given, and he will have abundance; but from him who does not have, even what he has will be taken away.”)
For example, consider how one opportunity changes the trajectories of two young girls who want to be professional actors. The first girl gets the lead role in her middle school play, which sets off a series of events:
The second girl gets a minor role in her middle school play. As a result:
Accumulative Advantage Isn’t Absolute
Research shows that the concept of accumulative advantage applies to many areas of life, including education, social influence, wealth distribution, and network science. However, the reality is more complex than the model suggests; for example, if the rich got endlessly richer, and the poor endlessly poorer, then there would be more trillionaires and more people in hopelessly desperate conditions.
In The Matthew Effect, sociologist David Rigney argues that, in reality, there are six ways things play out between the fates of the haves and the have-nots. Three scenarios cause the gap between haves and have-nots to widen:
The haves rise; the have-nots fall. (This is called the “absolute Matthew effect.”)
The haves rise; the have-nots rise at a slower pace. (This is called the “relative Matthew effect.”)
The haves fall; the have-nots fall at a faster pace.
In the other three scenarios, the gap between them narrows:
The haves fall; the have-nots fall at a slower pace.
The haves rise; the have-nots rise at a faster pace.
The haves fall; the have-nots rise.
Rigney concedes that, often, one of the first three scenarios plays out and the gap widens between the advantaged and the disadvantaged.
To illustrate the benefits of early opportunities, Gladwell examines the relative age effect (RAE), the advantage that comes with being born during the early months of an age grouping. First, Gladwell discusses how the RAE impacts Canadian hockey players.
Among Canada’s elite hockey players, 40% are born in the first three months of the year. The reason, according to researchers: Competitive youth hockey leagues are divided into age classes, and the cut-off date is January 1. This means that a child born on January 1 could play alongside someone born on December 31, who is a full year younger.
Gladwell explains that, in childhood, a year makes a big difference in physical and mental development. Consider how first-quarter birthdays lead to self-fulfilling prophecy and accumulative advantage:
Of course, not all the best hockey players are born in late winter. But enough of a pattern exists that we can’t attribute the success of some to talent alone.
Second, Gladwell discusses the RAE in American schoolchildren: Among students in the same grade, older students (those born shortly after the kindergarten-admission cutoff date) tend to perform better academically. Those students are more likely to be singled out for gifted programs and advanced classes and, ultimately, attend college. Gladwell cites a study that found that the youngest students in each class at four-year colleges were underrepresented by 11.6%.
Gladwell suggests that, by changing these age-based systems, we could create a more equal playing field.
(Shortform note: Besides changing age cut-offs, youth sports coaches and administrators can allow players to play with the age group above or below them, emphasize skill over size and physical ability (especially when assigning playing positions), and encourage younger players to play strategically).
Counterpoint: RAE Doesn’t Determine Your Fate
While numerous studies confirm that RAE impacts children’s physical ability, academic performance, and even popularity in school, researchers have also concluded that birth month is just one factor in a child’s success.
In terms of physical ability, one study of physical literacy in 8- to 12-year-old Canadians found the impact of RAE to be “negligible.”
In academics, a study of eighth-grade students found that, although the RAE still had a substantial impact on student achievement, its effect decreases the longer children are in school. Researchers also recognized that students’ socioeconomic background and the quality of school they attend are also important factors in their performance.
Flying in the face of RAE research, a study of students at an Italian university found that younger students actually performed better than their older classmates. The researchers attributed this, in part, to the fact that younger students were less active in sports, nightlife, and romantic relationships—presumably, they were studying while their older classmates were partying.
Think about the role of accumulative advantage and self-fulfilling prophecy in your own life.
Describe one opportunity or disadvantage that you had early in your life or career. For instance, maybe you had a particularly supportive coach, or you had to cope with instability in your home life.
Describe one thing that happened as a result of that opportunity or disadvantage.
Describe one thing that that thing led to.
How else could you have reached the last point above, if not through the initial opportunity or disadvantage and subsequent event?
It may seem obvious that we need to work hard to succeed, but Gladwell argues that, too often, we attribute success solely to talent and forget that the hours we put in matter just as much as, if not significantly more than, the natural gifts we start with. He writes that, after a certain level of natural talent gets your foot in the door in a particular field, practice becomes the determining factor in how successful you are.
Although we tend to think of practice as an equalizer—that anyone who is a hard worker can succeed—Gladwell points out that having the time to practice enough to master a skill is a luxury afforded only to the privileged.
Gladwell cites studies showing that the most masterful individuals in their fields have practiced their craft for at least 10,000 hours, which averages nearly 20 hours every week for 10 years. Someone needs to be in pretty extraordinary circumstances (with the extraordinary opportunities they provide) to accumulate 10,000 hours of focused practice as a young person.
The 10,000-Hour Debate
K. Anders Ericsson, the psychologist who led the study from which Gladwell gleaned the 10,000-hour rule, has criticized Gladwell for misrepresenting his research findings. In the study, Ericsson and his fellow researchers asked top-ranked violinists to estimate how many hours they’d spent practicing since picking up the instrument; they found that, on average, elite violinists had dedicated 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to their craft.
Ericsson has argued in papers (including one pointedly titled “The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists”) and in his book, Peak, that Gladwell oversimplified the results by making two mistakes:
He applied data about violinists to all fields, when it’s unreasonable to assume that all fields require the same amount of practice to achieve mastery.
He neglected to specify that the type of practice is far more important than the amount of time spent practicing. Ericsson’s study emphasizes that mastery requires deliberate practice, which is an intensely focused and effortful form of practice that constantly pushes the practitioner to stretch their abilities.
In response, Gladwell has since clarified that he wasn’t suggesting that 10,000 was a universal magic number (even though he writes in Outliers that “Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness,” and he’s the first to dub this concept with the name, the 10,000-Hour Rule). Instead, Gladwell seems to use the theory to reinforce the importance of time in achieving success, which sets up his larger point that having that time in the first place is a privilege that not everyone has.
This may be another case where Gladwell’s popularity inadvertently fuels the criticisms against him: Because Outliers was so widely read, he is largely responsible for introducing this concept to the masses. As a result, his popularization of the 10,000-hour theory is often conflated with his endorsement of it.
Gladwell writes that the opportunity to practice 10,000 hours typically emerges from two external factors: privilege and the timing of your birth.
Gladwell states that, in order to master a skill by adulthood, carving out 10,000 hours of practice in your childhood requires the support of the adults in your life—and it helps if your family has money. Money buys time, and time is necessary for practice. For instance, you can’t devote yourself to the full-time practice of a craft if you have to work a part-time job to pay for your lessons or simply contribute to family expenses. Additionally, if going to school eats into your practice time, wealthier families can afford to homeschool or arrange for special accommodations that allow for extended practice hours.
Time Poverty Is Often Part of a Vicious Cycle of Poverty
Research bears out that time poverty often goes hand-in-hand with income poverty. For example, if you are income-poor and your car breaks down, you can’t afford the repairs unless you clock extra hours at work—but you can’t put in those extra hours because you have to spend more time commuting by bus until your car is fixed.
Moreover, time and income poverty compound to create bandwidth poverty, when the pressing needs of the moment deplete your mental capacity for the long-term planning and self-control needed to address some of your time and money issues, creating a vicious cycle. To bring this back to Gladwell’s argument, even if you carved out some time to practice your skill, your bandwidth poverty would make it nearly impossible to put forth the intense focus required for meaningful deliberate practice.
Besides privilege, Gladwell posits that—just as your birth month affects your success in school or sports—your birth year, in relation to historical events, may provide unique opportunities to practice that wouldn’t otherwise be available to you.
As examples of this theory, Gladwell points to an inordinate number of successful computer programmers who were born between 1952 and 1958. These individuals came of age during the dawn of the personal computer in 1975.
Gladwell writes that individuals born before this sweet spot in the 1950s were too old and set in their ways to be willing to take risks on new ventures, while individuals born after missed their chance to get in at the start of a revolution.
Counterpoint: Successful People Make Their Own Luck
Gladwell’s argument that the luck of being born in the right time to practice 10,000 hours developing a skill set seems to center around innovative fields and changing social and economic circumstances: In addition to his example of computer programmers, he notes that 14 of the 75 richest Americans were born in the 1830s, which put them in an ideal position to take advantage of an economy that was transforming through the rise of industrialism, the construction of railroads, and the emergence of Wall Street.
However, if Gladwell is arguing that this form of luck is often necessary to achieve innovative success, psychologist Richard Wiseman counters in The Luck Factor that supposedly “lucky” people actually make their own luck through four behaviors:
They expose themselves to a variety of people and experiences.
They trust their instincts.
They’re optimistic that their “luck” will continue.
They find lessons and opportunities in failures.
Gladwell doesn’t deny that successful people—including the computer programmers above—have a baseline of natural talent that contributed to their achievements. Given those natural abilities and work ethic, someone like Bill Gates may have been just as likely to find success in a different field had he been born in another era.
To illustrate the importance of the opportunity to practice and the luck of timing, Gladwell examines the circumstances that contributed to the successes of Bill Joy and Bill Gates, two key players in the rise of computers and the internet.
Gladwell first explores the circumstances that benefited Bill Joy, the “Edison of the Internet” and cofounder of Sun Microsystems (one of the most important companies in Silicon Valley), who first discovered computer programming at the University of Michigan. He went on to make several significant contributions to the world of computer science.
Joy had several extraordinary opportunities to develop his skills, according to Gladwell. These opportunities depended on timing and allowed him to accumulate hours of practice:
According to Gladwell, Joy estimates that by the time he felt proficient in computer programming (his second year in graduate school at Berkeley), he had logged approximately 10,000 hours of practice. But he never would have logged that many hours if his birth year and a series of lucky breaks hadn’t given him the opportunities for practice.
(Shortform note: Again, while Joy was lucky to have the opportunities listed above, not every college student in his position would have spent eight to 10 hours a day programming—Joy had to have an immense amount of interest and dedication to take advantage of those opportunities in such an extreme way. Acknowledging this doesn’t counter Gladwell’s point: Outliers isn’t meant to argue that success depends solely on opportunity, but rather that it’s not based solely on hard work and intelligence, either.)
Bill Gates also had extraordinary opportunities that provided him with the computer programming experience necessary to found Microsoft after dropping out of Harvard. Gladwell explains that:
Gladwell says that all of these extraordinary opportunities allowed Gates the time to practice and hone his skills. By the time he dropped out of Harvard, Gates had been programming nonstop for seven years.
In Sports, Hours Can’t Compensate for Lack of Ability
Since the publication of Outliers—and the subsequent criticism about the 10,000-hour rule—Gladwell has clarified that the rule is a stronger determinant of success in intellectual endeavors than in physical ones. This clarification is at least partially in response to The Sports Gene, by David Epstein, which argues that favorable genetics are a necessary factor in athletic achievement, and that no amount of practice can make up for a lack of innate ability.
Epstein cites the disproportionate number of elite runners who come from the Kalenjin tribe in Kenya. One of the primary and undeniable factors in this tribe’s running ability is their body type: They have thin calves and ankles that help them run faster and more efficiently than others. Additionally, on the nurture side of the issue, Kalenjin must silently endure intense pain during a traditional rite of passage, and that ability may help them push through long, difficult runs.
On a spectrum of success factors, Epstein would fall on the end that strongly (but not solely) emphasizes innate ability, while Ericsson is on the opposite end, making a case for hard work and practice. And although Gladwell is often criticized for leaning too heavily toward Ericsson’s side, a close reading of Outliers and Gladwell’s subsequent writing seems to put him closer to the middle.
How can you achieve your 10,000 hours for mastery?
Think of a skill or craft that you wish to master. How much time would you estimate you’ve already spent deliberately practicing that skill?
Subtract the number of hours you’ve dedicated to deliberate practice from 10,000. (Although 10,000 hours isn’t an exact number for mastery, this will give you a baseline goal.) How long do you think it will realistically take to accrue that many hours of additional practice?
Identify one or two of the biggest obstacles that lie in the way of achieving your 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. How might you reduce these barriers?
Since deliberate practice is goal-oriented, write one goal or benchmark you can start working toward now.
In addition to the opportunity of time, Gladwell argues that successful people have the opportunity of intelligence—though not the type of intelligence we typically associate with success. He notes two types of intelligence:
1. Analytical Intelligence
2. Practical Intelligence
(Shortform note: Analytical and practical intelligence are two of three types identified in psychologist Robert Sternberg’s model of intelligence, called the Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. The third type is creative intelligence, which entails thinking outside the box to come up with innovative solutions.)
Although we tend to assume that analytical intelligence—indicated by a high IQ—is a prerequisite for success, Gladwell asserts that extraordinary success in life is often the result of practical intelligence. As we’ll see, this continues his argument that external factors (nurture) are at least as important as innate ability (nature) in determining a person’s success.
To explore his argument, let’s examine the origins and impacts of each type of intelligence.
People with high IQs are typically lauded as geniuses—arguably the ultimate outliers. However, Gladwell argues that IQ only determines success up to a certain point. This is called the “threshold effect”: After meeting the threshold of “smart enough,” differences in achievement based on IQ tend to level out, and opportunity plays a larger role in determining your success. Specifically, he cites an IQ of 120 as the threshold where the importance of IQ drops off.
The Importance—and Heritability—of Creativity
Although Gladwell refers to the threshold effect in broader terms, in psychological research, the threshold theory refers to the relationship between intelligence and creativity. Even in the discussion of what makes a genius, researchers like Nancy Coover Andreasen, a neuroscientist who studies the “science of genius,” and other studies on the threshold effect tend to focus on the relationship between IQ—analytical intelligence—and creativity, because they draw a connection between creativity and genius (as in, creative genius).
Gladwell does acknowledge the importance of creativity, as we’ll discuss next. However, while this does support his argument on the shortcomings of analytical intelligence alone, it does not support his larger emphasis on the limitations of innate ability, as research reveals that creativity is more genetic than learned. Rather, Gladwell returns to his focus on opportunities and external factors in the next section on practical intelligence.
Once a person passes the threshold of “smart enough,” what other factors determine their success? Besides practical intelligence, which we’ll discuss later, Gladwell argues that it is divergent thinking, or the ability to consider multiple possibilities and think creatively. By contrast, convergent thinking is the type measured by IQ tests, which enables you to choose an answer from a list of possibilities.
(Shortform note: Although psychologist J.P. Guilford developed the concept of convergent and divergent thinking, his definition of divergent thinking closely parallels the description of creative intelligence in Robert Sternberg’s Triarchic Theory of Intelligence. As mentioned earlier in this section, Sternberg’s theory identifies three types of intelligence: analytical (good for solving intellectual puzzles), practical (for reading people and situations), and creative (for thinking outside the box).)
What is divergent thinking? Gladwell writes that a test of divergent thinking might ask participants how many shapes they can make with a pile of blocks.
Gladwell asserts that the convergent thinker might have a higher IQ, but the divergent thinker demonstrates invaluable creativity beyond the functional—they’re more likely of the two to win a Nobel Prize or found a revolutionary business.
(Shortform note: In a business context, divergent thinking is key to innovating and adapting to change. You can incorporate divergent thinking into your organization by ensuring that your business model is adaptable to changing market demands, soliciting ideas from a broad range of team members, constantly learning, and taking calculated risks.)
One of the studies that Gladwell references to illustrate the limits of analytical intelligence is Stanford psychologist Lewis Terman’s “Genetic Studies of Genius.” After WWI, Terman began a long-term study following a group of about 1,500 extraordinarily intelligent children, whose IQs averaged 140. He called them “Termites.” Terman believed that no personal attribute was more important than IQ, and he intended to prove its correlation with success in adulthood.
According to Gladwell, Terman spent his life tracking the Termites’ physical, academic, and psychological development. He was convinced that his Termites would be the great leaders of their generation. However, he found that, while the Termites had done fairly well for themselves, they hadn’t been the true outliers that he had anticipated. The Termites’ intelligence allowed them to be moderately successful in life, but their intelligence was no better at predicting outlier status than their family background—in fact, one sociologist demonstrated that if Terman had randomly selected kids from the same family backgrounds as his Termites, without selecting for IQ, the random group would probably have been just as successful as the high-IQ group.
Criticism and Legacy of Terman’s Study
As a gifted child himself, Terman’s motivation in his “Genetic Studies of Genius” was to change a common notion at the time that exceptionally smart children were feeble, socially awkward, and generally ill-adjusted. From his own experience, he developed an interest in high intelligence: He adapted Alfred Binet’s intelligence test to develop the Stanford-Binet Intelligence Scales, which is still used to measure IQ. (Terman also used the IQ test in his advocacy for eugenics.)
However, critics point to several issues that compromise the validity of Terman’s study:
The Termites were not diverse. The vast majority were white (the total number of Black, Japanese-American, and American-Indian participants was nine), middle-class, urban, Californians.
During the study, Terman intervened to improve the Termites’ odds of success, undermining the study’s results. He wrote letters of recommendation and used his influence to help some get admitted to Stanford.
The circumstances of the time impacted the Termites’ opportunities. The study began in 1921, so the Depression that began at the end of that decade and World War II in the 1940s likely limited many participants’ abilities to attend college. Additionally, nearly half of the women in the study did not pursue careers, which was more of a cultural norm during that era.
Despite these issues, Terman’s study did help change public opinion of “gifted children”—and perhaps contributed to society’s current overvaluing of intelligence that Gladwell disputes.
Whereas there are limitations to the impact of analytical intelligence on a person’s success, as mentioned, Gladwell argues that practical intelligence is essential for outlier-level success. This is where he returns to the theme of emphasizing the importance of external factors: While analytical intelligence is largely innate, practical intelligence is learned.
Gladwell asserts that practical intelligence is largely cultivated through family. Specifically, a family’s wealth has a large impact on a child’s outcomes—not only because money affords the child opportunities to attend good schools and benefit from coaches and tutors, but because the family’s wealth correlates with parenting practices that instill the child with more or less practical intelligence. As evidence, he cites a study by sociologist Annette Lareau, who followed the families of 12 third-graders and found two distinct parenting philosophies divided along class, rather than racial or cultural, lines.
Gladwell explains that Lareau’s research revealed that wealthier parents took an active role in their children’s education and development. These parents:
Lareau called this approach “concerted cultivation,” and it teaches children to:
The Evolution From Cultivating to Constraining
Since Lareau’s assessment, concerted cultivation has come to be categorized as a form of “intensive parenting,” which has evolved to encompass “helicopter parenting” (incessantly hovering over children), “snowplow parenting” (clearing obstacles from children’s path), and “drone parenting” (technology-assisted helicopter parenting). Paradoxically, in contrast to concerted cultivation, research shows that these more-intensive variants actually produce children who are less competent, confident, mature, independent, and responsible than their peers.
Although all of these forms of intensive parenting involve signing children up for enriching extracurriculars, including children in family discussions and debates, and engaging in negotiations with children. However, the difference seems to be that the concerted cultivation that Lareau describes involves not only advocating for children, but also pushing them to take an active role in their own self-advocacy, which helps the children develop the skills and confidence that are key to navigating the world. By contrast, helicopter, snowplow, and drone parenting are characterized by parents’ efforts to prevent their children from experiencing failures and frustrations, which prevents them from learning valuable lessons and stunts the development of their competence and confidence.
By contrast, Gladwell says, Lareau revealed that working-class parents felt responsible for caring for their children, but they left them to develop naturally, on their own. Their children didn’t have play time that was orchestrated by their parents—instead, they played outside and made up games with their siblings and neighbors. These parents:
Lareau called this strategy “accomplishment of natural growth,” and it leads to children who are:
A Decline in Accomplishment of Natural Growth
Evidence suggests that, since Lareau published her findings, some aspects of the accomplishment of natural growth strategy—and their associated benefits—have declined in practice. First, some experts suggest that intensive parenting (closely related to concerted cultivation) is increasingly becoming the norm at every socioeconomic level. One possible explanation is that parents are getting more involved out of anxiety about rising competition in college admissions, greater necessity of a college degree in the changing job market, and widening income inequality. However, the ways in which parents are intervening is largely undermining children’s independence and sense of self-efficacy.
Second, the broader availability of technology means that most children are spending more time in front of screens—televisions, computers, and mobile devices—and less time outside. Furthermore, research shows that low-income children and teens average significantly more screen time than their middle-class and affluent peers. Being more sedentary and having less unstructured play makes children more physically unhealthy, and it inhibits their development of critical thinking and social skills. As a result, they likely miss out on the benefit of creativity that Lareau notes among working-class children.
Gladwell writes that neither parenting style is objectively better, but concerted cultivation fosters the growth of practical intelligence, the savvy to know how to ask for what you want and get it. Through seeing their parents speak up to authorities and learning how to advocate for themselves, middle-class children grow up feeling entitled to pursue their desires. While we tend to think of entitlement as a bad thing, it may be a foundational pillar of success—you won’t get something if you don’t ask (and even fight) for it.
(Of Lewis Terman’s Termites, Gladwell reports that those from the wealthiest families became the highest-achieving adults. This suggests that their success was due in part to the practical intelligence they learned from the way they were raised.)
On the other hand, Lareau found that kids from working-class and poor families didn’t know how to manipulate an environment to get what they wanted. They never made special requests of teachers or advocated for themselves. They weren’t comfortable around adults, and they even felt distrust.
There are some criticisms of Lareau’s research, which she published in a book titled Unequal Childhoods: Some critics noted the small sample size (she studied 88 families but discussed only 12 in the book), and others have pointed out that race has a larger impact on parenting philosophy than Lareau acknowledges. However, these critiques don’t significantly undermine Gladwell’s argument, because:
Other research supports Lareau’s assertion that concerted cultivation is positively correlated with academic achievement.
Although a child’s race is genetic, its impact on the child’s outcomes is based on the external factors that exist because of race, rather than an inherent correlation between race and innate ability. In this way, being born into a family of a certain race or a certain class both lead to external factors that help or hinder success.
To illustrate how practical intelligence—or the lack thereof—impacts success, Gladwell tells the contrasting stories of two geniuses: One spent most of his life as a bouncer in a bar, and the other was the father of the atomic bomb. Gladwell attributes the dramatic difference in these two geniuses’ trajectories to their family backgrounds and levels of practical intelligence.
The first genius, Christopher Langan, has an IQ of 195 (for comparison, Einstein’s was 150). He could read at age 3, got a perfect score on the SAT, and loved to learn. However, he grew up in poverty with a physically abusive stepfather. He developed a distrust of authority and a belief that being independent was the only way to get through life. As a result, Gladwell argues that Langan failed to develop the practical intelligence—and, specifically, the communication and negotiation skills—that would have helped him overcome a series of setbacks that led him to drop out of college (twice).
The second genius that Gladwell introduces, Robert Oppenheimer, was a theoretical physicist and father of the atomic bomb. Like Langan, Oppenheimer’s intellectual prowess was evident as a child. Unlike Langan, Oppenheimer’s family was well-off and cultivated his practical intelligence from a young age: His parents taught him to interact with adults on equal footing, instilling in him a sense of entitlement. His father was a model of how to negotiate to get what you want, having worked his way up the ranks in the business world. Gladwell credits Oppenheimer’s practical intelligence for getting him through potentially grave setbacks in his life and career.
When Langan’s mother forgot to sign a form, he had to drop out of college; Oppenheimer tried to murder his tutor, and he was merely put on probation. While both men had impressive analytical intelligence, Gladwell asserts that Oppenheimer’s practical intelligence gave him a huge advantage in navigating the world.
Lacking Practical Intelligence or Learned Helplessness?
As in any comparison of two individuals under uncontrolled conditions, it’s impossible to say that one particular factor is solely or primarily responsible for a difference in outcomes. While Gladwell’s comparison of Langan and Oppenheimer appears to support his argument that practical intelligence significantly impacts how people navigate challenges in life, other factors can’t be ruled out: For one, Langan’s extreme poverty (he reports that he had just one set of hole-ridden clothes as a child) and abuse (his stepfather allegedly locked away food and disciplined with a bullwhip) almost surely left Langan with untreated trauma. With this in mind, it’s reasonable to suspect that Langan could have suffered from learned helplessness.
People who repeatedly experience trauma that they can’t control or escape—such child abuse survivors—become so accustomed to that sense of helplessness that they eventually stop making efforts to change stressful situations even where they do have control. In Langan’s case, accepting that he’d lost his scholarship rather than following up with school administrators may have been an example of learned helplessness.
Interestingly, in The Subtle Art of Not Giving a F*ck, Mark Manson argues that learned helplessness creates a sense of entitlement that makes people feel that they deserve special treatment or that they can do whatever they want and use their trauma as justification. In contrast to the type of entitlement Gladwell describes in relation to practical intelligence, trauma-bred entitlement leads to unapologetic, self-sabotaging behavior—often, people with this entitlement are bucking the system, rather than working it, as Oppenheimer did.
Are you a divergent or convergent thinker?
Set a timer for two minutes. Answer the question: How many uses can you think of for a box?
Review your answers. Would you describe your responses as more characteristic of convergent thinking (conventional uses like “storing objects”), or divergent thinking (out-of-the-box ideas like “as a sled”)?
With this in mind, set a timer for two more minutes and write down as many additional uses as you can think of. Push yourself to be even more creative in your answers.
Describe a current project at work or problem in your life that more divergent thinking could help you address.
Reflect on your upbringing and strategize to fill in any gaps in practical intelligence.
Describe at least one instance in your childhood in which your parents demonstrated that you should either challenge or comply with authority.
Describe how your parents responded to your interests and talents. For example, did they provide you opportunities to invest more deeply in these interests, or did they let you pursue them on your own?
Describe the nature of parent-child communication in your household growing up. Did your parents solicit your opinions and invite you to debate and negotiate, or did they expect you to comply without questioning them?
Consider the descriptions of concerted cultivation (which produces children who feel entitled to pursue what they want) and accomplishment of natural growth (which rears children who are less likely to challenge authority and self-advocate). Which best describes your upbringing? How has this impacted your trajectory as an adult?
So far, we’ve looked at the opportunities provided by privilege and good fortune. But difficult circumstances can also bring unexpected opportunities.
In this chapter, Gladwell illustrates this point by examining the life of Joe Flom, a lawyer who grew up in poverty during the Great Depression. As we’ll discuss, because of his early hardships, Flom grew up to become a partner at one of the largest and most powerful law firms in the world—Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher, and Flom.
Although Gladwell frames Flom as an outlier, he clarifies that Flom is representative of an inordinate number of highly successful lawyers who had the same hidden opportunities that we’ll explore in this chapter: being Jewish, being the child of garment workers, and being born in the 1930s. As we’ll see, these circumstances and their consequences encapsulate many of the principles from previous chapters, such as accumulative advantage, the importance of upbringing, and the necessity of thousands of hours of practice to master a skill.
Let’s look at the hidden opportunities in this rags-to-riches story.
Gladwell writes that when Flom entered the job market, he faced discrimination for being Jewish. This discrimination limited not only which law firms would hire him, but also the type of law he could practice.
In the 1940s and ‘50s, elite law firms were particular about the lawyers they hired and the clients they worked with: They preferred people who were Nordic, clean-cut, well-connected, and born to a respectable family. As a result, Flom could only find work at less-distinguished law firms.
Gladwell explains that the elite firms handled the taxes and legal work of issuing stocks and bonds for big corporations. They didn’t take on litigation cases (lawsuits) because they were considered low-class and sleazy. Lawsuits were also uncommon at the time—major corporations didn’t sue each other and there weren’t many hostile corporate takeovers.
Again, Jewish lawyers like Flom were left to take on the undistinguished work of litigation and “proxy fights,” the legal side of a hostile takeover, when one investor or company tries to take over another company without its consent. Although this was a disadvantage initially, Gladwell says that it forced Jewish lawyers to develop a unique skill set that led to their eventual success.
In the 1970s, a combination of economic and legal changes led investors to become more aggressive, and corporate takeovers increased dramatically—and the legal work associated with them became less taboo. Suddenly, everyone needed litigation lawyers, and Jewish lawyers had already accumulated their 10,000 hours of litigation and proxy-fight practice. Flom became one of the few experts in a sought-after specialization.
Gladwell asserts that if Flom hadn’t faced discrimination for being Jewish, he wouldn’t have gained the expertise that made him, and other Jewish lawyers, so enormously successful.
For Most, Discrimination Is a Disadvantage—Not an Opportunity
Although Gladwell argues that the hiring discrimination that Flom faced turned out to be an advantage in his career, workplace prejudice overwhelmingly harms its targets. Directly, it causes minority groups to have higher rates of unemployment and poverty than majority groups. In fact, unemployment rates have been twice as high among Black Americans as white Americans during all but seven years between 1962 and 2015. Additionally, in 2016, the poverty rate among working-age women was higher than the national average—and it was significantly higher among Black, Hispanic, and Native women.
Indirectly, workplace discrimination also negatively affects health. This is because economic stability—through consistent employment and wages—is one of five social determinants of health (SDOH), which are external factors that heavily impact individuals’ long-term health. The other four SDOH are the health and safety of a person’s neighborhood, their social and community support, and their access to high-quality education and health care; most or all of these remaining factors are also arguably impacted by a person’s ability to find and sustain well-paid jobs.
Workplace discrimination remains a persistent problem in the American workforce: A 2017 study examined how often a Black or Hispanic job applicant was called for an interview compared to a white applicant with identical qualifications. Researchers found that white applicants received 24% more callbacks than Hispanics and 36% more than Blacks. The study also revealed that, since 1990, this discrimination against Blacks has not changed, and it has improved negligibly among Hispanics.
The second hidden opportunity that Gladwell notes came from the fact that Flom’s parents worked in the garment industry. We’ll discuss the details of that opportunity next, but it’s worth noting that his parents worked in this industry because of anti-Semitic discrimination they had faced before immigrating to the US
Gladwell explains that at the time Flom’s parents were living in Europe, Jews were forbidden to own land, so they lived in cities and worked in various trade professions, most commonly the garment trade. When they arrived in New York City in the 1890s, the garment trade was the largest industry in the city, and their specialized skill set was greatly needed. Again, because discrimination forced them to take jobs that others wouldn’t, they were in a position to be experts when the neglected skills became in-demand.
For Some Immigrants, Work Experience Was Irrelevant
Amid the surge of US immigration in the 19th and early 20th centuries, some immigrants—like Flom’s parents—found work based on their experience and expertise, while other immigrants’ work was dictated by the region in which they settled and the changing needs of the labor market. As with the Jewish immigrants who flooded the garment industry, a wave of German immigrants brought their wheat farming expertise to the Midwest after the Russian government revoked privileges for German farmers settled in Russia.
At the same time, industrialization was changing America’s economy and labor market, shifting the center of industry from agriculture to factory work. Many immigrants from various countries settled in cities and found work in these factories, where they typically performed monotonous tasks for long hours in unsafe conditions. Similarly, labor shortages on the transcontinental railroad were filled with low-wage immigrant workers based on proximity, including Chinese immigrants in the West (where many had come for the Gold Rush) and Irish immigrants in the East (where millions settled near their ports of entry).
As garment workers, Flom’s parents were extremely poor. However, the nature of their work taught them three key lessons that they passed on to their son, which contributed to his success. Thus, Gladwell argues that his parents’ trade was yet another unexpected opportunity for Joe Flom.
Specifically, garment workers—and their children—benefited from three aspects of the industry: autonomy, complexity, and the relationship between effort and reward.
1) Autonomy: Unlike other trades, you could start a garment business fairly easily and independently. The overhead cost was relatively low—all you needed was a sewing machine, some fabric, and the ability to sew. Jewish garment workers highly valued this autonomy, and passed that on to their children.
(Shortform note: In Drive, Daniel H. Pink emphasizes that autonomy is critical for enduring motivation, job satisfaction, high performance, and psychological health at work. Pink notes that autonomy isn’t about working alone, but rather having the freedom to choose how you work—which tasks you tackle and how you approach them, the hours you work, and the team you assemble. Although Pink focuses on how employers give workers autonomy, the garment workers enjoyed this freedom because they didn’t have to work for an employer.)
2) Complexity: The entrepreneurial nature of the industry required that the worker be intimately involved in every aspect of the business, including manufacturing, negotiating, conducting market research, and understanding fashion trends. They passed their knowledge of the economy and how to negotiate with New Yorkers on to their children; many, like Flom, used it to their advantage.
(Shortform note: Flom’s story shows an exception to our discussion in the last chapter about how children in middle- and upper-class families typically benefit from their parents’ negotiation and business skills. In Flom’s case, because of the particular industry his parents worked in, he had the opportunity to learn these skills despite being poor.)
3) A relationship between effort and reward: If garment workers stayed up late sewing more dresses, they’d make more money the next day. The correlation between increased effort and increased reward was clear and tangible. The harder and longer you work, the more money you’ll make. That instilled Flom with a belief in the value of hard work that helped him in his own career.
(Shortform note: This type of contingent reward—similar to commissions for salespeople—is motivating in “algorithmic” tasks, such as assembly-line work or sewing dresses. However, research shows that contingent rewards are less effective in complex or creative “heuristic” work, such as innovating or solving novel problems.)
Furthermore, Gladwell writes that these three elements collectively made the work meaningful, despite the long hours and difficult work. This taught garment workers and their children that even hard work could be joyful if it had meaning. Although, in many ways, Jewish immigrants were like many other immigrants—forced to work in poor conditions for little pay—Gladwell posits that the specific lessons listed above and the understanding of meaningful work gave Flom an advantage over other first-generation Americans at the time.
The Definition of Success
On one hand, Gladwell argues that Flom learned skills and life lessons—like the importance of hard work—from his parents’ work experiences, and that those helped Flom to become monetarily successful in his career. Additionally, Gladwell suggests that Flom’s parents had success because they found meaningful work. This brings into question Gladwell’s definition of success when framing an outlier as someone who’s especially successful.
Generally, Gladwell’s writing in Outliers implies success through career achievements and financial gain. Based on this, we can assume that broader definitions of success—like mental and emotional well-being, or overall life satisfaction—may not adhere strictly to Gladwell’s argument about the necessity of external factors.
Just as many uber-successful computer programmers were born at a key point in the 1950s, many successful Jewish lawyers, like Flom, were born in an advantageous period—the 1930s. Gladwell asserts that this is yet another example of how the timing of your life impacts your opportunities for success, which was covered in Chapter 2.
As we discussed, Jewish lawyers in Flom’s generation worked in litigation when that area of law was undesirable, which made them a fairly small, highly skilled group when demand for their work grew in the 1970s. Additionally, Gladwell writes that the 1930s produced a “demographic trough,” or small generation, due to the fact that many families couldn’t afford to have more children during the Depression.
Although being born during the Great Depression brought certain challenges, Gladwell argues that being born in a demographic trough has its advantages. Children of this generation benefited from small class sizes, they were instructed by excellent teachers who would have been professors if not for the Great Depression, university tuition was lower (presumably to attract more students), and employers were always looking to hire. Because his generation was small, Flom’s opportunities were more numerous and the competition for jobs less fierce.
The Silent Generation vs. the Baby Boomers
Flom was part of the “Silent Generation,” born between 1928 and 1945, spanning the Great Depression and the beginning of World War II. In stark contrast to the small Silent Generation, its successor, the Baby Boomer Generation (1946-1964), was defined by its large size. Accordingly, while the Silent Generation benefited from smaller class sizes and plenty of job opportunities (which likely helped Flom’s admission to Harvard Law School, despite never graduating college), Boomers faced fiercer competition in college and in the workforce. One sociologist argues that those stressful conditions help explain why Baby Boomers have consistently reported being less happy than older and younger generations.
On the other hand, in contrast to the Silent Generation’s relative invisibility amid national turmoil, the Boomer Generation’s size gave them outsize influence on American life. The population surge led to a building boom in housing and infrastructure, widespread migration from cities to the suburbs, and a rise in consumerism. Additionally, Boomers had a strong impact on national culture, especially with the rise of activism and counterculture during the 1960s and ‘70s.
Reflect on the advantages you’ve gained from your disadvantages.
Describe a difficult challenge you’ve faced in your life.
What is one way you gained an unexpected advantage from that hurdle?
Describe a difficult situation you’re facing now.
What is one advantage or opportunity that could result from the situation?
The cultures of our ancestors (even the aspects we no longer practice or ascribe to) influence our present-day behaviors. In Part 2, Gladwell explores how the legacies of our cultures foster or impede our success by examining three distinct cultures:
Each example shows that it matters where you’re from—not only geographically but also culturally. Then, in Chapter 9, we’ll examine a case study of a school who achieved success because it challenged the cultural norms of western education.
First, Gladwell describes what sociologists call the culture of honor, in which your self-worth (and sometimes your livelihood) is based on your reputation. In this culture, you’re more likely to fight someone who challenges you and, therefore, jeopardizes your reputation. Whether or not you come from a culture of honor may impact how you respond to certain situations, which can affect your life trajectory.
(Shortform note: Gladwell doesn’t make an explicit connection between a culture of honor and success, as he did with the various opportunities in Part 1—rather, he writes that Part 2 is meant to highlight how culture influences individual behavior, and how that might impact success. This suggests that whether a particular culture helps or hinders a person’s success depends on the context of their pursuits.)
Let’s explore how this culture of honor arises.
Gladwell cites a theory that the culture of honor originated in herding cultures—and that the culture and its norms persist among herders’ descendants today, regardless of whether or not they also herd livestock. This theory draws a distinction between the cultures that developed among herders versus farmers.
Livelihood #1: Herding
Herding fosters a culture of honor because it’s a risky and solitary venture. Animals can be stolen, so herdsmen must demonstrate their aggression and strength to protect themselves and their animals. Gladwell notes that cultures of honor generally develop in rocky or mountainous areas that are unsuitable for farming.
Livelihood #2: Agriculture
In contrast, agriculture fosters a culture of cooperation because it requires cooperation and interdependence. Farmers depend on each other and the community to grow and sell a variety of crops. There is also a degree of security in farming: You don’t have to worry about neighbors stealing your livelihood because nobody can swiftly steal a field of crops.
The Culture of Honor Protects Status
The culture of honor is also prevalent in urban, low-income neighborhoods—but not necessarily because residents descended from herders. Instead, experts say that this culture developed in response to stigmatization based on factors like income, social class, race, and education. Stigma takes a toll on people’s psychological safety, and thus they can develop hyper-vigilant responses (often including violence) to threats to their honor and sense of worth.
Stigma may also be a factor in the rise of a culture of honor among herders, who generally occupied a lower, poorer class within society. Some experts argue that herders’ aggression was intended not only to protect their livelihoods but also to defend their status.
To illustrate how cultural habits are passed down from generation to generation, Gladwell cites evidence that in the American South, murders occur more frequently than in the rest of the country, and they tend to involve two people who know each other and are involved in a personal conflict (presumably involving honor, respect, or reputation). He points out that many southerners are descendants of immigrants from rocky, harsh terrains in Scotland, England, and Ireland, where the culture of honor is fierce.
The Cultural Evolution of “Tight” and “Loose” Societies
Cultural “tightness” and “looseness” provides another example of how a culture’s history impacts its modern norms. In tight cultures (such as Singapore and Japan), residents are generally more cooperative, more law-abiding, and face harsher consequences for crime and misbehavior. These norms emerged because these cultures historically faced higher threats—such as natural disasters, scarce resources, or foreign invasions—that made social cooperation necessary for survival. By contrast, loose cultures (like Belgium and the United States) have more relaxed cultural norms and lighter enforcement because they historically faced fewer threats.
Just as Gladwell highlights the higher crime rates in cultures of honor, researchers link cultural tightness and looseness to countries’ success or failure in limiting Covid cases and deaths, since containment required social cooperation and large-scale adherence to health mandates.
Gladwell describes an experiment that psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett conducted in the 1990s to examine the legacy of the culture of honor. The experiment looked at how college-aged men from the North and the South responded to being called an “asshole.”
First, Gladwell writes, Cohen and Nisbett created situations in which the men would be called an “asshole” without realizing that it was part of the experiment. Afterward, researchers examined subjects’ faces to rate levels of anger and shook their hands to assess the firmness of their grip. They also took saliva samples before and after the insult to measure levels of cortisol and testosterone (markers of stress and aggression).
Participants from the North and South had noticeably different reactions:
Next, Gladwell explains that Cohen and Nisbett asked the participants to read a story about a man hitting on another man’s fiancé. The story had no ending, so the researchers asked the subjects to finish the story. Few of the northerners responded that the second man would act violently, but the southerners generally replied that the second man would attack the first man in retaliation.
Finally, the subjects had to pass a 250-pound, 6’3” former football player in a narrow hallway, not realizing that this was part of the experiment. Cohen and Nisbett wanted to know how close the participants would get to the man before they got out of the way. The northerners stepped aside about six feet before passing the other man (this was also true of the control group, who had not been insulted). By contrast, the southerners who had been insulted walked up to within two feet of the man, while those in the control group stepped aside about nine feet before passing.
Do Black Southerners Adhere to the Culture of Honor?
Gladwell’s description of this study leaves out an important detail: All the students who participated were white. This helps support Cohen and Nisbett’s argument that the culture of honor is a more reliable explanation for the high rates of southern violence than other theories that point to the region’s poverty, hot climate, and history of slavery.
If poverty and heat were to blame, then all southerners would adhere to the same violent norms. However, in a separate study, Cohen and Nisbett found that Black southerners and Black northerners didn’t show the same differences in behavior that was evident between white southerners and white northerners. (The third alternative explanation—the legacy of slavery—could also potentially account for racial differences.) The discrepancy between white and Black southerners may be because Black slaves didn’t have their own livestock to herd, so they wouldn’t have had the same incentives to respond to threats with violence and displays of strength.
Still, although Black southerners may not adhere to the culture of honor, they can’t avoid it, either—in many ways, it’s the law of the land. The cultural norms have been codified into southern laws and policies, including looser gun restrictions and stand-your-ground laws. Historically, southern courts have even been less likely to convict someone of murder if the victim had insulted the killer and then refused to take back the insult.
Next, Gladwell examines the culture of deference, or cultures with a higher Power Distance Index (PDI), which measures how hierarchical a country is and how its citizens value authority.
In high PDI countries, employees are often afraid to express disagreement with managers, power is not equally distributed, and people in power hold special privileges. By contrast, in low PDI countries, people downplay their power, there are fewer overt symbols of power, and power is more equally distributed in society and within organizations.
(Shortform note: The Power Distance Index scores countries on a scale of 1 to 120, and it measures not only the distribution of power but also of wealth—high PDI countries have larger gaps between wealthy and poor citizens. The highest PDI countries include Malaysia (104), Guatemala (95), and Panama (95). The lowest PDI countries include Austria (11), Israel (13), and Denmark (18). For reference, the US scores 40, between the Netherlands (38) and Jamaica (45).)
Gladwell expands on this by explaining that people in high PDI cultures use mitigated speech, or indirect statements. Mitigated speech sounds more respectful and deferential, which is important for maintaining and validating a hierarchical culture. For example, “Let’s turn right” is mitigated speech because it’s phrased as a suggestion; in contrast, “Turn right” is not mitigated speech because it’s a command. A subordinate from a high PDI country wouldn’t feel comfortable commanding his superior to do something, so he would mitigate his speech.
(Shortform note: Gladwell notes that communication in high PDI cultures is receiver-oriented, meaning that it’s the listener’s responsibility to interpret a message. In The Culture Map, Erin Meyer describes this as a feature of high-context cultures, where people communicate not just through words, but also through shared cultural understanding, etiquette, and norms. By contrast, in low-context (or transmitter-oriented) cultures, it’s the speaker’s responsibility to explicitly state all relevant information.)
Gladwell points out that a high PDI can be problematic—even dangerous—when mitigated speech downplays the importance and urgency of a message in serious situations.
(Shortform note: As in the last chapter, Gladwell doesn’t make a blanket statement about whether a person from a deferential culture is more or less likely to be successful, but in the following case study, he highlights a situation in which it hindered success. Furthermore, there is evidence that successful business people tend to challenge authority and swim against the current of popular opinion. While researchers attribute this to individual attributes, it stands to reason that cultural norms in a high PDI country could inhibit a person from challenging the status quo.)
To illustrate how a culture of deference can hinder success in certain contexts, Gladwell examines how mitigated speech contributed to Korean Air’s high rates of plane crashes—until the airline acknowledged and changed those cultural norms.
From 1988 to 1998, Korean Air’s rate of plane crashes far exceeded that of many other airlines; it was an industry outlier. Gladwell points to two factors that help explain this:
Gladwell argues that if the flight crew notices problems but mitigates the message rather than communicating directly, the pilot may not understand the urgency of the situation. For example, on one Korean Air flight, the landing system (called a glide scope) wasn’t working so the captain wanted to make a visual approach, despite bad weather and poor visibility. The first officer and flight engineer worried that a visual approach was dangerous, but they used mitigated speech to voice their disagreement. Despite a few attempts, the pilot didn’t get the hint: The plane crashed on a hill about three miles short of the runway, killing 228 of the 254 people aboard.
(Shortform note: The National Transportation Safety Board’s accident report for this flight lists other factors that contributed to the crash, including the flight’s nighttime landing and the captain’s fatigue. Some of reasons cited may also support Gladwell’s thesis about the roles of hierarchy and mitigated speech: For example, the captain inadequately briefed the flight crew on his intended landing approach, perhaps because he felt he didn’t need to thoroughly explain himself to subordinates, and the captain appeared to believe that the glideslope was working, while the first officer and flight engineer failed to correct him.)
Gladwell writes that Korean Air turned around its high crash rate by acknowledging the influence of the culture of deference and making English the language of their flight communications. English removed the obstacle of mitigated speech, allowing copilots to speak to their superiors in a direct way without feeling disrespectful. In essence, this gave flight crew members permission to adopt a new culture—one that flattened a previously strict hierarchy—if only for the time they were in the air. Along with a number of other flight safety improvements, this policy change dramatically reduced flight crashes.
(Shortform note: Even before making the cultural shift in flight communications, Korean Air took another dramatic step and brought in foreigners to advise on flight safety and hold senior staff positions—a decision that ran counter to a cultural tendency toward self-reliance.)
With this example, Gladwell argues that your culture is not your destiny, and that being aware of your cultural limitations is the first step to overcoming them.
(Shortform note: Whereas Korean Air had to acknowledge the limitations of its internal culture of deference, international companies have to understand the differences between their internal culture and the cultures of the countries into which they expand. In No Rules Rules, Reed Hastings describes how Netflix accommodated employees from high PDI cultures by adapting its approach to candid feedback, a pillar of the company’s culture. Hastings created opportunities for formal feedback, which was more comfortable than delivering impromptu feedback, and employees from low PDI cultures learned to somewhat mitigate their speech when giving feedback to colleagues from high PDI cultures.)
The third culture Gladwell explores is the culture of diligence and hard work that’s prominent in many Asian countries. Whereas the culture of honor stems from herding ancestors, he asserts that a culture of diligence is a legacy of rice farming.
Gladwell explains that rice farming requires higher levels of precision, skill, and diligence than Western farming.
Furthermore, landlords often incentivized farmers by allowing them to keep or sell whatever they produced above what was required as rent. As a result, like the garment workers we discussed earlier, rice farmers saw the clear relationship between increased effort and increased wealth. This also cultivated their diligence.
Rice Farming Also Fosters Cooperation
Although Gladwell frames the cultural difference as a distinction between Eastern and Western farming, research reveals that a cultural divide also exists between southern China, where rice farming dominates, and northern China, where wheat is the primary crop. Rather than focusing on diligence, this study found that rice farming also fosters a culture of cooperation and interdependence that persists among their non-farming descendants. The study’s author points out that rice farming demands extensive irrigation systems and requires rice farmers to work together to build and maintain canals and other irrigation infrastructure.
Earlier in the book, Gladwell describes this correlation among farmers more generally, contrasting agriculture’s culture of cooperation with herding’s culture of honor. It’s reasonable to extend that logic and assume that rice farming, which demands even greater levels of interdependence, would create a higher level of cultural cooperation.
Gladwell posits that this culture of diligence partially explains why Asian students’ high performance in math. Asian students’ aptitude for math is not merely a stereotype: Students from Hong Kong, Japan, Singapore, South Korea, and Taiwan scored highest in math on an international comparison test called TIMSS (Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study).
(Shortform note: Since the book’s publication, these countries have held their spots with the top math scores on TIMSS. In 2019, Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Taiwan, and Japan scored highest among fourth- and eighth-graders.)
Gladwell asserts that Asian students excel at math because math requires the diligence to spend a lot of time figuring out how to solve a problem. As further evidence of the correlation, he explains that students who take the TIMSS test must also complete a long, tedious questionnaire, in which many students leave questions blank—and you can predict which countries will score highest on the math portion of the test by looking at their average completion of the questionnaire. The students who demonstrate the most diligence on the questionnaire are the same one who perform best in math.
Other Explanations for Asian Students’ Math Ability
Experts offer several other possible explanations for Asian students’ high performance in math.
Confucian values that are prominent in Asian cultures emphasize effort and practice, which seems to overlap with Gladwell’s culture of diligence.
Teaching methods in many Asian classrooms help students develop number sense, a form of reasoning that helps students work through math problems more flexibly than by memorization alone.
In some parts of Asia, students compete to recite math facts or perform mental calculations faster than their peers. The competition makes math feel more like a sport and motivates students to improve.
In Japan, children learn the multiplication table by memorizing a song called the kuku, and music makes it easier to remember information (just as singing the ABCs helps children remember the alphabet).
Chinese teachers use the traditional “chalk-and-talk” approach, in which they instruct while students listen. While schools in many English-speaking countries have moved toward more collaborative and student-led learning, research shows that students benefit more from teachers’ explicit instruction and problem intervention in chalk-and-talk classrooms.
Unrelated to diligence, Gladwell offers another cultural reason that Asians excel at math: language. For instance, Chinese is more efficient than English for learning math, primarily due to two factors:
1. Chinese numbers take less time to pronounce. Since the human brain stores digits in two-second loops, Chinese speakers can hold more numbers in their mind than English speakers, whose numbers take longer to pronounce. This makes mental math much easier for Chinese speakers than English speakers.
(Shortform note: Contrary to Gladwell’s argument that Chinese speakers can cram more numbers in the same span of time, research reveals that speakers of languages that convey more information per syllable—like Chinese—speak more slowly than in languages that require more syllables to communicate the same information. The result is that speakers in both types of languages take the same amount to deliver the same information. Researchers suggest that this uniform “information rate” (rather than speech rate) must be ideal for listeners to process information.)
2. Chinese number systems are more regular and intuitive than the English system.
(Shortform note: In addition to Chinese, research shows that Japanese and Turkish also make it easier for children to understand numbers’ values. Like Chinese, the Japanese and Turkish words for 19 translate to “ten-nine.” For 29, the Japanese and Chinese words translate to “two-ten-nine,” while the Turkish word is more like the English structure: “twenty-nine.”)
Because of these differences, Gladwell asserts that Asian children learn to count much faster than English-speaking children, and they learn to add and subtract more easily. Instead of memorizing seemingly arbitrary bits of information, the functions operate as part of a logical system. These seemingly small advantages become a cumulative advantage over time.
(Shortform note: Cumulative advantage is especially significant in math because concepts build upon each other. For example, research shows that when first-graders struggle to understand place value (the concept that the position of a digit in a number indicates its value, like the 2 in 29 standing for 20), they have a harder time adding two-digit numbers in third grade.)
Gladwell has argued throughout the book that true outliers are given opportunities and are smart enough to seize them. Instead of marveling at outliers and attributing their success solely to talent and drive, he says that we, as a society, should explore how to build systems that create more opportunities for more individuals.
In this chapter, Gladwell examines a school system that has taken this approach by giving students the opportunity of time. The Knowledge is Power Program (KIPP) Academy began in the South Bronx as an experimental, public middle school intended to create opportunities for success for low-income, underserved communities.
(Shortform note: In 1995, KIPP opened two pilot middle schools—one in the Bronx, and one in Houston. They developed the model into charter schools and eventually opened KIPP schools nationwide for PreK-12. As of the 2020-21 school year, the school network had more than 112,000 primarily Black and Hispanic students enrolled at 255 schools.)
Let’s take a closer look at how KIPP helped students succeed by challenging the cultural norms of the American school system.
Gladwell explains that traditional American school schedules reflect 19th-century educators’ concerns that “over-study” would lead to insanity. As a result, they shortened the school day, eliminated Saturday classes, and developed the idea of a summer vacation. This placed a value on alternating work and rest, rather than practicing diligence.
By contrast, KIPP students attend school for longer periods of time both over the course of a day and over the course of the school year. Students attend school from 7:45 a.m. to 5 p.m., and many students participate in extracurricular activities until 7 p.m. This works out to a school day that contains 50-60% more learning time than a day at a traditional public school. Additionally, the KIPP school year extends into the traditional summer vacation.
Gladwell writes that, by extending students’ time in school, KIPP’s approach compensates for some of the disadvantages low-income students face. He cites a Johns Hopkins study demonstrating that, although poorer students “outlearn” wealthier students during the school year, their math and reading scores drop over the summer, while scores among wealthy students increase. This trend compounds over time, reinforcing Gladwell’s principle of cumulative advantage (and disadvantage).
By continuing school into the summer break, KIPP enables students from poorer families to continue to learn rather than fall behind their wealthier peers. Furthermore, Gladwell posits that this challenges the cultural legacy that tells us that alternating work and rest is more important for success than diligence.
Additionally, Gladwell asserts that KIPP’s approach creates a more relaxed atmosphere in which students can question and struggle their way through problems at their own pace. Opportunities like this make school work meaningful.
How Much Time vs. How You Spend It
A five-year study of 43 KIPP middle schools across the country found that, during three years enrolled at KIPP, the extra instruction time added up: They had an additional eight months’ worth of reading, 11 months’ worth of math and social studies, and 14 months’ worth of science compared to peers in other schools.
However, the study’s authors also point out there is variation among KIPP schools. For example, longer days don’t improve student performance unless those days dedicate more time to core subjects like math, science, and language arts. This appears to support Gladwell’s argument that KIPP’s culture of diligence is more effective than a cultural legacy that emphasizes alternating work and rest.
On the other hand, one of the arguments in favor of longer school days in general—not at KIPP, specifically—is that it allows for more time on non-core subjects, such as arts and physical education. Proponents say that these types of classes, which are often considered nonessential, teach students social, emotional, and critical-thinking skills that are important for success outside of school.
Gladwell credits KIPP’s unconventional schedule with students’ outlier-level success: While only 16% of middle school students in the South Bronx are performing at or above their grade level, seventh-grade KIPP students are already learning high school algebra. By eighth grade, 84% of KIPP students are performing at or above their grade level.
(Shortform note: On a nationwide scale, KIPP reported that 48% to 76% of third- through eighth-grade KIPP classes outperformed local districts in reading and math during the 2018-19 school year.)
Reflect on the lessons, beliefs, and assumptions passed down to you.
Think of lessons your parents explicitly taught you growing up, or values or beliefs you learned from your parents’ or other relatives’ example. What are they?
How have these lessons or beliefs contributed to your success?
How might they have hindered your success?
Knowing this, how can you overcome or capitalize on your cultural legacy?
Gladwell’s examination of the formula for success challenges common beliefs.
In what ways has your idea of success changed after reading this book?
To what factors do you attribute your own success?
What were some of the most surprising things you learned from the book?