The word ‘genius’ is something of a paradox these days – in entertainment, it’s thrown around so liberally that it almost loses its value altogether, but not so in business. Here the word maintains an air of mystery that puts anyone with the ill-defined but generally agreed upon stature of a genius on a pedestal.
But who are these geniuses and where do they come from? In ‘Outliers – The Story of Success’ – Malcolm Gladwell explores the many factors that influence the most glittering achievements. He throws ‘talent’ into the mix with a list of other key ingredients to show that genius is part of a recipe, not a dish in itself.
What makes it great, in a nutshell?
There’s nothing wrong with revering success but Gladwell asks us to take a critical rather than a reverential approach. While he doesn’t refute the idea of talent, he asks us to look more closely at the circumstances, culture and upbringing of a person, where they were born and even when.
Working through the book
The first section, ‘Opportunity’, uses examples from sport, business, medicine and even Gladwell’s own experience as a writer to argue that success is a complex machine of many parts. He suggests that if we dig deeper, we’ll almost always find that self-made people are:
“The beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.”
The eponymous ‘outliers’ benefit from extraneous influences as much as an innate and special way of seeing the world. Bill Joy and Bill Gates, both born in the 1950s and both computing pioneers, were also both born into exactly the right period in history to exploit their abilities. There are general socio-economic examples too – people born around the turn of the twentieth century faced events that took them away from other callings or wiped them out altogether – the great flu epidemic, the Great War and the Great Depression.
Then there’s upbringing – citing a study on students by sociologist Annette Lareau Gladwell raises the possibility that actively involved parents may be the key to success. That might be down to encouragement or avoiding a sense of entitlement, leading to more resilience in the face of rejection.
But, it’s not all about luck. If Outliers sounds like a manifesto for scything away tall poppies, it isn’t. Along with circumstance and fortune, Gladwell looks at the cold reality of the ‘10,000 hours rule’ of gaining true mastery over any discipline. He reminds us that ‘geniuses’ like Mozart and The Beatles were talented – but they also put their shifts in.
In the second part, ‘Legacy’, Gladwell goes a step further, looking into how the experiences, opportunities and circumstances of successful people, as well as the examples they set, can be paid forward. In doing so, he argues that it’s possible to gift those who follow with a fortuitous start in life. He notes that values are unconsciously handed down across the generations and given enough time, across cultures – our individualism, toleration of hierarchy, self-sufficiency and resilience can all be developed in a particular direction.
It’s a compelling idea. While Gladwell’s book may lead readers to question how they arrived where they are (and whether they’re outliers in some way themselves), it also raises the question of what we’ll pass along to future generations. That should resonate with anyone who wants to build a legacy that establishes not only financial security, but also instils a foundation of good practice towards financial decisions, encourages discipline and patience around investment and demonstrates the ability to set goals and pursue them to completion.
Not so different…
In Outliers Gladwell’s intention isn’t to devalue high achievers and their examples of extreme success, but rather to cast them in a new light. What the book does is empower the reader in understanding that those people held up as examples of success, geniuses even, often got there through a complex collection of factors.
Talent, hard work, timing and circumstances can come together to make a career turn supernova in a way that, with subtle adjustments to just one of those factors may not have happened, or might not be repeatable. It doesn’t mean that reading the book will suddenly make stratospheric success available to everyone, but it reminds us that these people aren’t invincible, they’re not unknowable or even particularly special – it’s not ‘us’ and ‘them’ and we’re really not so different.