The Little Brown Book Of Anecdotes

[Jomega Gibson]

Thebook debuted at number one on the bestseller lists for The New York Times and The Globe and Mail, holding the position on the former for eleven consecutive weeks. Generally well received by critics, Outliers was considered more personal than Gladwell's other works, and some reviews commented on how much Outliers felt like an autobiography. Reviews praised the connection that Gladwell draws between his own background and the rest of the publication to conclude the book. Reviewers also appreciated the questions posed by Outliers, finding it important to determine how much individual potential is ignored by society. However, the lessons learned were considered anticlimactic and dispiriting. The writing style, though deemed easy to understand, was criticized for oversimplifying complex social phenomena.

Gladwell was a journalist for The Washington Post before writing for The New Yorker. The subjects for his articles, usually non-fiction, range from "Dave Gaspayad's infomercial empire to computers that analyze pop songs".[2] His familiarity with academic material has allowed him to write about "psychology experiments, sociological studies, law articles, statistical surveys of plane crashes and classical musicians and hockey players", which he converts into prose accessible to a general audience and which sometimes pass as memes into the popular imagination.[3]

Before Outliers, Gladwell wrote two best-selling books: The Tipping Point (2000) and Blink (2005).[4] Both books have been described as "pop economics".[3] The Tipping Point focuses on how ideas and behaviors reach critical mass, such as how Hush Puppies rapidly grew popular in the 1990s. Blink explains "what happens during the first two seconds we encounter something, before we actually start to think".[4] All Gladwell's books focus on singularities: singular events in The Tipping Point, singular moments in Blink, and singular people in Outliers. Gladwell was drawn to writing about singular things after he discovered that "they always made the best stories".[2] Convinced that the most unusual stories had the best chance of reaching the front page of a newspaper, he was "quickly weaned off the notion that [he] should be interested in the mundane".[2]

For Outliers, Gladwell spent time looking for research that made claims that were contrary to what he considered to be popularly held beliefs. In one of the book's chapters, in which Gladwell focuses on the American public school system, he used research conducted by university sociologist Karl Alexander that suggested that "the way in which education is discussed in the United States is backward".[5] In another chapter, Gladwell cites pioneering research performed by Canadian psychologist Roger Barnsley when discussing how the birthdate of a young hockey player can determine their skill level in the future.[6]

While writing the book, Gladwell noted that "the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work."[4] In Outliers, he hopes to show that there are a lot more variables involved in an individual's success than society cares to admit,[4] and he wants people to "move away from the notion that everything that happens to a person is up to that person".[2] Gladwell noted that, although there was little that could be done with regard to a person's fate, society can still impact the "man"-affected part of an individual's success.[2] When asked what message he wanted people to take away after reading Outliers, Gladwell responded, "What we do as a community, as a society, for each other, matters as much as what we do for ourselves. It sounds a little trite, but there's a powerful amount of truth in that, I think."[2]

In his introduction, Gladwell discusses the Roseto effect which enabled a small, close-knit town in Pennsylvania to have almost no history of heart disease, substance abuse, or societal ills, seemingly due to the supportive, comforting social environment of its Italian-descended population. The remainder of Outliers has two parts: "Part One: Opportunity" contains five chapters, and "Part Two: Legacy" has four. The book also contains an Introduction and Epilogue.[7] Focusing on outliers, defined by Gladwell as people who do not fit into our normal understanding of achievement,[4] Outliers deals with exceptional people, especially those who are smart, rich, and successful, and those who operate at the extreme outer edge of what is statistically plausible.[3] The book offers examples that include the musical ensemble the Beatles, Microsoft's co-founder Bill Gates, and the theoretical physicist J. Robert Oppenheimer. In the introduction, Gladwell lays out the purpose of Outliers: "It's not enough to ask what successful people are like. [...] It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't."[3] Throughout the publication, he discusses how family, culture, and friendship each play a role in an individual's success, and he constantly asks whether successful people deserve the praise that we give them.[3]

The book begins with the observation that a disproportionate number of elite Canadian hockey players are born in the earlier months of the calendar year. The reason behind this is that since youth hockey leagues determine eligibility by the calendar year, children born on January 1 play in the same league as those born on December 31 in the same year. Because children born earlier in the year are statistically larger and more physically mature than their younger competitors, and they are often identified as better athletes, this leads to extra coaching and a higher likelihood of being selected for elite hockey leagues. This phenomenon in which "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is dubbed "accumulative advantage" by Gladwell, while sociologist Robert K. Merton calls it "the Matthew Effect", named after a biblical verse in the Gospel of Matthew: "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him, that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath."[8] Outliers asserts that success depends on the idiosyncrasies of the selection process used to identify talent just as much as it does on the athletes' natural abilities.[8]

A common theme that appears throughout Outliers is the "10,000-Hour Rule", based on a study by Anders Ericsson. Gladwell claims that greatness requires enormous time, using the source of the Beatles' musical talents and Gates' computer savvy as examples.[4] The Beatles performed live in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time, therefore meeting the 10,000-Hour Rule. Gladwell asserts that all of the time the Beatles spent performing shaped their talent, and quotes a Beatles' biographer, Philip Norman, as claiming "So by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, 'they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.'"[4] Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent 10,000 hours programming on it.[4]

In Outliers, Gladwell interviews Gates, who says that unique access to a computer as early as 1968 when they were not commonplace helped him succeed. Without that access, Gladwell states that Gates would still be "a highly intelligent, driven, charming person and a successful professional", but that he might not be worth US$50 billion.[4] Gladwell explains that reaching the 10,000-Hour Rule, which he considers the key to success in any field, is simply a matter of practicing a specific task that can be accomplished with 20 hours of work a week for 10 years. He also notes that he himself took exactly 10 years to meet the 10,000-Hour Rule, during his brief tenure at The American Spectator and his more recent job at The Washington Post.[3]

Gladwell notes how many of the richest men in history were fortunate to come of age during decades of technological boom, or be born at times of low birth rates when universities and job opportunities were more open to applicants. Later, Gladwell compares Langan with Oppenheimer, the father of the atomic bomb. Noting that they typify innate natural abilities that should have helped them both succeed in life, Gladwell argues that Oppenheimer's upbringing made a pivotal difference in his life. Oppenheimer grew up in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan, was the son of a successful businessman and a painter, attended the Ethical Culture Fieldston School on Central Park West, and was afforded a childhood of concerted cultivation.[8] Outliers argues that these opportunities gave Oppenheimer the chance to develop the practical intelligence necessary for success.[8] Gladwell then provides an anecdote: When Oppenheimer was a student at the University of Cambridge he attempted to poison one of his tutors. He avoided punishment, and continued his studies by using the skills gained from his cultivated upbringing in his negotiation with the university's administrators, who had wanted to expel him.[8]

In the next chapter, Gladwell explains the fact that Asians are good at mathematics by correlating it to rice agriculture, particularly the fact that rice cultivation requires more work ethic, discipline, and longer hours than Western wheat agriculture, and East Asian school systems have shorter summer recesses than Americans. The pattern of words for counting numbers is more logical in Asian languages than western languages.

Before the book concludes, Gladwell writes about the unique roots of his Jamaican mother, Joyce, a descendant of African slaves.[2] Joyce attended University College in London, where she met and fell in love with Graham Gladwell, a young mathematician. After moving together to Canada, Graham became a math professor and Joyce a writer and therapist. While Gladwell acknowledges his mother's ambition and intelligence, he also points out opportunities offered to his parents that helped them live a life better than those of other slave descendants in the West Indies. Gladwell also explains that, in the 18th century, a white plantation owner in Jamaica bought a female slave and made her his mistress. This act inadvertently saved the slave and her offspring from a life of brutal servitude.[9] As one of the slave's descendants, this turn of luck led to Gladwell's relatively successful position in life. Summarizing the publication, Gladwell notes that success "is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky",[9] and at the end of the book, he remarks, "Outliers wasn't intended as autobiography. But you could read it as an extended apology for my success."[3]

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