Outliers

Jose and I got back from Corpus Christi about 10:30 last night after a nice two days with his family. We ate a lot, slept a lot, watched a bunch of TV, and checked out a couple sales. Oh, and I played a ton of Wii with his youngest cousin Megan, who is surprisingly coordinated for a 6-year-old. La Paletera continued to spite me by closing early, but we caught them open at 3:00 on Sunday afternoon. Ha! Fruity freezes for all!
We spent the entire drive there and back listening to Malcolm Gladwell’s new book, Outliers. It discusses successful people and takes a deeper look into what makes them successful. Gladwell argues against the traditional American belief that “I’m successful because of me and me alone, because I worked harder than everyone else” and instead makes the point that success can also be dependent on things that are totally out of your control — such as when you were born, what your family is like, and what kind of culture you grew up in.
Take his first example, for instance: in studying professional, elite hockey players, you will find that a disproportionately large number of them are born in January, February, and March, while a disproportionately small number are born in October, November, and December. Weird, right? But hockey is a sport where talent is identified very early, when an age difference of even a few months makes a big difference. The age cutoff for kids’ leagues in Canada is January 1. So the kids born earlier in the year are bigger, more coordinated, and more mature than the ones born at the end of the year. Therefore the slightly older kids get selected for better leagues. They are given better coaches, and more practice time. After a while, they really are better than the others — because they were given the opportunity to become so. The same thing happens in baseball, where talent is also sought out in young kids. The cutoff is in the summer, so there are many more baseball players born in July, August and September than in April, May and June. The same thing even happens in education, where older kids are often seen as smarter simply because they are a bit more mature — I know this is something my mom has seen with her kindergardeners. The 5-year-olds tend to be better than the 4-year-olds.
I could go on and on about all the other interesting stories in the book, but you might as well just read it. My only critique is that I think Gladwell goes too far in the direction of saying “some people are successful only because they get lucky and have certain opportunities.” Just because you’re born in January doesn’t mean you’ll be a great hockey player — that much is obvious. But maybe it does mean that if you want to play hockey, and if you’re committed to putting in the time and effort necessary, you have a better chance of succeeding than your December birthday friends.
Something to think about…