Maybe Geniuses Just Got Lucky
Life is unfair, as even the Bible acknowledges.
We can't all hit a baseball like DiMaggio
or sing like the Beatles.
But how much do we understand about those who can?
Not enough, says Malcolm Gladwell,
in his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success.
We attribute the Beatles' fabulous success
to their amazing musical talents,
whereas Gladwell has a different explanation-
as a determinant of success, talent is overrated,
compared with, among other things, luck.
Outliers opens with a typically Gladwellian puzzle:
why are so many professional hockey players
born early in the year?
It turns out that Canadian youth leagues group players by age,
based on a calendar year,
so a player born in January will be the oldest on his team,
enjoying a big difference in size and maturity.
The early birds get more playing time and coaching,
advantages that become self-reinforcing,
spelling the difference
between a National Hockey League career
and a job as a high-school coach.
Life is unfair.
Similarly, Gladwell calculates
that the best year for a software genius to be born was 1955-
just old enough for the start of the personal-computer revolution
in the mid-1970s.
That is the year when Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born.
Obviously, not everyone born that year became a billionaire;
Gates and Jobs had distinctive talents,
but they also had unique opportunities growing up.
Almost invariably, Gladwell says,
geniuses are made, not born,
and it was their families, schools and societies that made them.
As evidence Gladwell brings to bear his own history,
as the son of a Jamaican woman of limited means
who won a scholarship to study at the University of London.
Her marriage to an Englishman there
began the family's ascent into the educated elite.
He maintains that his mother was the beneficiary
of her own mother's initiative and a favorable environment.
And so are we all.
The reader should feel free to cite counterexamples-
Shakespeare, the son of a provincial trader in hides and grain?
Einstein, dreaming away in an obscure patent office?-
you won't faze Gladwell.
He always builds an argument out of riveting anecdotes
and eye-opening statistics,
then blithely moves on to his next point,
leaving the reader with a faint hint of buyer's remorse
about the almost too-perfect package of ideas.
No other writer today can pull this sort of thing off so well.
If I hadn't just read Gladwell's book,
I'd be jealous of his talent, instead of his luck.