"Outliers" 2: Some Advice

In my last post, I proposed the idea that Malcolm Gladwell was really the new Dr. Spock, at least in the sense that his book, Outliers, gave a wealth of much-sought-after advice on how to raise children, right from the moment of conception. With that in mind, this is the first of two posts summarzing a few rules I have, ah, distilled from his book:

1. Have procreative sex from April 1st to June 1st, plus or minus.

Children born early in the year have an advantage in kindergarten that teachers and coaches nurture into a huge advantage by the time a child is in high school. Gladwell says, “The small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years.”

The sociologist Robert Merton famously called this phenomenon the “Matthew Effect” after the New Testament 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.” It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice.

Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.” The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers. And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still—and on and on until the hockey player is a genuine outlier. But he didn’t start out an outlier. He started out just a little bit better.

Take a look at that roster for the Czech Republic soccer team. There are no players born in July, October, November, or December, and only one each in August and September. Those born in the last half of the year have all been discouraged, or overlooked, or pushed out of the sport. The talent of essentially half of the Czech athletic population has been squandered. [Gladwell makes a similar provocative case for Canadian hockey players.]

The sad part is, of course, that we prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play—and by “we” I mean society—in determining who makes it and who doesn’t.

2. Remind your children (and yourself) that achievement is talent plus preparation, with the greatest emphasis on preparation. Do your homework. Practice your instrument. (Eat your carrots.) Having talent is necessary but insufficient.

Exhibit A in the talent argument is a study done in the early 1990s by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and two colleagues at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. With the help of the Academy’s professors, they divided the school’s violinists into three groups. In the first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world-class soloists. In the second were those judged to be merely “good.” In the third were students who were unlikely to ever play professionally and who intended to be music teachers in the public school system. All of the violinists were then asked the same question: over the course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practiced?

They all started around five years old, and all practiced two to three hours a week for the first few years. But around eight years old, real differences began to emerge. The best students simply practiced more—16 hours a week by age 14, and over 30 hours a week in their 20s. And this was purposeful, single-minded practice.

By the age of 20, elite performers had 10,000 hours of practice, good students 8,000 hours, and average students 4,000 hours. The same was true in a study of pianists.

And here’s the clincher: The researchers who did the study could not find ANY “naturals”—folks who floated to the top dabbling at their instrument. Conversely, they couldn’t find anyone who worked harder than the rest who didn’t make it to the top ranks. In other words, if you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the rest is just hard work—much hard work.

The bottom-line, and you’ve seen this before (see What It Takes to be Great), is that 10,000 hours of practice is required to be world-class at anything—even Mozart, the Beatles and Tiger Woods put in the time.

3. Being born at the right time of year helps a lot. Being born in the right decade (and the right century) helps too.

Of the seventy-five richest people of all time, an astonishing fourteen are Americans born within nine years of one another in the mid-nineteenth century. Think about that for a moment. Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country.

What’s going on here? The answer becomes obvious if you think about it. In the 1860s and 1870s, the American economy went through perhaps the greatest transformation in its history. This was when the railroads were being built and when Wall Street emerged. It was when industrial manufacturing started in earnest. It was when all the rules by which the traditional economy had functioned were broken and remade. What this list says is that it really matters how old you were when that transformation happened. If you were born in the late 1840s you missed it. You were too young to take advantage of that moment. If you were born in the 1820s you were too old: your mind-set was shaped by the pre–Civil War paradigm. But there was a particular, narrow nine-year window that was just perfect for seeing the potential that the future held. All of the fourteen men and women on the list above had vision and talent. But they also were given an extraordinary opportunity, in the same way that hockey and soccer players born in January, February, and March are given an extraordinary opportunity.

Now let’s do the same kind of analysis for technology folk. Bill Gates: October 28, 1955 That’s the perfect birth date! Gates is the hockey player born on January 1. Gates’s best friend atLakeside was Paul Allen. He also hung out in the computer room with Gates and shared those long evenings at ISI and C-Cubed. Allen went on to found Microsoft with Bill Gates. When was Paul Allen born? Paul Allen: January 21, 1953 The third-richest man at Microsoft is the one who has been running the company on a day-to-day basis since 2000, one of the most respected executives in the software world, Steve Ballmer. Ballmer’s birth date? Steve Ballmer: March 24, 1956. Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955 Eric Schmidt: April 27, 1955.

You get the idea. There are very clearly patterns here, and what’s striking is how little we seem to want to acknowledge them. We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.

Funny enough, it works the other way as well. Jazz musicians born from 1940 to 1955 are considered a lost generation; they came of age in a world where jazz was splitering and rock consumed everything in its path.

Will those kids born in 1990, for example, be members of the the age of the “Giants of Green,” or the “Wizards of Genomics,” or will they walk into a meltdown?

There’s not much we can do at this point, I suppose, except maybe to buy a CD from a jazz musician born in 1950.

More advice from the new Dr. Spock in my next post.

Posted by Entrepreneur Generations

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