The first time I became aware of the word "outlier" was on the website fivethirtyeight.com. This was during the height of the US Presidential elections. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines an "outlier" as "a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others in the sample." Now, I studied statistics as part of my graduate program in public policy and public administration and I can't recall hearing the term. Okay then, that's to my discredit.
Now Malcolm Gladwell, author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point" and a regular contributor to The New Yorker has just released "Outliers: The Story of Success." What, Gladwell asks, makes high-achievers different? He suggests that luminaries such as Mozart, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs and the Beatles owe their successes to their culture, family and their generation. Gladwell also discusses why Asians are good at math.
Gladwell posited the theory of the ten-year rule: that the people who have succeeded have spent a minimum of ten years learning/practicing their metier. It could explain performances of Michael Johnson and Usain Bolt. His explanation about the Asians' superiority in math made sense. It is a cultural phenomenon, he suggested. He related this to the long hours spent by many Asians in rice fields: the patience and industry carried over to the training of the young. This is not such a novel idea since Asian schools offering extra lessons in math can be easily found in any major North American city. On the flip-side, there is a paucity of such schools in black communities, for example. Another idea is that 1955 was a good year to be born: Gates, Jobs and others were born that year. Gladwell was on Charlie Rose last week and spent time expounding on these ideas.
As a Jamaican, I became smitten by Gladwell after it turned out his mother is Jamaican and that he is a cousin of former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose parents were also Jamaicans.
In a happy coincidence - well, perhaps not - in the second part of the hour-long show, Rose's second guest was Geoff Colvin, Senior Editor at Large at Fortune magazine and author of "Talent is Overrated: What Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else". In this new book, Colvin expands on an article he wrote for Fortune, "What it Takes to be Great." Using Tiger Woods, Warren Buffett, Winston Churchill and Jack Welsh as examples, Colvin suggests that greatness does not come from DNA but from practice and perseverance sharpened over decades.
Both the Gladwell and Colvin books make perfect bookends.
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