Outliers was a story by Malcolm Gladwell that was intended to change out perspective on success, or to at least let us consider a different way to approach success stories. This book was initially met with much controversy by most of my friends, who did not at all agree with the statement Gladwell made about all colleges being equal to each other. Of course, there are many factors that determine success, just as Gladwell writes, and I believe that not all of them are obvious. What I believe all of my friends have misinterpreted is that Gladwell does not write about how to measure success, but how to find the roots of success. For Asians, success is generally to get into a good college, but life doesn't end there. Maybe success is to be a better athlete, or to break a record, or to write a story. No matter what success is, Gladwell has determined that it can always be traced back to a few key things that, although were very exaggerated in the story, are still things that I have connected to with my own life.
The most important thing that kept me reading throughout this book was the chapter on IQ (69), which was the first section of the book I turned to, by chance. Throughout the book, the author writes a lot to emphasize the lack of importance of IQ after a certain point. "A mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is as likely to win a Nobel Prize as is one whose IQ is 180" (80) was a quote from the book that now makes me consider different perspectives and paths whenever I go about my daily life, in a broader sense. Perhaps IQ doesn't matter as much and perhaps there is always another way. I had never thought about IQ before. This hasn't really changed my life drastically, but it has made me think of finding new ways around the bigger problems that society has created. The divergence test was a new experience that I found to be really interesting (86) because it measures creativity over IQ, which is an aspect I really enjoy. Ever since I was little, I always read fiction and fantasy such as The Phantom Tollbooth by Norton Juster, and Redwall by Brian Jacques. These kinds of books, along with the sporadic nature of life, have greatly influenced my writing. Throughout my middle school years, I found it very difficult to even finish all of my writer’s notebook assignments because I favored quality over quantity and would write entire pages before I realized much later that all of my classmates got full scores for half pages with pictures in the middle. The divergence tests are also a great way to vindicate the fact that I am not wasting my time. In reality, I like the divergence tests because they illustrate a second path, where creativity and IQ may diverge to form different paths to "success", wherever that may be. In the future, there will be many more opportunities for me to keep an eye out for the chance to diverge and think differently.
Another part of the book that I could connect to was the point of practicing 10,000 hours to finally achieve success in an area. I have been told to “practice, practice, practice” and that “practice makes perfect” by various people, including my parents and motivational speakers. While growing rice paddies is not an area I am experienced with, my parents have indeed forced me to work and to put a lot of effort into playing the piano when I was younger. I hated playing the piano when I was younger (even though my NYSSMA scores were 28/28). That’s what Outliers reminded me of with “Even Mozart… couldn’t hit his stride until he had his ten thousand hours in” (42) and that Mozart only wrote his masterpiece at age 21, after ten years of writing music. As I got older, I gradually liked to play musical pieces more and more as I became more adept at sight reading and could play the pieces I liked. It is an interesting idea that people such as Bill Gates could accidentally rack up ten thousand hours of practice and suddenly be in the midst of the dawn of the 1975 personal computer age and in a “position to take advantage of it” (64). I have to become skeptical at the thought that year of birth and age are the most important roots of success, as if life was predetermined, but the amount of time that practicing and working hard has paid off in my life has led me to heed from this book the ten thousand hour rule as a life lesson.
The final thing I connected to in Outliers was the emphasis on race, but not on stereotyping. There wasn’t much of a lesson to be learned, but there was a small discrepancy that caught my attention while reading. It was interesting to learn the backgrounds and legacies of different groups of people, but I began to wonder if it was really background, or if it was simply outside influence. “…Being good at math may also be rooted in a group’s culture” (231), Gladwell writes about abilities and traits as if they were solely because of one’s culture, as in the Korean pilot examples and the Cohen and Nisbett experiments. I was convinced about the validity of Gladwell’s writing until I remembered an older experiment I had seen long ago about stereotypes (http://abcnews.go.com/2020/story?id=2450394&page=1#.TvPCTtQV12A). In the experiment, Blacks were asked to do as good as they could in a game of golf. They were divided into two groups, with one group operating under the assumption that it was a test of athletic ability and another being told that it was a test of intelligence. “When students are told the golf game is a test of intelligence… scores were 18 percent worse”, writes the abc news article that reported on the tests done by Jeff Stone at the University of Arizona. This leaves me to wonder whether it really is a cultural legacy that determines our success, or whether success can simply be determined by the state of our overall mentality.
It may be that Gladwell writes in a very radical way about success, but it has shed a helpful light over new ideas and has motivated me to live in new ways. For now, my friends still hate his message, or at least how they interpret his message. I still think his writing is interesting, and his points are mostly well supported and correct. I completely agree with practicing and working hard, as well as receiving a good education outside of school, nonstop. Even though Outliers has just as many radical ideas as the ridiculous stories of success of the world’s billionaires, the stories that Gladwell as compiled have encouraged myself to think more about where the future will be, where paths will diverge, and most importantly, what opportunities I can get a head start on for the future.
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