Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell: Summary and Notes

"Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good."

Chapter ThreeThe Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1

Christopher Langan appeared on the quiz show 1 vs. 100 in 2008, introduced as a man with an IQ of 195 against Einstein's 150. He read Principia Mathematica at 16, taught himself languages and physics, and walked away with $250,000. Gladwell sets him beside Lewis Terman, the Stanford psychologist behind the Stanford-Binet IQ test, who in 1921 began a lifelong study of gifted children. Terman sorted through some 250,000 students and selected 1,470 whose IQs averaged over 140 and ranged as high as 200. His subjects became known as the Termites, and he believed they would become the nation's elite.

Gladwell argues that IQ works like height in basketball: it matters up to a threshold and then stops paying off. An IQ of around 120 is the point after which additional points do not seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage. He cites the British psychologist Liam Hudson, who argued that a scientist with an IQ of 130 is as likely to win a Nobel Prize as one with 180. The undergraduate schools of the last 25 Americans to win the Nobel Prize in Medicine are a list of good schools, rarely the most elite, because past a point what counts is being good enough. The University of Michigan's affirmative action students, admitted with lower scores, did just as well as their classmates after graduation by the measures Gladwell reports.

Divergence tests make the same point. Asked to list uses for a brick or a blanket, some students with lower IQs produced long, imaginative lists, while a prodigy Hudson calls Florence gave short, literal ones. Terman's Termites turned out to be a bright, ordinary group. The sociologist Pitirim Sorokin showed that a random group of children from similar family backgrounds would have done about as well. Two children Terman tested and rejected, William Shockley and Luis Alvarez, went on to win Nobel Prizes.

"Terman didn't understand what a real outlier was, and that's a mistake we continue to make to this day."

Chapter FourThe Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2

Langan grew up poor in Bozeman, Montana, with a violent, alcoholic stepfather. He won a full scholarship to Reed College and lost it when his mother failed to fill out a financial aid form. At Montana State, the transmission fell out of his car, and when he asked to move his morning classes to the afternoon, his adviser refused. He dropped out and spent years working construction, as a firefighter and as a bouncer, writing his theory of the universe without the academic credentials to publish it.

Robert Oppenheimer, a mind of similar power, tried to poison his tutor at Cambridge and was put on probation after negotiations by his parents. Twenty years later he talked his way into leading the Manhattan Project despite little administrative experience, by charming General Leslie Groves. Gladwell attributes the difference to what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls practical intelligence: knowing what to say to whom, when to say it and how to say it for maximum effect. It is separate from the analytical ability IQ measures, and it has to be learned.

The sociologist Annette Lareau studied 12 families closely and found two parenting styles. Wealthier parents practice concerted cultivation: they schedule activities, reason with their children and teach them to question adults and speak up for themselves. Poorer parents allow natural growth, which gives children independence but leaves them deferential before authority. In a doctor's visit, nine-year-old Alex Williams corrects the doctor and asks his own questions; Gladwell calls it entitlement, learned at home. Oppenheimer had it; Langan never got it. When Terman sorted 730 of his adult men into groups, the top 150, the A's, had earned 98 graduate degrees between them, while all 150 of the C's together had earned eight. One thing separated the groups.

"In the end, only one thing mattered, family background."

Chapter FiveThe Three Lessons of Joe Flom

Joe Flom, the last living named partner of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom, grew up poor in Depression-era Brooklyn, went to Harvard Law School and, after failing to land a job with the big corporate firms, joined a new firm that did not yet have a client. By the time Gladwell writes, Skadden has nearly 2,000 attorneys in 23 offices and earns well over $1 billion a year. Gladwell retells the story as three lessons.

Lesson one: the importance of being Jewish. In the 1940s and 1950s the old-line Wall Street firms would not hire Jewish lawyers. The firms that did take them did the work the establishment disdained: litigation and proxy fights, the core of hostile takeovers. When the rules loosened in the 1970s and takeovers exploded, the outsiders already had their 10,000 hours. From the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s, the money involved in mergers and acquisitions each year rose 2,000 percent.

Lesson two: demographic luck. Maurice Janklow, a lawyer born in 1902, was crushed by the Depression and closed real estate titles for $25. His son Mort Janklow, born in the 1930s, built a law firm and a celebrated literary agency. Gladwell explains the gap with birth rates: almost 3 million babies were born in 1915, about 600,000 fewer by 1935, and over 3 million again within a decade and a half. Children of the 1930s demographic trough got small classes, excellent New York public schools staffed by would-be professors, cheap college and plentiful jobs.

Lesson three: the garment industry and meaningful work. Louis and Regina Borgenicht came from Eastern Europe in 1889 and made 40 aprons from gingham on their first try; by January of 1892 they had 20 people working for them. Seventy percent of the Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island before the First World War had an occupational skill, many in the clothing trade, the largest industry in the city. Running a small shop taught autonomy, complexity and a link between effort and reward. Gladwell argues those three things make work meaningful, and children raised by parents who did meaningful work learned to expect it. Putting it together, the perfect birth date for a great New York Jewish lawyer is around 1930, and Gladwell profiles several who fit it.

"Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning."

Part TwoLegacy

Part Two turns from opportunity to cultural legacy: the habits and attitudes passed down from ancestors that shape how people behave long after the conditions that created them are gone.

Chapter SixHarlan, Kentucky

Harlan County, Kentucky, was founded in 1819 by eight families from the northern British Isles. The feud between two of them, the Howards and the Turners, broke out after a poker game in which each side accused the other of cheating, and ran for years of killings. Gladwell places it in a pattern of Appalachian feuds, including the Hatfields and McCoys. A Kentucky legislator once found 1,000 murder indictments in one Cumberland Plateau town between the Civil War and the start of the 20th century, in a region that never numbered more than 15,000 people.

The explanation is what sociologists call a culture of honor. Such cultures take root in highlands and marginal land where people herd animals, because a herdsman's wealth can be stolen and he has to show he will fight over any slight. The settlers of Appalachia came from the borderlands of Scotland and northern England, where that culture had lasted for centuries, and they brought it with them.

In the early 1990s, the psychologists Dov Cohen and Richard Nisbett tested whether it still lives. Young men at the University of Michigan were bumped in a narrow hallway by a confederate who called them a name. Northerners were mostly amused. Southerners grew angry, showed spikes in cortisol and testosterone, and were far more likely to stand their ground when a large man walked toward them. None of them were herdsmen; they lived in the late 20th century. Gladwell concludes that cultural legacies persist for generations and that people cannot make sense of their own world without them.

"It's a world where a man's reputation is at the center of his livelihood and self-worth."

Chapter SevenThe Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes

In August 1997, Korean Air Flight 801 crashed into a hillside near Guam, killing 228 of the 254 people on board. Between 1988 and 1998, Korean Air's loss rate was 4.79 per million departures, 17 times higher than United's 0.27. Gladwell reports that the typical plane crash involves bad weather, a delayed and tired crew, and a chain of seven consecutive human errors, most of them errors of teamwork and communication.

He walks through the cockpit recording of Avianca 052, which ran out of fuel near Kennedy Airport in January of 1990 after the crew never clearly told air traffic control it was in an emergency. The first officer, Klotz, used what linguists call mitigated speech, any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat what is being said. Historically, crashes have been far more likely when the captain is in the flying seat, because a first officer hints where a captain would speak up plainly.

The Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede, working for IBM, measured cultures on several dimensions, including the Power Distance Index: how much a culture values and respects authority. Boeing's own safety data showed a correlation between a country's plane crashes and its score. When the psychologist Robert Helmreich and Ashley Merritt measured the power distance of pilots around the world, South Korea ranked second, behind Brazil. In the Guam cockpit, the first officer and the flight engineer hinted at the weather and the broken glide slope while the exhausted captain missed their meaning.

In 2000, Korean Air brought in David Greenberg from Delta to run flight operations. He made English the language of the cockpit, since English was the language of the aviation world, and retrained crews in a new set of communication norms. The airline's safety record since 1999 has been spotless, and in 2006 it won the Phoenix Award from Air Transport World for its transformation. Gladwell's point is that cultural legacy is powerful and can be changed once it is acknowledged.

"We mitigate when we're being polite, or when we're ashamed or embarrassed or when we're being deferential to authority."

Chapter EightRice Paddies and Math Tests

Asian students consistently outperform Western students in math, and Gladwell traces part of the gap to language and part to rice. Chinese number words are brief and can be said quickly, and people hold digits in a memory loop of about two seconds, so Chinese speakers can remember a list like 4, 8, 5, 3, 9, 7, 6 more easily. Their number systems are also regular and logical, which makes counting and basic arithmetic easier for children to learn.

The deeper legacy is work. Wet-rice farming in southern China was intricate, year-round and endlessly improvable; a peasant who worked harder and smarter on his small paddy got a bigger harvest, and fixed rents meant he kept the surplus. Gladwell estimates such farmers worked 3,000 hours a year, against no more than 12 to 19 hours a week for the Kung bushmen of the Kalahari and long winter idleness for European peasants. He quotes peasant proverbs about hard work.

Math, he argues, is a matter of attitude as much as ability. The education researcher Alan Schoenfeld filmed a student named Renee working for 22 minutes on a problem most people would give up on after 30 seconds. Erling Boe found that the countries whose students answer the most questions on an endless questionnaire attached to an international math test are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems. At the top of both lists are Singapore, South Korea, China, Taiwan, Hong Kong and Japan, the places with a rice-paddy legacy.

"No one who can rise before dawn, 360 days a year, fails to make his family rich."

Chapter NineMarita's Bargain

KIPP Academy opened in the mid-1990s on the fourth floor of a public junior high school in the South Bronx. David Levin and Michael Feinberg founded KIPP in 1994; there are now more than 50 KIPP schools across the United States. Students are chosen by lottery, and the fifth grade has two sections of 35 students each.

Gladwell traces the long American summer vacation to 19th-century reformers who feared that too much study would exhaust children. Then he presents research from Baltimore, where students were tested at the end of each school year in June and again at the start of the next in September. During the school year, poor children learn as much as rich ones; over five years of elementary school, poor kids actually out-learn the wealthiest kids 191 points to 186 points. The gap opens in the summer. Over four summers, the reading scores of the poor kids go up by 0.26 points and those of the rich kids by 52 points. Gladwell's conclusion is that schools work, and that American schools have too much vacation.

KIPP's answer is more school: a day from 7:25 until 5, Saturday classes and a short summer. Marita, a KIPP student, wakes at a quarter to six, does homework until late at night and goes to sleep around 12. Gladwell calls this her bargain, the same one the rice farmers made, and reports that more than 80% of KIPP graduates go on to college. What she needs, he argues, is a chance to work hard.

"She doesn't need a laptop, a smaller class, a teacher with a PhD, or a bigger apartment."

EpilogueA Jamaican Story

Gladwell applies the book's method to his own mother, Joyce. She and her twin sister were born in 1931 to Daisy and Donald Nation, schoolteachers in the village of Harewood in rural Jamaica, where formal schooling went only to 14 years of age. Her opportunities came from a chain of accidents: William M. Macmillan, who wrote a book warning that there would be trouble if the government did not give its people opportunities; the riots of 1937, which followed his book and led to scholarships; and her mother Daisy, who borrowed an enormous sum from Mr. Chance, a Chinese shopkeeper, to send her to university in England. There she met Gladwell's father, Graham.

He goes further back. His great-great-great-grandmother was a slave bought by an Irish planter, William Ford, who arrived in Jamaica in 1784. Their children were born into Jamaica's colored class, which had full civil rights by 1826 and an outsized place in the professions, while dark-skinned Jamaicans were kept out. Gladwell says the advantage came from an ancestor who worked in the house instead of the fields and was valued instead of enslaved, and that he has to acknowledge the ugly history in his own family's rise. His mother's success belongs to many centuries and many people.

"The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all."

Audio editionA Word with the Author

The audiobook closes with a conversation in which Gladwell explains the thesis in his own words. An outlier is something that lies outside the norm, and he wants to learn from such people the way Wolf learned from Roseto. The Beatles are the Beatles in large part because of a lucky break in Hamburg; Bill Gates had a formative experience at 13 that had nothing to do with him. The Silicon Valley founders born in 1954 or 1955 were about 21 when the personal computer arrived, the perfect age to see its possibilities. He describes his own luck, including a rural Ontario school where 75 to 80% of the children were farmers' kids, and calls his own story a perfect confirmation of the book's thesis.

His target is the idea of the self-made man. He argues it obscures the real reasons people succeed, the hidden mechanisms of opportunity and legacy, and that bringing them to light shows how a society could promote achievement on a much broader scale.

"It's worse than false. It's dangerous."