Outliers
Right Birth date, Right Social Class, Right Culture
In Malcom Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success
Right birthdate, right social class, 10,000 hours of practice, and right culture.
His book seeks to explain why some people are so spectacularly successful. And he concludes success is little more than a roll of the dice. The lucky few, born smart enough, and at the right time to the right parents, inevitably become greatly successful.
The book conveniently leaves out any inner dialog the incredibly successful may have. By looking at the raw statistics about where a person was born, and his family, he supposes he can tell whether a person will be successful or not.
He is wrong.
People do not become wealthy, do not practice for 10,000 hours because of their social environments. People practice and stick with it because they have two things aligned within in their minds:
Desire and Justification
It takes an incredible psychology to stay motivated through 10,000 hours of routine. The small problems and worries of life continually ask for our attention. These so called Outliers weren’t just blessed with the right family and the right culture. They were also blessed with the mindset that allows them to believe in impossibilities.
I don’t buy that our lives are over by the age of eighteen, that if we don’t have the right amount of practice before then we are doomed. At any point within our lives, we can decide to change. It must be so.
I am so obsessed with the topic of success because its one of the fundamentals of American society. We believe in the impossible, in our ability to become greater through hard work and intelligence. Malcom’s book is dangerous, because it says things like genes and birthdates and economic status determine our true potential.
And it is complete bullshit. The Outliers I know from within my life have come from many different social and economic places. Their birthdates are all over the place. Their intelligence level is all over the place. The thing that matters most, the one thing all the Outliers I know have is this:
An irrational belief in impossibilities.
Success is all about mindset and motivation, regardless of which socio-economic spectrum you come from, or how smart you are.
Of course Bill Gates became successful because he was incredibly lucky. He was born on the right date to get into personal computing, he was blessed to be programming when there simply wasn’t an opportunity for anyone else to be programming. But Bill Gates had something much greater than all of that.
He had a reason to be successful. He had a reason to work so hard at programming. I don’t know what his family situation was like, but I guarantee that programming was more important to him than anything else. We can idealize the right upbringing for him, but we cannot escape this vital fact:
His psychology allowed him to dominate his field.
It is so incredibly dangerous to write his success off as Malcom does in his book. To say Bill Gates became so successful because he was born in the right place with the right genes and the right parents and the right environment. Because as soon as we do, we begin to make excuses for ourselves. We are not successful, we will not ever be successful, because we weren’t born with the lucky roll of the dice.
Even if it is impossible for poor people to lift themselves out of poverty, we meet people every day who do it anyways. Living in Florida, I saw Mexican immigrants working to send money back to their families; starting their own businesses. They’re here illegally, they’re getting paid horrible wages, they don’t speak the language. It’s supposed to be too impossible, they have too little education. But they do it, continue to do it, against all those statistics you read about in Malcom’s book.
The way I see it, you have two choices in life: you can believe in what you see presented as fact; or you can believe in what everyone else believes as impossible.
I choose to believe in the impossible. I think it is the most important choice a person can make.
Within each of us there is the seed of a great person. We must plant the seed, continue to cultivate it, even as it doesn’t seem to grow. There is a certain level of belief inherent in creating anything. You plant your seeds, water, fertilize, pull weeds, and you wait. You work in anticipation, in belief that the plants will grow and produce. But you start from trust and belief.
Maybe our inner greatness won’t reach the level of Bill Gate’s financial success. But we certainly shouldn’t buy in and give up on the pursuit of greatness. Yes, everyone else may seem to have been given greater gifts of education, money, and genes, but we all cultivate the gifts we are given. We all grow our own seeds of greatness into the plant we become, the plant we are continually becoming.
Greatness and happiness is not a roll of the dice. It is a mindset and a set of values acted upon daily.
This is why religion, mythology, and philosophy are so important. As human beings born into an indifferent world, we need models that tell us the world rewards those who seek and live justly. Seek first wisdom, seek first the kingdom of heaven, seek first the eightfold path, and leave on your own Illiad.
Some cultures have the vision quest, orthers have the passage to adulthood, but the net result is the breakdown of your culture’s values. The elimination of imposed standards and ideas, and a seeking for another set to replace them. What is right, and what is wrong. How life should be lived, and how it shouldn’t.
Such dry books on success worry me. Success does not come from statistics and analysis. It comes from a belief in the impossible, an ability to trust your gut, and a level of commitment unattainable by cold calculation.
But this book appeals to a certain type of mind. Who likes to believe everything is calculatable, who likes to know there’s no reason to believe in impossiblities, or ideas without numbers behind them.
And those types of people will never be successful, will never be totally satisfied. There is no such thing as absolutes, it is all an artificial concept placed on top of reality. But true success, true happiness requires a strong belief in irrational things, in things that do not yet exist, and in things everyone else says are wrong.
Those types of people write off religion as gross and perverse, as ways of controlling and manipulating people. They point to the Crusades and say:
“Look at what belief in imaginary ideas produces.”
But Jesus does not teach to kill everyone who disagrees with you. Instead, he talks about being peaceful, being kind, and believing god will reward those who love and care for their neighbors.
Is that a dirty, horrible belief? Is that a lie, is that an ugly impossibility?
That the universe could have its own reward system for those who look after others?
It’s this belief that motivates people to become weathly, so they can become responsible stewards of the world and humanity’s wealth. Improving the world and the lives of those around them as they grow wealthier.
Which is the one true proof of success I have ever seen.
And it is the same with the Buddhists, the Muslims, and the Hindus, and everyone else.
Make your life mean more than yourself, and you are granted infinite wealth and happiness. Heaven. Enlightenment.
It is easy to get caught up in the ego. The great impossibility is that we forget this and give of ourselves freely every day. Can we do so if we’re bitter about those born with more? Or if we’re busy studying numbers that prove our own success impossible? No.
