Success is a transitory idea

A book review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

    Success is generally calculated in three ways: achievements of social status (accumulation of capital, vertical growth in employment opportunity, acceptance in limited organization, etc.), achieving a prior established goal, or simply the opposite of failure.  Malcom Gladwell in his work Outliers adds an interesting component to the success paradigm, the nature of your surroundings plays a large part in your ability to attain success. 
    Towards the end of Gladwell’s work, he cites an interesting study which calculated the abilities of four year old children from China and the United States.  The researchers were determining how high each child could count.  The results tallied the Chinese children averaging at the number 40, where their American counterparts were able to reach about 15.  There are several historical trends brought into the statistic in order to shed some light on the gross inconsistency of performance.  For one, the Chinese language utilizes simple words for its numerical system: one, two, three, four, five equated to yi, er, san, si, wu.  The simple mechanics of the Chinese and surrounding Asiatic tongues, arguably, create a supple mind for mathematical computation.  This is compounded by a vocabulary that allows for less memorization of added consonants and vowels.  Much of the Children whom were studied in China, compared to their American counterparts, hailed from the Southern lands of China.  The southeastern mainland of China is a vast, fertile delta where rice has been harvested for thousands of years.  The necessary calculations and labor that go into the production and harvest of the aquatic based crop are extraordinary.  The plant demands an intellect focused on the attention to detail and a will to patiently struggle with the crops fragile but laborious development.
    Gladwell is not necessarily saying that because many Asian nations have a history of rice cultivation and a simple language structure that they are naturally superior to the rest of the world in mathematics.  In fact he notes that many of the studies are biased towards China’s urban children who have a higher quality of living and affordable education.   What he is attempting to assert is that cultural and environmental factors do play a small and important role in how, as individuals we succeed.  The idea is that we tend to be bound to our genealogy through cultural trends and perhaps genetic traits we inherit.
    Outlier is a mathematical term that Malcom Gladwell adapted to note the unique relationship between the Western world's perception of success, and how it really unfolds.  Essentially, the outlier deviates from the norm of data sampled, for Gladwell the data sample is a qualitative analysis of success.  An  interesting cultural theory Gladwell touches on is accumulative advantage or what is referred to as “The Matthew Affect.  The term was coined by Robert K. Merton in the 1960’s in his work "The Matthew Effect in Science", in which he hoped to analyze the systems of reward and communication within the field.  Merton found that more often than not, a researcher who had greater notoriety within the academic discipline, would receive credit for a recent discovery over a lesser known counterpart regardless of who formulated what first.  The Nobel peace prize is often cited as an area in which the Matthew Effect is heavily influential in the decision of the award recipient.  Gladwell masterfully displays the Canadian Hockey league’s Matthew Effect in relation to its player’s birth dates and their respective youth leagues age cut off limit. 
    The CHL has an alarming incidence of individuals in its elite division born during the months of January, February, March and April.  Gladwell cites the relation between the youth leagues cutoff dates for age level registration as the nature of this inequality.   Most Western professional sports leagues follow the same pattern, sponsoring age restrictions for youth leagues in which the children born earlier in the year hold a developmental edge over the children born in August and September.  This phenomenon is also observed in most public school systems.  For example, two children born in 1986 wish to play youth Baseball and the birthday registration cutoff date for their relevant age level is August 25th.  The first child is born January 15th, while the second is born August 14th.  The first child, in the tradition of maintaining youth in groups based on yearly birthdays set by a deadline, would hold a substantial developmental edge over the relatively younger.  In fact, between ten and thirteen years of age when most young men are reaching puberty, this difference can be an overwhelming obstacle for the August birth dates. 
    Gladwell notes that in the instance of the Canadian Hockey League or the Czech Republic national soccer team (he illustrates the same birth date to elite level performance trend), if the children were divided into three periods within their age range and allowed to physically and intellectually develop in like groups, an even greater degree of talent could be developed.  Group A would consist of January through April, Group B from May to August and September to December for Group C; within this format each year will have three groups with education and instruction specifically tailored to their developmental stage in a given year.  Most important, the respective nations could then field three times the quality of athletes, in a more egalitarian atmosphere.
    Two more interesting social phenomena in regards to how we view success rest largely on our perception of genius.  Gladwell cites a study in which the IQ’s of Nobel Prize recipients are tallied.  The cold truth is that an individual with an IQ of around 120-130 is just as likely to win a Nobel prize as an individual with an IQ between 160-170.  This fact takes a lot of wind out of the notion that intellect is inherent and held by a few, especially when one takes into account the “10,000 Hour Rule.”  The preeminent Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson first coined the phrase in his research on expert performance and excellence.  The idea is that all one needs to do in order to succeed in a specific field is roughly 10,000 hours of dedicated study and practice.  The catch is that one would need the necessary social and historical factors in order to support the endeavor.  A child forced to work 40 hours a week and attend school part time until the eighth grade before he or she is forced to abandon their studies will never have the opportunity to implement this rule. 
    This rule parallels the idea of an embryonic stage in an intellects development in which a homeostasis is achieved between the desire to acquire the necessary knowledge and the practical environment in which the undertaking is enabled or denied.  So, when Gladwell notes how when the The Beetles first began playing 12 hours sets for nearly a decade in Liverpool, England and Hamburg, Germany; you begin to understand the relevance of 10,000 dedicated hours.  Or when he explains how an association of caring and involved parents in Seattle dedicated a substantial amount of funds towards state of the art computer technology.  The neighborhood center in which the technology resided would be the embryonic stage of development necessary for Bill Gates and his fellow suburbanites to develop their programming genius over 10,000 hours of uninhibited programing.
    This book offers some astounding insight into the nature of Western cultures perception of success.  At the same time, there is little surprise for the student of Critical Pedagogy or Progressive Democratic theory.  The idea that an individual needs a supportive environment in order to prosper is a driving notion behind all liberal theories of humanities.  What Gladwell accomplishes in his work Outliers, is the creation of a blue print in analyzing our societies tragic behavior towards its own citizenry.  In a society in which the gap of wealth and resource distribution continues to expand in favor of the 1%, it is refreshing to read a work of art that expose a tired system.