I picked the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell for the listening seeing it pushed as a recommendation from Amazon several times. Most of us think about success stories that are about “a miracle” or a self-made person, but if we will dig deeper into the stories itself, it becomes clear that there are a lot of “hidden” obstacles that allowed “a miracle” has happened. Read or scroll to understand what helped famous people to be so successful and how everyone could use this knowledge to improve own daily life.
Part 1: Opportunity
When we thinking about success stories, the first thing most of us have in mind is – “How much effort he or she invest to make it real?!”, but the real question everyone should ask themselves are: “What circumstances did allow this to happen?”, “Who or what did help them?”, “Is there any chance, that this success could come to everyone?”.
It could be not so clear at the beginning, but let’s think of the success story as a beautiful apple tree. First of all, let’s agree on something – it is a garden apple tree, not wild in the forest. The wild apple trees are not the same as we expect to see as an “ideal apple” and most of them are small and bitter. That’s mean that someone is taking care of this apple on early-stage by regularly pouring and kill pests. During the grow, every detail matters – geography localization of the garden (probably it will be tough for the apple tree to grow in Nevada desert), the distance to the next tree, soil quality, etc. The tree will have a chance to grow only if all of these factors will be “good enough”. The same rules apply to the outliers, but unfortunately, it requires more investigation to the history, then just googling “how to grow an apple tree” 😉
The book describes a few examples of opportunities that allow success one, but not another. So here are few of them:
- The eligibility cut-off for the age-class hockey in Canada starts at 1 of January. Which in theory (and in practice as well) means that children who born in the first quarter of the year have slightly more time to practice in comparison with their teammates who born in 3-4 year quarters. As a result, most of the top players in Canada’s top hockey teams born between January and May (Quant Hockey Ranking).
So if you want your kid to become a Hockey star in Canada, try to think about it, even before you consider having a child. - The 10,000-Hour rule – the idea behind it is very simple – you could be an expert in any area if you worked and practiced enough. History shows that “enough” is about 10,000 hours or 10 years of daily practice. It could sound very obvious from the definition, but let’s think about Bill Gates’s history. Literally he spent a lot of time coding during computer classes in General Electric Company and Computer Center Corporation in the early ’70s. But let’s how many children had such an opportunity to spend so much time with a computer at that time? Probably your parents had to reach enough and you should grow in the country which allows you to use such kind of technology. So if analyze the opportunities and circumstances which were given to Bill Gates, it is hard to imagine it could happen in any other part of the world at that time.
So as you could see, sometimes it’s not about being but even about to be born in the right place and at the right time. Sure, it will not guarantee anything and it is still a matter of hard work, but at least it will give the opportunity to make it possible.
Part 2: Legacy
Like every story, it is hard to predict the future and handle the present without analyzing the past. Sometimes it is enough to check the last 10 minutes before something happened, but in some particular cases, it is necessary to analyze 100 years before.
One of the great examples from the book describes the aircraft crash of Flight 52 Avianca from Bogota to New York in 1990. Investigation of the catastrophe lasted for more than a year first conclusions were about the multiple errors of the crew, bad weather conditions, and a broken engine on each wing. It could sound as a sequence of very unfortunate circumstances, but in fact, the most important thing in this situation was a misunderstanding between the crew and the flight tower.
The author introduces a term of Power Distance Index (PDI) which describes as “the extent to which the less powerful members of organizations and institutions (like the family) accept and expect that power is distributed unequally”, which means how likely people question authority and attempt to distribute power. This term is extremely important for understanding Avianca’s tragedy.
If we compare the USA and Colombia (even with actual 2020’s data), we will find, that Colombia has 30% highest PDI and 7 times less individualism. During that flight, the second pilot communicated with the flight tower and followed the instruction of the captain without questioning and expressing his opinion about the situation to anyone and especially the flight tower. He just used the Hint or Preferences level of Mitigated Speach which wasn’t enough in such a critical situation, but the Colombian (as any other) culture dictates the rules you should follow in the daily world. Due to Hofstede Insights, in Colombia people less criticize supervisors and more rarely take an initiative, just because it’s Boss’s responsibility to solve the problems.
You could find a full record Cockpit Voice Recorder here.
That particular situation shows us, that culture in which we grew up influences our behavior and our choices during the life path. The only thing we could do to flat the cultural curve between intercultural differences is to communicate by using the ubiquitous mechanism of expressing our thoughts with a common level of understanding.
Conclusion
I highly recommend this book for everyone who thinks that he is not good enough for getting a better job/create start-up/try something new in life. This book helps to understand that everything around us, could help to reach the target and we should use every chance to do it.