Outliers, Left Out of Success?

I just finished reading the acclaimed bestseller, Outliers, The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. It is a fascinating read with interesting and controversial insights into what breeds success in such diverse groupings as professional hockey players to entrepreneurs like Bill Gates to airline pilots to ethnic groups who score highest in mathematical scores.

What a load it has taken off my shoulders! Here I was blaming my lack of success on my reluctance to work hard and the total absence of dedication to any job that requires more than a passing effort. No, according to Gladwell it is simply a matter of the timing of my birth. Without giving to much away of the book or it’s conclusions, the hypothesis is that children who are enrolled in school whose birth dates are closer to the cutoff date for school registration in September are faced with the undeniable fact that their maturation and their intellectual capacity was not equal to those they were in class with. This then becomes a self fulfilling prophecy of not achieving the standards of his classmates and leads him down the path of moral rectitude, substance abuse and an ultimately death; or a career as a lawyer.

Being an October child I was enrolled in school almost a year before some of my classmates were. This part of my upbringing was no surprise to me. Having the bejesus pounded out of me in the playground by a goon who was 5 inches taller and outweighed me by 30 pounds was nothing new. But I didn’t have the wherewithal to inquire about his date of birth to verify this hypothesis or not. I was too busy just trying to avoid that long hanging bit of saliva he had dangling from his lips as he held me down. The thought still sends shivers down my back, I was never sure if he was going to be able to suck it back up to his mouth without losing control of it.

I always thought that I had some certain level of superiority over my classmates because I was younger than they were. But according to this new outlook on education and age, I couldn’t have been more mistaken. I had been bred for failure.

Marketing a book like Outliers, especially one that has all the elements of something extremely boring, it helps to have a bit of controversy behind it. Freakonomics by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner, published in 2005 was one that had some spicy racial overtones to it’s ideas. It did generate respectable sales figures for the authors (I wonder what month they were born in) and spent almost a full year on best seller lists. Freakonomics was essentially about theoretical economics with some drug dealing and crime statistics thrown in. It had the capacity to be as boring as counting ceiling tiles, but they transcended that. Gladwell has taken a similar approach. A lot of the highlights or more controversial bits do have racial elements to them because after all, the main thrust is to sell books and nothing sells books like some old good racial controversy.

While there are many valid points he proposes in his book, he does leave one particular definition unexplained. He never truly defines what he refers to as successful. He certainly profiles those who are financially successful to those who are intellectually successful, but he never really does focus on what that definition should be. He seems to waffle between the financial and the intellectual but in the end leans towards the financial as to which one carries the most merit.

By no description am I a professional hockey player or a mover and shaker in industry, but I have been a published writer for over twenty years and I feel there is some degree of success in just that fact. There is no denying the fact that for the most part writing is not a lucrative venture, but I have had many financially successful people tell me that they wished they had the ability to write as seemingly effortlessly (I won’t tell them the truth) as I.

I guess in the end, the definition of success really does rest within your own mind. Just remember you are as successful as the next guy; as long as the next guy is not a professional hockey player or Bill Gates.