Malcom Gladwell: Outliers
I purchased this book out of curiosity, and after reading the first couple of chapters I can conclude it has been worth it. It is of high relevance to my own life.
In the introduction, Gladwell talks about an American town of Italian immigrants with a far lower rate of heart diseases than anywhere else in the country. The physicians who studied these phenomena came to the conclusion that this was neither due to genetics nor to nutrition, but due to the community (and, as Uwe Rohr and I would say, due to the lack of stress these people experienced in their lives, in spite of working hard). This made this town an outlier.
In the first chapter, Gladwell explains why people born in particular months have an advantage in being selected by (sports) talents scouts: if they were born short after the cut-off date, they are more mature and developed than their peers, and so they are considered more talented. This has the effect that many young people who are actually equally talented genetics-wise do not get the support they deserve. And that introduces the central theme of this book: that success is not only due to talent but also due to certain circumstances, including the family background.
Then Gladwell shows that some very successful people share having been born in some particular years which enabled them to experience developments in society and technology that gave them opportunities to succeed. For example, Bill Gates and many other people who made a lot of money with computers were born in or around 1955. Of course these people were talented, but they also were lucky to seize a particular window of opportunity.
Alas, success is also due to hard work, as Gladwell explains in the next chapter: Those who became good at playing a musical instrument as adults were the people who in total had invested ten thousands of hours in their musical training. The difference between average and excellent musicians according to Gladwell is not talent but practice.
Then, two chapters deal with high IQ geniuses. Gladwell especially focuses on Chris Langan, who is considered to be the smartest man in the world with an IQ of approximately 200. Langan was born in a very poor family and although he was definitely gifted and had strong academic interests, he eventually became a college drop-out. Gladwell argues that due to Langan's bad family background, which was the reason why he had poor skills at handling people, Langan's professors either did not recognize his talent or did not consider it relevant and therefore treated him badly, giving him bad grades, not allowing him to attend lectures in the afternoon when he had trouble to attend the lectures in the morning due to the bad weather, etc. To show what difference it makes to be brought up in a good, wealthy family, Gladwell brings the example of Robert Oppenheimer, who also experienced problems in his academic life and even went so far as to poison one of his instructors - yet his professors always treated him with benevolence, forgave his bad behaviour, and ultimately Oppenheimer became a very successful scientist.
What I have read so far has mainly made an impression on me because of one thing: the ten-thousand hour rule, the fact that you need a lot of practice to become very good at a particular field. This has reminded me of the reason why I was so depressed after graduating from high school. I had started teaching myself to program at the age of eight. Yet, when I was seventeen years old, I did not have ten thousand hours of programming practice. I have no idea how many hours I actually had, but probably they were not much more than one or two thousands. The reason for this was that I got distracted from programming at age twelve when I started editing Hugi. So in the last five years of high school, I was getting more of a training in proofreading and journalism than in actual programming. This may not have been a bad thing, but actually I had wanted to become a programmer since the age of eight. (I also decided that I wanted to become a university professor when I was five years old, but that's another story.) As a result, I was afraid that I would have strong competitors and only be average or below average in my self-chosen profession. That was the reason why I fell into depression and as a result accepted my father's wish to study medicine.
As the examples provided by Gladwell show, a high intelligence quotient does not compensate for lack of practice. A high intelligence quotient only helps you solve certain problems, which would take people with average intelligence far more time to solve. But to be a really good programmer, you definitely first and foremost need practice.
Now I have been working as a professional programmer for a bit more than three years. So I have meanwhile gathered a couple of thousands of hours of practice. Still, I have not reached the magic number of ten thousands of hours yet.
In the introduction, Gladwell talks about an American town of Italian immigrants with a far lower rate of heart diseases than anywhere else in the country. The physicians who studied these phenomena came to the conclusion that this was neither due to genetics nor to nutrition, but due to the community (and, as Uwe Rohr and I would say, due to the lack of stress these people experienced in their lives, in spite of working hard). This made this town an outlier.
In the first chapter, Gladwell explains why people born in particular months have an advantage in being selected by (sports) talents scouts: if they were born short after the cut-off date, they are more mature and developed than their peers, and so they are considered more talented. This has the effect that many young people who are actually equally talented genetics-wise do not get the support they deserve. And that introduces the central theme of this book: that success is not only due to talent but also due to certain circumstances, including the family background.
Then Gladwell shows that some very successful people share having been born in some particular years which enabled them to experience developments in society and technology that gave them opportunities to succeed. For example, Bill Gates and many other people who made a lot of money with computers were born in or around 1955. Of course these people were talented, but they also were lucky to seize a particular window of opportunity.
Alas, success is also due to hard work, as Gladwell explains in the next chapter: Those who became good at playing a musical instrument as adults were the people who in total had invested ten thousands of hours in their musical training. The difference between average and excellent musicians according to Gladwell is not talent but practice.
Then, two chapters deal with high IQ geniuses. Gladwell especially focuses on Chris Langan, who is considered to be the smartest man in the world with an IQ of approximately 200. Langan was born in a very poor family and although he was definitely gifted and had strong academic interests, he eventually became a college drop-out. Gladwell argues that due to Langan's bad family background, which was the reason why he had poor skills at handling people, Langan's professors either did not recognize his talent or did not consider it relevant and therefore treated him badly, giving him bad grades, not allowing him to attend lectures in the afternoon when he had trouble to attend the lectures in the morning due to the bad weather, etc. To show what difference it makes to be brought up in a good, wealthy family, Gladwell brings the example of Robert Oppenheimer, who also experienced problems in his academic life and even went so far as to poison one of his instructors - yet his professors always treated him with benevolence, forgave his bad behaviour, and ultimately Oppenheimer became a very successful scientist.
What I have read so far has mainly made an impression on me because of one thing: the ten-thousand hour rule, the fact that you need a lot of practice to become very good at a particular field. This has reminded me of the reason why I was so depressed after graduating from high school. I had started teaching myself to program at the age of eight. Yet, when I was seventeen years old, I did not have ten thousand hours of programming practice. I have no idea how many hours I actually had, but probably they were not much more than one or two thousands. The reason for this was that I got distracted from programming at age twelve when I started editing Hugi. So in the last five years of high school, I was getting more of a training in proofreading and journalism than in actual programming. This may not have been a bad thing, but actually I had wanted to become a programmer since the age of eight. (I also decided that I wanted to become a university professor when I was five years old, but that's another story.) As a result, I was afraid that I would have strong competitors and only be average or below average in my self-chosen profession. That was the reason why I fell into depression and as a result accepted my father's wish to study medicine.
As the examples provided by Gladwell show, a high intelligence quotient does not compensate for lack of practice. A high intelligence quotient only helps you solve certain problems, which would take people with average intelligence far more time to solve. But to be a really good programmer, you definitely first and foremost need practice.
Now I have been working as a professional programmer for a bit more than three years. So I have meanwhile gathered a couple of thousands of hours of practice. Still, I have not reached the magic number of ten thousands of hours yet.
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