Outliers

Pop quiz hotshot.  What does pro-hockey player have in common? The answer will surprise you. Most of them are born on the first quarter of the year.  This obviously has nothing to do with astrological signs. This is due to the cut-off date for age-class hockey which is January 1.  Kids who are born on the first quarter are naturally bigger and has more experience playing hockey. And when the time comes when the coach chooses an all-star team, the older players, being bigger and more experienced, has a greater chance of being chosen. With better coaching and all that extra practice,  those players has more chance to make it into the big league.  This example shows that talent does not necessarily translate into success. The environment you are born with(in this case the cut-off date) has a large impact whether you will succeed or not.

This is the thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. People does not necessarily rise from nothing. The environment, parentage and patronage has a very profound effect on whether we succeed or not. It not just talent. You just need to be good enough.

Take for example math. Why are Asians more talented in Math? In Outliers, the main reason he said is because of Asians tend to work harder. They tend to work on math questions longer. And math is one of those things where hard work really matters. If there is a Math Olympics that will be held, you can tell which country would win even without asking a single math question. You can tell if you can measure how hard they are willing to work.  The next question is why Asians tend to work harder. It is because Asians work in rice paddies. Working in a rice field is ten to twenty times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalent-size corn or wheat field.  Hard work is embedded into Asian culture, and that culture is inherited by Asians of today.

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Another interesting thing that is mentioned in Outliers is that in order to become an expert in a field you need ten thousand hours or about ten years(reminded me of Peter Norvig’s Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years).  He mentioned Bill Gates and Bill Joy(creator of vi) as examples.  They have accumulated ten thousand hours of programming. And those ten hours of programming was because they are (very )lucky enough to have access to computers at those times.

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outlier(copied verbatim from the book)

1. something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2. a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample