Data and the Divine

Book: Outliers May 10, 2012

Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is a thought provoking read.  It explores success stories in terms of not “who they are now” but “how they got here.”  It’s based around the fallacy of the “self-made man” who can “pull himself up by his bootstraps.”  This argument is identical to that of the free will concept of the intrinsic actor.  It exposes a person as a network of opportunities and relationships and their success as an expression of an ecosystem and not an individual.  The notion of an intrinsic identity capable of acting “in spite of” an environment is counterproductive, but enticing.

Gladwell begins by illustrating how the vast majority of professional canadian hockey players are born between January and April.  A surprising fact that illustrates the way that an arbitrary cut-off date for league membership can provide the slightly older (i.e. those born Jan 1) with a leg-up that starts a cycle of access that propels them into higher leagues.  If you were born on December 31st, don’t even bother.  There are many other thought provoking explorations of this effect and Gladwell asks a compelling question: If we could have a hockey league that selected without such arbitrary filters in place, we could have 10 times as many skilled professional hockey players (or a thousand more Bill Gates’s).

He also provides compelling evidence that hard work leads to success.  If you want to be a master, you have to get your 10,000+ hours of practice in.  There are virtually no examples of masters who haven’t put in the work and even fewer of those who have put in the work and didn’t become success stories.  The Beatles played 8 hours a day for several years in strip-clubs in Hamburg before they got their break.

The attitude of the self-made-man is exactly the free-will having intrinsically-motivated oxymoron common to egocentric western culture.  It’s a violation of the basic rules we understand about the universe: “You can’t get something from nothing.”  When we look at individuals as self-made, as if they pulled themselves out of their own navel, we cannot learn and grow towards success.  When we recognize that individuals (including ourselves) are networks of relationships and not intrinsic actors, ironically, we can truly learn and grow.  When we realize that we are identical with the ecosystem of our unique histories, we can take ownership of our lives, and achieve whatever we want.