TURNING PAGES: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

When I was in kindergarten, I had a hard time understanding Math specifically the lesson in “greater than- less than-equal to” equations. My mother, being a teacher, helped me understand the lesson by using analogy. In a manner of storytelling, she told me that the sign corresponding greater than/less than/equal to is Pacman (the famous computer game back then), while the numbers in the equation represent the amount of apples. She told me I have to point Pacman’s mouth to the larger amount so he can eat more apples. I never failed at greater than/less than/equal to lesson ever again.

SOURCE: http://prekandksharing.blogspot.com/2012/08/montessori-inspired-greater-than-less.html

Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell is a lot like my mom’s way of teaching me Math. It is composed of analogies and stories that helped me understand the wisdom behind success. It will not tell you what to do, it will ask you to analyze the roots of success and what lies behind the equation.  At some point you question the reliability of data presented on the books but because there’s wisdom behind those stories, you care less whether they are true or not, you care more on the observations and analogies those stories represent. Gladwell’s writing style is entertaining that you find yourself learning through the stories until you nod in agreement and all you can say is “He has a point.”

Other books I’ve read about success are filled with dos and don’ts, work, passion for goals, visions, etc. This book is the opposite. It is filled with proverbs and stories that will reveal a thesis about cultural legacies, opportunities, racial roots, and things we often neglect when we analyze success.

In short, it is not about the hows of success… it is about the reasons behind success. It doesn't tell you what to do in order to succeed; it tells you the factors hidden in our system that makes those people successful. It reveals a new perspective on the lives of successful people.

 “They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious, It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier in the end, is not an outlier at all.”

This book will ask you not to believe, not to reject the idea—but to consider the analysis. The ideas presented on this book are freakishly mind-provoking that I have to dive in really deep just to understand what he was saying. Now I know why it will “transform” our idea of success because it will push you to think through stories while helping you analyze deeply why successful people made it.

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DISCLAIMER: THE FOLLOWING PARAGRAPHS HAVE SPOILERS AND HINTS SO READ AT YOUR OWN RISK.

Among all chapters, my favorite is “Chapter Seven: The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes”. It talks about Power Distance Index that explains different responses on hierarchy depending on your race and the culture you grew up with. It exploits how PDI influence the capability of a person to convey message to higher authority. Sometimes, there’s barrier in effective communication because of high PDI, that is, the message is being mitigated to prevent offending the higher person in position.

I could relate to the whole chapter because Maxwell’s examples are happening here in the Philippines. Employees in lower position would prioritize being polite and courteous than saying his opinions in direct and clear manner. Filipinos tolerate ambiguity when imploring things to authorities and higher officials so sometimes the message isn’t delivered effectively. I wasn't surprised Maxwell listed Philippines on top 5 highest PDI. 

"They died because when the copilot asked questions, his implied suggestions were very weak. The captain's reply was to ignore him totally. Perhaps the copilot did not want to play the fool because he knew that the pilot had a great deal of experience flying in that area. The copilot should have advocated for his opinions in a stronger way...

I have come to realize that a lot of times I played the role of the copilot, trying to mitigate what I really want to say just to present myself as polite which in turn made my statement powerless. Many times I choose not to say what I really want to say believing that silence is humility. There's nothing wrong with being courteous but be aware of false humility as well. Many times I choose to be the copilot, who depends on the pilot, and it didn't serve me well, I have a voice that I need to use.

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All in all, I love this book because it surpassed all my expectations, and I guess I have to admit that by far, this is my favorite success book ever.

To finish this post, I decided to present some lines and words that I highlighted because they are so insightful and worthy to share. So, here they are...

CHAPTER 1: THE MATTHEW EFFECT:
The initial difference in maturity doesn't go away with time. It persists.

We so profoundly personalize success, we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung. We make rules that frustrate achievement. We prematurely write off people as failures. We are too much in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become too much passive. We overlook just how large a role we all play -- and by "we" I mean society in -- determining who makes it who doesn't.

CHAPTER TWO: THE 10,000-HOUR RULE
No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

He wanted to learn. That was a big part of it. But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the opportunity to learn how to be an expert.

CHAPTER THREE: THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART I
Knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a formful of clever boys.

A basketball player only has to be tall enough -- and the same is true of intelligence. Intelligence has a threshold.

All we can say is that when it comes to thinking about really hard things like physics, they are both clearly smart enough.

CHAPTER FOUR: THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART II
Social savvy is knowledge. It's set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families. 

Lareau calls the middle class parenting style "concerted cultivation"... foster and assess a child's talents, opinions, and skills. Poor parents tend to follow a strategy of "accomplishment of natural growth... responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop their own.

Lareau stresses that one style isn't morally better than the other. The poorer children were, to her mind, often
better behaved, less whiny, more creative in making use of their own time, and had a well-developed sense of independence. But in practical terms, concerted cultivation has enormous advantages. The heavily scheduled middleclass child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences. She learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings. She is taught how to interact comfortably with adults, and to speak up when she needs to. In Lareau's words, the middle-class children learn a sense of "entitlement." The issue with Chris is that he was always too bored to actually sit there and listen to his teachers. If someone had recognized his intelligence and if he was from a family where there was some kind of value on education, they would have made sure he wasn't bored."

CHAPTER FIVE: THE THREE LESSONS OF JOE FLOM
To my surprise I didn't highlight anything from this chapter except the word "shyster" which means a dishonest person; especially : a dishonest lawyer or politician This part is where I got bored so I am not sure of this chapter, really. 

CHAPTER SIX: HARLAN, KENTUCKY
When one family fights with another, it's a feud. When lots of families fight with one another in identical little towns up and down the same mountain range, it's ^pattern.


The "culture of honor" hypothesis says that it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where yourgreat-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact. It's just the beginning, though, because upon closer examination, cultural legacies turn out to beeven stranger and more powerful than that.

Cultural legacies are powerful forces. They have deep roots and long lives. They persist, generation after generation, virtually intact, even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawned them have vanished, and they play such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them."

CHAPTER SEVEN: THE ETHNIC THEORY OF PLANE CRASHES
(The most highlighted chapter in the whole book. This is obviously my favorite chapter.)

He was maxed out. He had no resources left to do anything else. That's what happens when you're tired. Your decision-making skills erode. You start missing things—things that you would pick up on any other day."

What was required of Ratwatte was that he communicate, and communicate not just in the sense of issuing commands but also in the sense of encouraging and cajoling and calming and negotiating and sharing information in the clearest and most transparent manner possible.

The term used by linguists to describe what Klotz was engaging in in that moment is "mitigated speech," which refers to any attempt to downplay or sugarcoat the meaning of what is being said. We mitigate when we're being polite, or when we're ashamed or embarrassed, or when we're being deferential to authority. If you want your boss to do you a favor, you don't say, "I'll need this by Monday." You mitigate. You say, "Don't bother, if it's too much trouble, but if you have a chance to look at this over the weekend, that would be wonderful." In a situation like that, mitigation is entirely appropriate. In other situations, however—like a cockpit on a stormy night—it's a problem.

1. Command: "Turn thirty degrees right." That's the most direct and explicit way of making a point imaginable.It's zero mitigation.
2. Crew Obligation Statement: "I think we need to deviate right about now." Notice the use of "we" and the fact that the request is now much less specific. That's a little softer.
3. Crew Suggestion: "Let's go around the weather." Implicit in that statement is "we're in this together."
4. Query: "Which direction would you like to deviate?" That's even softer than a crew suggestion, because the speaker is conceding that he's not in charge.
5. Preference: "I think it would be wise to turn left or right."
6. Hint: "That return at twenty-five miles looks mean." This is the most mitigated statement of all.

...a hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse.

Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn't going to be afraid to speak up.

Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.  Of all of Hofstede's Dimensions, though, perhaps the most interesting is what he called the "Power Distance Index" (PDI). Power distance is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority. To measure it, Hofstede asked questions like "How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers?" To what extent do the "less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally?" How much are older people respected and feared? Are power holders entitled to special privileges?

The high-power distance of Colombians could have created frustration on the part of the first officer because thecaptain failed to show the kind of clear (if not autocratic) decision making expected in high-power distance cultures.The first and second officers may have been waiting for the captain to make decisions, but still may have been unwilling to pose alternatives.

His plane is moments from disaster. But he cannot escape the dynamic dictated to him by his culture in which subordinates must respect the dictates of their superiors. In his mind, he has tried and failed to communicate his plight, and his only conclusion is that he must have somehow offended his superiors in the control tower.

The copilot was right. But they died because... when the copilot asked questions, his implied suggestions were very weak. The captain's reply was to ignore him totally. Perhaps the copilot did not want to appear rebellious, questioning the judgment of the captain, or he did not want to play the fool because he knew that the pilot had a great deal of experience flying in that area. The copilot should have advocated for his own opinions in a stronger way...

But Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said.

high-power distance communication works only when the listener is capable of paying close attention, and
it works only if the two parties in a conversation have the luxury of time, in order to unwind each other's meanings. It doesn't work in an airplane cockpit on a stormy night with an exhausted pilot trying to land at an airport with a broken glide scope.

when we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success—then we don't have to throw up our hands in despair at an airline where pilots crash planes into the sides of mountains. We have a way to make successes out of the unsuccessful.

CHAPTER EIGHT: RICE PADDIES AND MATH TESTS

So rice farmers improved their yields by becoming smarter, by being better managers of their own time, and by making better choices.

rice agriculture is "skill oriented": if you're willing to weed a bit more diligently, and become more adept at fertilizing, and spend a bit more time monitoring water levels, and do a better job keeping the claypan absolutely level, and make use of every square inch of your rice paddy, you'll harvest a bigger crop. Throughout history, not surprisingly, the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost
any other kind of farmer.

What redeemed the life of a rice farmer, however, was the nature of that work. It was a lot like the garment work done by the Jewish immigrants to New York. It was meaningful. First of all, there is a clear relationship in rice farming between effort and reward. The harder you work a rice field, the more it yields. Second, it's complex work. The rice farmer isn't simply planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall. He or she effectively runs a small business, juggling a family workforce, hedging uncertainty through seed selection, building and managing a sophisticated irrigation system, and coordinating the complicated process of harvesting the first crop while simultaneously preparing the second crop.

Don't depend on heaven for food, but on your own two hands carrying the load."

"No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich."

Working really hard is what successful people do, and the genius of the culture formed in the rice paddies is that hard work gave those in the fields a way to find meaning in the midst of great uncertainty and poverty.

Renee persists. She experiments. She goes back over the same issues time and again. She thinks out loud.
She keeps going and going. She simply won't give up. She knows on some vague level that there is something wrong with her theory about how to draw a vertical line, and she won't stop until she's absolutely sure she has it right.

Success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for twenty-two minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after thirty seconds. Put a bunch of Renées in a classroom, and give them the space and time to explore mathematics for themselves, and you could go a long way. Or imagine a country where Renee's doggedness is not the exception, but a cultural trait, embedded as deeply as the culture of honor in the Cumberland Plateau. Now that would be a country good
at math.

CHAPTER NINE: MARITA' S BARGAIN
I didn't highlight anything from this chapter. I am not sure why, maybe I don't find anything interesting.

EPILOGUE: A JAMAICAN STORY
She was a force.
                         
My grandfather may have been an imposing and learned man, but he was an idealist and a dreamer. He buried himself in his books. If he had ambitions for his daughters, he did not have the foresight and energy to make them real. My grandmother did.

She was the inheritor of a legacy  of privilege.

Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky—but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

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There's a lot more to say about the book but I guess this post is far too long already so I should park now. I am very pleased with this book but I am not recommending this to every one. If you want to read for entertainment and fun, this may not be the best book for you. You might be disappointed, too, if you are into success books or self-help books because this is not a teaching manual, I suppose, just like other self-help books I've read. However, I think this will be perfect for those who love to read about philosophy, psychology, and sociology. 

I guess that's it for now. Till my next TURNING PAGES.

Bye.