'Outliers' Doesn't Succeed

In his oft-quoted 1859 speech “Self-Made Men,” Frederick Douglass famously declared that men were the “architects of their own good fortunes,” and that successful men were “indebted to themselves for themselves.” Today, the speech is often read as a proclamation of “the American Dream,” the idea that men can go from nothing to something—as Douglass himself did—if only they would work hard enough.

This whole Rags-to-Riches trope, says Malcolm Gladwell, author of the bestsellers “Blink” and “The Tipping Point,” is actually nothing more than a pipe dream. In his new book, “Outliers: The Story of Success,” Gladwell tries to dispel the myth that men make their own destinies, instead advancing the thesis that “outliers”—the so-called “best and the brightest”—are the result of the context in which their success took place. Outliers can’t be understood as isolated prodigies because success is not an individual phenomenon; successful people, Gladwell argues, never rise from nothing.

This is hardly an uncontroversial claim in a culture that prides itself on being a meritocracy. Tales of 21st century self-made men (and women)—of J.K. Rowling writing the first chapter of Harry Potter on the back of a café napkin when she was a single mother on welfare, or of Steve Jobs dropping out of Reed College because he couldn’t pay tuition—are no less popular now than they were during Horatio Alger’s day. In a 2007 article titled “Rags to Riches Billionaires,” Forbes reported that “almost two-thirds of the world’s 946 billionaires made their fortunes from scratch, relying on grit and determination, and not good genes.” Clearly, while the American public loves wealth, we love self-made wealth even more.

Gladwell divides his treatise into two sections, one on opportunity, exposing how so many success stories rely on catching chance breaks, and the other on legacy, which traces the cultural and familial influences that shape successful individuals. The opportunity section is by far the more compelling of the two.

The most interesting of these environmental theories of success is the “Matthew Effect,” the notion that success is the result of what sociologists call “accumulative advantage”—because those who are successful initially are most likely to be given “the special opportunities that lead to further success.”

A fascinating example that Gladwell explores is the case of hockey players in Canada. In hockey-crazed Canada, boys start playing hockey at a very young age and are placed in leagues based on their age group. The eligibility cutoff for each of these age groups is January 1, meaning that in the younger leagues those kids who were born in the first three months of the year are likely to be larger, stronger, and more mature than their peers who are nine or 10 months younger than they are. (At age eight or nine, a few months can make a significant difference in physical maturity.) And since coaches in Canada begin selecting players for the traveling all-star teams or “rep” squads at the age of nine or ten, those who were born closer to the cutoff date are more likely to be selected for these advanced teams. They then receive extra attention and coaching, becoming even more skilled compared to their slightly younger peers. The result is that by the time we look at the professional hockey leagues in Canada, a shockingly disproportionate number of the players on the roster were born in January, February and March.

This effect also affects schooling. Those who are closer to eligibility cutoffs for school enrollment and are older when they begin kindergarten and pre-school are likely to be more mature and more intellectually advanced than those born farther away from the cutoff. This arbitrary cutoff date then has a real impact on the success of these students; at many colleges, Gladwell claims, students who are in the younger half of their age-class are underrepresented by more than 10 percent. But don’t worry, warm weather babies: a simple Harvard College Facebook search reveals that no birth month predominates among current undergraduates.

While Gladwell’s theory might not predict Harvard’s demographics, he isn’t trying to advance a catch-all explanation for success. He’s not claiming that one factor, like birth month, could be the primary determinant of whether we fail or whether we make it big. Rather, his contention is that success is the interaction of multiple external factors and the individual’s responses to them.

Still, Gladwell is unable to clearly articulate why any of this matters. Successful people get lucky, much luckier than we like to think. So what? If different hockey leagues were established with different eligibility cutoffs, Gladwell says, Canada could have double the hockey talent available for the professional hockey leagues. But is exceptional talent still special if everyone is exceptional? Should we make success available to everyone? And if so many hidden factors predispose some individuals for success, is it even possible to do so?

Gladwell’s failure to answer these and other questions leaves his argument feeling incomplete. Still, the book is eminently readable, and though it may not shake your faith in “grit and determination,” it is certain to make you think. For some, reading “Outliers” may feel like a personal attack on their pride in their own achievements. For others, it may be a vindication of their belief that the American Dream was never really more than a myth created to mask structural inequalities in our country.

Perhaps the problem is that the “self-made man” has become a Super Myth, an idea so deeply carved into our national identity and cultural consciousness that we refuse to believe that some people will get lucky and some people won’t. The specific purpose of Frederick Douglass’s speech—often glossed over in history books—was to argue that freedmen ought to be given equal opportunities for success, and that they should jump at those opportunities when they presented themselves. We forget that ultimately even Douglass concludes that “properly speaking, there are in the world no such men as self-made men...We have all either begged, borrowed, or stolen.”

—Reviewer Anjali Motgi can be reached at amotgi@fas.harvard.edu.