Ian M Rountree

Copywriter, Project Manager, Digital Marketing

Book Review – Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

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Outliers on FlickrI picked up Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success during the Christmas season from the HMV that’s next door to my store in the mall. It happened to be on sale, and I’d heard some decent reviews – I didn’t know what I was getting into, though. It’s not an overstatement to say that Outliers has changed something fundamental in how I do my work, what I see as my advantages, and where the idea of success has totally fallen down around my ears.

Let me explain.

The book is glibly subtitled “The Story of Success” but it’s really not. It’s the story of people who have taken opportunity where they saw it, and identified more accurately their strengths and interests, compared to the rest of us. I have to assume that this is either Gladwell’s summation of what success is, or that the latter simply didn’t fit on a cover as well. Either way, by about fifty pages in, my head had been blown clean off my shoulders about four times.

The first noggin knocker came with the formula the book would follow; identify a seemingly privileged set of people, or an individual, and examine the individual’s roots. Find out what it was that put this group or person where they are, and totally remove the shiny pedestal from their feet. This has helped me see celebrities in a new light, one that thankfully makes them more human.

The second came from Gladwell’s style. He’s a journalist, and it shows, but he’s also a phenomenal storyteller. As a writer myself, I’m always really interested in how authors compose their ideas, and draw the reader through the story as if by way of treasure map. By the time I had figured out where the X was on Malcolm’s map, I was only twenty pages in – but still, the book didn’t get boring, and that’s all about presentation.

The third brain buster was the shear weight of information. From the beginning of the first chapter, where Gladwell dissects the birthdays of hockey players, right up to the last few pages where he tells the story of a Jamaican woman who moved to Britain for love of knowledge (arguably the best story in the book), the statistical density is high. It speaks to the power of Gladwell’s writing, as well, that this barely becomes overwhelming, and that it’s so understandable.

The one that really baked my noodle, however, and that’s changed my life approach in certain respects, was one really simple idea, the one that takes a page to explain, but requires Gladwell to make universally accessible: Your personal history, everything from the beginning of the universe until now that went into the making of the You that you are, provides you with the infinite capacity for wealth, success, the realization of all your dreams, and total, utter fulfilment in whatever flavour you can conjure. It requires only that you identify where you need to be for your highest good, and that you act on that highest good without hesitation, without compromise, and without any thought to how much work you’ll need to do.

There really is no such thing as an overnight success, but you can become one, if you find your highest good and work yourself to every bone you’ve got to get there. Because once you’re there, you can change the world – not just for yourself, but if you do it right and well, for everyone after you.

The people, places and organizations Gladwell has studied in this book: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Eric Schmidt, Chris Langan, Joe Flom, the city of Harlan, Kentucky, Korean Air, rice paddy farmers in China, and these are just a sample. These people, places and organizations build on each other toward that inevitable truth. Your hard work is not enough to make you an outlier. But your hard work at something your entire chronology an ecology have uniquely prepared you for can shift the very earth you walk on and turn your touch to a golden blessing – if you do it right.

By the time Gladwell tells the story of Daisy Nation and her twin daughters in the final chapter, he has taught an entirely new world view, one that prepares the reader to receive the story, which he relates in a very flat, biographical way for portions, with the light of the Outlier on it, and make unwritten connections proving the concept in a beautiful manner.

I would buy this book again. I’d buy it for friends. I’d buy it for you, if you haven’t read it (if I had the cash to spare) – or I’ll lend you mine if you’re in town and can convince me it’ll make its way back to me in one piece. Or, if you want, you can also go buy yourself a copy here because this is definitely a book that’s worth having, and coming back to again whenever you’re feeling downtrodden on the road to success.

Photo by me!

The Automated Prejudice of Scale

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Real Big FishHow do you approach big problems? You know, the ones you feel – at first glimpse – can never be solved? After you ge over the shock, how do you go about tearing down the mountain? On the other hand, what do you do when confronted with a big project at work? Perhaps liaising with a Fortune 100 company at the C-level to get a contract? Do you treat it differently than working with a local entrepreneur?

Of course you do. You have to. Don’t you?

Apparently, Berkeley High might be cutting out its science labs in order that the massive ethnic gap in its students grades might be levelled. I think these teachers are missing something. The move comes with the aim of diverting resources toward helping “underachieving” students get up to snuff; their studies say that black and latino students are doing poorly, and the science labs only benefit white students. I can’t help but wonder if this is an indication of educational idiocy, or if they’re playing to their audience. It’s hard to tell until the work gets done.

But we’re used to bureaucracy doing this sort of thing. It feels external. Often, we’re unaware of treating things differently because of size, because the prejudice is so ingrained it’s mental furniture. If you go shopping for a TV, you probably want a big one, the biggest you can afford, right? Who cares that if you’re sitting six feet away, a 37″ screen is just on the high end of useful for viewing – that 60″ plasma just screams take me home.

It doesn’t always work in a good or productive manner, but we tend to treat anything bigger than our estimates as better when it’s a perceived benefit, and worse when it’s a perceived threat. I should know – I’m 6’2″ tall and fairly large. My friends treat me as localized security, because without more than five seconds exposure (I’m the goofiest person I know, most days) on the face of it, I look big and threatening. Useful? No. Clothes cost half again as much as they do for anyone else, I hit my head on everything including some doorframes depending on my shoes, and I’m vastly out of shape. Still think being 6’2″ and having a football player’s frame is better than whatever shape you’re in?

As a proving converse argument, I had a friend in school who was 5’10” tall and less than a hundred pounds – and still more threatening than me. Is scale still impressive, putting these descriptions side by side?

One of the things we need to be able to do to combat these clouding assumptions is change our paradigm away from immediate impression toward utility. Often these are one and the same, but in the ever-more-convoluted twenty-first century, we can no longer afford to let first impressions count for anything if we’re given evidence the impression was imperfect. Minds are like parachutes, they work better when we let them open.

Another thing we need to get better at is making sure we’re aware of where scale is of any benefit. I’ve got less than three hundred people following me on Twitter, for example, but those I’ve connected with (and if you’re reading this, it’s likely you’re one of them and know where to find me there) are awesome people, well worth following – and well worth promoting on my part as well. Does this make my stream less valuable to the world than @Scobleizer‘s constant ReTweet storms?

If the small fish is connected to the right big fish, does the small fish need to grow?

Photo by jurvetson

you can’t tell me this doesn’t mean something

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Every so often, some luddite troll pops up and barks about how relationships formed on the internet don’t mean anything. I need you to not believe them. Why? Well, I have a story to tell you.

I’m very good at forming relationships online. Having read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers this month, I did some quick math. Gladwell asserts that to be an expert at something you need to accumulate ten thousand hours working at it in a concerted manner. I’ve said before that I’ve been online for nearly half my life. Much of this, between 1999 and 2003, was spent developing, maintaining and curating a freely built, all-players-included rule free fantasy fiction universe. Four years. Given that I graduated High School in 2001 and spent the next two years doing nothing but building this world for ten to sixteen hours a day, I think it’s safe to say I know what I’m talking about. Ten thousand hours happens when you’re working eight hours a day, five days per week. At this point, I expect I’m nearing a hundred thousand hours actively cultivating my environment online. I’ve made a lot of friends.

I nearly proposed to a girl I met online. My co-author for The Dowager Shadow, who lives in England and who I’ve never met (yet) naturally, met me online. I’d met more people from this roleplay during it’s golden age than I had in most of the last two years of school. From this group of people, one family really stood out.

When I needed to escape from a very bad life situation in the summer of 2003, one of my friends – a New Yorker living in Windsor, Ontario at the time, named Dave – offered to take me in. I flew down. Lived there for six months while the fallout happened. Dave moved back to New York, I ended up bringing our other roommate home to Manitoba. That didn’t go so well. But I kept up with Dave afterward.

Dave got married just over a year after – in May of 2005, just after I met my wife – to another roleplayer whom he had met over the summer, a wonderful, vivacious woman named Blythe. She was one of the crowd who came up after Dave and I (to be fair, Dave was there before I was) so much of my getting to know her happened after their wedding, which I missed, because I couldn’t get time off work to fly down.

There was some really pure magic with Dave and Blythe. They fit, the way movies tell you you’re supposed to fit. They had passion, they were similar. Breathtaking to listen to; enriching each others lives in every way possible.

They have two sons. Who don’t have a mother now. Blythe passed away on the 30th of December – complications following a surgery. Suddenly. Unexpectedly. And completely ruinous to hear about.

I heard about this through Facebook. By the end of the day, on the 31st, I had a candle lit, had spoken to Dave on the phone, and had spent the better part of half an hour crying with my wife – who had never met Blythe either, but knew her none the less, because of me, and because of Dave. I wasn’t up late last night to mind the passing of the year; I spent three hours in bed, tending a set of candles and holding a private vigil. The first thing I did when I woke up this morning was light the white candle again – which burned straight through brunch and finally let itself our with more than a half hour of smouldering around four this afternoon.

I hadn’t ever met Blythe in person. How much does this matter? We can talk and talk about relationships and ephemera, but there’s a simple truth behind all of this. I – and others who live in the cloud – let into our lives people who we, under other circumstances, would never have been exposed to. Some of us form friendships that last for years, even decades – I’ve known Dave ten years, now. Some of us nearly propose to what people lacking this avenue of connection would call axe murderers or complete strangers.

Some of us get married, have children, and spend long periods of time happy in spite of everything the world can throw at us. Some of us, eventually, find ourselves shedding tears and sitting in speechless agony because, as connected as we can become, very little can change the fact that I can’t fly to New York and help Dave and his sons through this. One of my three or four best friends, in the world, is in the biggest pain he’ll ever experience and I can’t do anything.

But I can do something. I can tell you this story, and hope that you’ll light a candle for Blythe and Dave and their sons. I can hope that you take yourself, and your connections more seriously. If you allow it, foster it, there are so many sources of connection – to so many people so like you you’d barely believe it. If you allow it, some day you’ll light a candle for a friend you can’t be near enough to hug.

There’s pain in this. This connection and distance. Without this connection, Dave wouldn’t have had such a beautiful life for the last five and more years. Without it, I wouldn’t likely be alive, because I wouldn’t have known Dave, and he couldn’t have made the offer that saved me.

Without this connection and distance, I couldn’t tell you how much impact Blythe’s passing is having on me and my family, none of whom ever met her, and only one of whom met Dave.

I love my friends. I do everything I can for them, including trying, as hard as I can to make you notice, because someone should. Everyone should. Everyone needs someone in their lives like Blythe was for Dave.

Think about that for a few minutes. I’m going to go light another candle for the evening.

Update, January 3rd 2010: While I’m aware this is entirely unrelated, it’s reassuring to see that the idea of concerted connection is making itself known about the web. Chris Brogan made a post today about “Emotions at a Distance” that echoes the intention of this one; take the human connection seriously.

Update, April 18th 2010: It’s been a while since I checked in on this, but it’s worth mentioning. David is getting on alright. So am I. Surprisingly, we just spoke about getting some of the creative work from the old gold game up online. I’ll update with that more later. Keep taking your connections seriously.