Outliers

Finally finished the second Benjamin Franklin biography I've read in the past year. Enjoyed it and loved Isaacson's concluding analysis of how appreciation for Franklin has ebbed and flowed based on the cultural climate. Since Franklin was more practical than romantic, many of the romantic era writers didn't express a high opinion of him. On the other hand, during the Great Depression, Franklin's sayings regarding frugality and hard-work caused him to be highly regarded.

After finishing that, I quickly read the latest by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers, which I found fascinating. Some of the highlights:

• An inordinate number of hockey and baseball players are born in the months immediately following the "cutoff date" for their particular sport. For example, if players born within a calendar year are grouped together, those with birthdays in January - March are more likely to become professionals in that sport. The theory is that since nearly a year separates the players, the physical maturity of those older players is enough to get them selected for the all-star and competitive teams, which leads to increased opportunities to practice and better coaching, which increases the separation even further. This same type of pattern can be seen in education.
  
• Research shows it very hard to find someone who is naturally great at something and the magic amount of time that seems to be required to be excellent at an activity is 10,000 hours. The players with the early birthdays mentioned above get a leg up on reaching those 10,000 hours of practice.
• Bill Gates, despite having a brilliant mind and determination, came into some very fortunate situations that allowed him to get in 10,000 hours in computing/programming at a very early age.
• Cultural history plays a big part in our behavior. Rice farming which is very intricate and time-consuming in comparison to farming wheat or corn, helps explain a lot of the Asian work-ethic and success in mathematics. Gladwell talks about the TIMMS test that compares math scores between nations that is accompanied by a very involved demographic questionnaire. A researcher found that there was perfect correlation betweeen how thoroughly the student filled out the demographic questionnaire and how well they scored on the exam.
• Many plane crashes are caused by lack of communication between the co-pilot and the captain or the pilots and air traffic control. This lack of communication can vary culturally based on the power-distance index of the country, which is basically the respect for authority.
• Many of the differences in test-scores between higher-income and lower-income students can be attributed to their respective summer vacations. In other words, both groups of students are shown to progress equally during the school year, but during the summer, the higher-income kids progress significantly more than their lower-income counterparts.
• Advantages from having a high-IQ diminishes significantly past level of IQ needed to successfully obtain a four-year college degree. Once you are "smart enough", other aspects of intelligence come into play more.

This just a sampling of the book, but it really gets into how just restructuring some parts of our society could have a dramatic impact on how many people could be successful. I highly recommend it.

Also, you can access an archive of Gladwell's New Yorker articles here. I particularly enjoyed this one.

For those of you that follow the Sports Guy on ESPN.com, he's also had a couple of email exchanges with Gladwell over the years. You can access the most recent here. And one from 2006 here.