Outliers: The Story of Success

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Personal Demons Stacia Kane Year: 2008 Language: english File: PDF, 552 KB

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Rhetorical structure theory: A theory of text organization (ISI reprint series. University of Southern California. Information Sciences Institute) University of Southern California, Information Sciences Institute William C Mann Year: 1987 Language: english File: PDF, 945 KB

Ou tliers
THE

STORY

OF

SUCCESS

MALCOLM
GLADWELL
#1 bestselling author of

The Tipping Point and Blink

$27.99
$30.99 in Ca n ada

Why do some people succeed far more than others?
There is a story that is usually told about
extremely successful people, a story that focuses
on intelligence and ambition. In Outliers Malcolm
Gladwell argues that the true story of success is
very different, and that if we want to understand

how some people thrive, we should spend more
time looking around them - at such things as

their family, their birthplace, or even their birth
dale. The story of success is more complex - and

a lot more interesting - than it initially appears.
Outliers explains what the Beatles and Bill
Gates have in common, the extraordinary success

of Asians at math, the hidden advantages of star
athletes, why all top New York lawyers have the
same resume, and the reason you've never heard
of the world's smartest man - all in terms of gen·
eration, family, culture, and class. It matters what
year you were born if you want to be a Silicon

Valley billionaire, Gladwell argues, and it matters
where you were born if you want to be a suc-

cessful pilot. The lives of outliers - those people
whose achievements fall outside normal experience - follow a peculiar and unexpected logic ,

and in making that logic plain Gladwell presents a
fascinating and provocative blueprint for making
the most of human potential.

(continued on backflap)

In The Tipping Point Malcolm Gladwell

changed the way we und erstand th e world.
In Blink he changed th e way we think about
thinking. Outliers will transform the way we

understand sliccess.

MALCOLM GLADWELL

is the author of the

# J intemational bestsellers The Tipping Point and

Blink. He is a staff writer for The New Yorker
,mel was fomlerly a business and science reporter

at the Washington Post. For more infonnation about
Malcohn Gladwell, go to www.gladwell.com.
LOOK FOR

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OUTLIERS
The Story of Success

MALCOLM GLADWELL

LITTLE, BROWN AND COMPANY
NEW YORK·

BOSTON·

LONDON

Copyright © 2008 by Malcolm Gladwell
All rights reserved. Except as permitted under the u.s. Copyright Act
of 1976, no part of this publication may be reproduced, distributed, or
transmitted in any form or by any means, or stored in a database or retrieval
system, without the prior written permission of the publisher.
Little, Brown and Company
Hachette Book Group
237 Park Avenue, New York, NY 10017
Visit our Web site at www.HachetteBookGroup.com
First Edition: November 2008
Little, Brown and Company is a division of Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The Little, Brown name and logo are trademarks of
Hachette Book Group, Inc.
The author is grateful for permission to use the following copyrighted material:
American Prometheus, by Kai Bird and Martin]. Sherwin, copyright 2005
by Kai Bird and Martin]. Sherwin. Used by permission of Alfred A. Knopf,
a division of Random House, Inc.; Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and
Family Life, by Annette Lareau, copyright 2003 Regents of the University of
California. Published by the University of California Press; "Intercultural
Communication in Cognitive Values: Americans and Koreans, by Ho-min
Sohn, University of Hawaii Press, 1983; The Happiest Man: The Life of Louis
Borgenicht (New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1942). Used by permission of
Lindy Friedman Sobel and Alice Friedman Holzman.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Gladwell, Malcolm.
Outliers: the story of success / Malcolm Gladwell.- 1st ed.
p.cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
HC ISBN 978-0-316-01792-3
Int'l ed. ISBN 978-0-316-03669-6
1. Successful people.
2. Success. I. Title.
BF637·S8G5332008
302 -dc22
10

9

7

6

4

3

2

RRD-IN

Book designed by Meryl Levavi
Printed in the United States of America

Contents

INTRODUCTION

The Roseto Mystery
"These people were dying of old age.
That's it." 3

PART ONE: OPPORTUNITY
ONE

The Matthew Effect
"For unto everyone that hath
shall be given, and he shall have
abundance. But from him that hath
not shall be taken away even that
which he hath." - Matthew 25:29 15

CONTENTS

TWO

The 10,OOO-Hour Rule
"In Hamburg, we had to play
for eight hours." 35
THREE

The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 1
"Knowledge of a boy's IQ is of
little help if you are faced with
a formful of clever boys." 69
FO U R

The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2
"After protracted negotiations,
it was agreed that Robert would be
put on probation." 91
FIVE

The Three Lessons of Joe Flom
"Mary got a quarter."

116

PART TWO: LEGACY
SI X

Harlan, Kentucky
"Die like a man, like your
brother did!" 161

V II I

CONTENTS

SEVEN

The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes
"Captain, the weather radar has
helped us a lot." 177
E IGH T

Rice Paddies and Math Tests
"No one who can rise before dawn three
hundred sixty days a year fails to
make his family rich." 224
NINE

Marita's Bargain
"All my friends now are from KIPP."
EPILOGUE

A Jamaican Story

"If a progeny of young colored
children is brought forth, these
are emancipated." 270

NOTES

287

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

INDEX

IX

301

297

250

OUTLIERS

INTRODUCTION

The Roseto Mystery
"THESE PEOPLE WERE DYING
OF OLD AGE. THAT'S IT."

out·H·er \-,li(-;) )r\ noun
I: something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body
2: a statistical observation that is markedly different in
value from the others of the sample

1.
Roseto Valfortore lies one hundred miles southeast of
Rome in the Apennine foothills of the Italian province of
Foggia. In the style of medieval villages, the town is organized around a large central square. Facing the square is the
Palazzo Marchesale, the palace of the Saggese family, once
the great landowner of those parts. An archway to one side
leads to a church, the Madonna del Carmine-Our Lady
of Mount Carmine. Narrow stone steps run up the hillside, flanked by closely clustered two-story stone houses
with red-tile roofs.

OUTLIERS

For centuries, the paesani of Roseto worked in the
marble quarries in the surrounding hills, or cultivated the
fields in the terraced valley below, walking four and five
miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night. Life was
hard. The townsfolk were barely literate and desperately
poor and without much hope for economic betterment
until word reached Roseto at the end of the nineteenth
century of the land of opportunity across the ocean.
In January of 1882, a group of eleven Rosetans-ten
men and one boy-set sail for New York. They spent
their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a tavern on Mulberry Street, in Manhattan's Little Italy. Then
they ventured west, eventually finding jobs in a slate
quarry ninety miles west of the city near the town of Bangor, Pennsylvania. The following year, fifteen Rosetans
left Italy for America, and several members of that group
ended up in Bangor as well, joining their compatriots in
the slate quarry. Those immigrants, in turn, sent word
back to Roseto about the promise of the New World, and
soon one group of Rosetans after another packed their
bags and headed for Pennsylvania, until the initial stream
of immigrants became a flood. In 1894 alone, some twelve
hundred Rosetans applied for passports to America, leaving entire streets of their old village abandoned.
The Rosetans began buying land on a rocky hillside
connected to Bangor by a steep, rutted wagon path. They
built closely clustered two-story stone houses with slate
roofs on narrow streets running up and down the hillside.
They built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel and named the main street, on which it stood, Gari-

4

THE ROSETO MYSTERY

baldi Avenue, after the great hero of Italian unification. In
the beginning, they called their town New Italy. But they
soon changed it to Roseto, which seemed only appropriate given that almost all of them had come from the same
village in Italy.
In 1896, a dynamic young priest by the name of Father
Pasquale de Nisco took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel. De Nisco set up spiritual societies and organized
festivals. He encouraged the townsfolk to clear the land
and plant onions, beans, potatoes, melons, and fruit trees
in the long backyards behind their houses. He gave out
seeds and bulbs. The town came to life. The Rosetans
began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes
for homemade wine. Schools, a park, a convent, and a
cemetery were built. Small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue. More
than a dozen factories sprang up making blouses for the
garment trade. Neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh
and English, and the next town over was overwhelmingly
German, which meant-given the fractious relationships
between the English and Germans and Italians in those
years-that Roseto stayed strictly for Rosetans. If you
had wandered up and down the streets of Roseto in Pennsylvania in the first few decades after 1900, you would
have heard only Italian, and not just any Italian but the
precise southern Foggian dialect spoken back in the Italian Roseto. Roseto, Pennsylvania, was its own tiny, selfsufficient world-all but unknown by the society around
it-and it might well have remained so but for a man
named Stewart Wolf.
Wolf was a physician. He studied digestion and the

OUTLIERS

stomach and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma. He spent his summers on a farm in
Pennsylvania, not far from Roseto-although that, of
course, didn't mean much, since Roseto was so much in
its own world that it was possible to live in the next town
and never know much about it. "One of the times when
we were up there for the summer-this would have been
in the late nineteen fifties - I was invited to give a talk
at the local medical society," Wolf said years later in an
interview. "After the talk was over, one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer. And while we were having
a drink, he said, 'You know, I've been practicing for seventeen years. I get patients from all over, and I rarely find
anyone from Roseto under the age of sixty-five with heart
disease.' "
Wolf was taken aback. This was the 1950S, years before
the advent of cholesterol-lowering drugs and aggressive
measures to prevent heart disease. Heart attacks were an
epidemic in the United States. They were the leading cause
of death in men under the age of sixty-five. It was impossible to be a doctor, common sense said, and not see heart
disease.
Wolf decided to investigate. He enlisted the support
of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma.
They gathered together the death certificates from residents of the town, going back as many years as they could.
They analyzed physicians' records. They took medical
histories and constructed family genealogies. "We got
busy," Wolf said. "We decided to do a preliminary study.
We started in nineteen sixty-one. The mayor said, 'All my

6

THE ROSETO MYSTERY

sisters are going to help you.' He had four sisters. He said,
'You can have the town council room.' I said, 'Where are
you going to have council meetings?' He said, 'Well, we'll
postpone them for a while.' The ladies would bring us
lunch. We had little booths where we could take blood, do
EKGs. We were there for four weeks. Then I talked with
the authorities. They gave us the school for the summer.
We invited the entire population of Roseto to be tested."
The results were astonishing. In Roseto, virtually no
one under fifty-five had died of a heart attack or showed
any signs of heart disease. For men over sixty-five, the
death rate from heart disease in Roseto was roughly half
that of the United States as a whole. The death rate from
all causes in Roseto, in fact, was 30 to 35 percent lower
than expected.
Wolf brought in a friend of his, a sociologist from
Oklahoma named John Bruhn, to help him. "I hired medical students and sociology grad students as interviewers, and in Roseto we went house to house and talked to
every person aged twenty-one and over," Bruhn remembers. This happened more than fifty years ago, but Bruhn
still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he described
what they found. "There was no suicide, no alcoholism,
no drug addiction, and very little crime. They didn't have
anyone on welfare. Then we looked at peptic ulcers. They
didn't have any of those either. These people were dying
of old age. That's it."
Wolf's profession had a name for a place like Roseto - a
place that lay outside everyday experience, where the normal rules did not apply. Roseto was an outlier.

7

OUTLIERS

2.
Wolf's first thought was that the Rosetans must have held
on to some dietary practices from the Old World that left
them healthier than other Americans. But he quickly realized that wasn't true. The Rosetans were cooking with
lard instead of with the much healthier olive oil they had
used back in Italy. Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt,
oil, and perhaps some tomatoes, anchovies, or onions.
Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage, pepperoni, salami, ham, and sometimes eggs. Sweets such as
biscotti and taralli used to be reserved for Christmas and
Easter; in Roseto they were eaten year-round. When Wolf
had dieticians analyze the typical Rosetan's eating habits,
they found that a whopping 41 percent of their calories
came from fat. Nor was this a town where people got up at
dawn to do yoga and run a brisk six miles. The Pennsylvanian Rosetans smoked heavily and many were struggling
with obesity.
If diet and exercise didn't explain the findings, then
what about genetics? The Rosetans were a close-knit group
from the same region of Italy, and Wolf's next thought was
to wonder whether they were of a particularly hardy stock
that protected them from disease. So he tracked down relatives of the Rosetans who were living in other parts of the
United States to see if they shared the same remarkable
good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania. They didn't.
He then looked at the region where the Rosetans lived.
Was it possible that there was something about living in the
foothills of eastern Pennsylvania that was good for their
health? The two closest towns to Roseto were Bangor,
8

THE ROSETO MYSTERY

which was just down the hill, and Nazareth, a few miles
away. These were both about the same size as Roseto, and
both were populated with the same kind of hardworking
European immigrants. Wolf combed through both towns'
medical records. For men over sixty-five, the death rates
from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were three
times that of Roseto. Another dead end.
What Wolf began to realize was that the secret of
Roseto wasn't diet or exercise or genes or location. It had
to be Roseto itself. As Bruhn and Wolf walked around
the town, they figured out why. They looked at how the
Rosetans visited one another, stopping to chat in Italian on the street, say, or cooking for one another in their
backyards. They learned about the extended family clans
that underlay the town's social structure. They saw how
many homes had three generations living under one roof,
and how much respect grandparents commanded. They
went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the
unifying and calming effect of the church. They counted
twenty-two separate civic organizations in a town of just
under two thousand people. They picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of the community, which discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped
the unsuccessful obscure their failures.
In transplanting the paesani culture of southern Italy
to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania, the Rosetans had created a powerful, protective social structure capable of
insulating them from the pressures of the modern world.
The Rosetans were healthy because of where they were
from, because of the world they had created for themselves
in their tiny little town in the hills.

9

OUTLIERS

"I remember going to Roseto for the first time, and
you'd see three-generational family meals, all the bakeries, the people walking up and down the street, sitting on
their porches talking to each other, the blouse mills where
the women worked during the day, while the men worked
in the slate quarries," Bruhn said. "It was magical."
When Bruhn and Wolf first presented their findings
to the medical community, you can imagine the kind of
skepticism they faced. They went to conferences where
their peers were presenting long rows of data arrayed in
complex charts and referring to this kind of gene or that
kind of physiological process, and they themselves were
talking instead about the mysterious and magical benefits
of people stopping to talk to one another on the street and
of having three generations under one roof. Living a long
life, the conventional wisdom at the time said, depended
to a great extent on who we were-that is, our genes. It
depended on the decisions we made - on what we chose
to eat, and how much we chose to exercise, and how effectively we were treated by the medical system. No one was
used to thinking about health in terms of community.
Wolf and Bruhn had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an
entirely new way: they had to get them to realize that they
wouldn't be able to understand why someone was healthy
if all they did was think about an individual's personal
choices or actions in isolation. They had to look beyond
the individual. They had to understand the culture he or
she was a part of, and who their friends and families were,
and what town their families came from. They had to

10

THE ROSETO MYSTERY

appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit
and the people we surround ourselves with have a profound effect on who we are.
In Outliers, I want to do for our understanding of
success what Stewart Wolf did for our understanding of
health.

I I

PART ONE
OPPORTUNITY

CHAPTER

ONE

The Matthew Effect
"FOR UNTO EVERYONE THAT HATH SHALL
BE GIVEN, AND HE SHALL HAVE ABUNDANCE.
BUT FROM HIM THAT HATH NOT SHALL BE
TAKEN AWAY EVEN THAT WHICH HE HATH."
-

MATTHEW

25:29

1.
One warm, spring day in May of 2007, the Medicine Hat
Tigers and the Vancouver Giants met for the Memorial
Cup hockey championships in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Tigers and the Giants were the two finest teams in
the Canadian Hockey League, which in turn is the finest
junior hockey league in the world. These were the future
stars of the sport-seventeen-, eighteen-, and nineteenyear-olds who had been skating and shooting pucks since
they were barely more than toddlers.
The game was broadcast on Canadian national television. Up and down the streets of downtown Vancouver,
Memorial Cup banners hung from the lampposts. The
arena was packed. A long red carpet was rolled out on the
ice, and the announcer introduced the game's dignitaries. First came the premier of British Columbia, Gordon
Campbell. Then, amid tumultuous applause, out walked

OUTLIERS

Gordie Howe, one of the legends of the game. "Ladies and
gentlemen," the announcer boomed. "Mr. Hockey!"
For the next sixty minutes, the two teams played spirited, aggressive hockey. Vancouver scored first, early in
the second period, on a rebound by Mario Bliznak. Late
in the second period, it was Medicine Hat's turn, as the
team's scoring leader, Darren Helm, fired a quick shot past
Vancouver's goalie, Tyson Sexsmith. Vancouver answered
in the third period, scoring the game's deciding goal, and
then, when Medicine Hat pulled its goalie in desperation,
Vancouver scored a third time.
In the aftermath of the game, the players and their
families and sports reporters from across the country
crammed into the winning team's locker room. The air
was filled with cigar smoke and the smell of champagne
and sweat-soaked hockey gear. On the wall was a handpainted banner: "Embrace the Struggle." In the center
of the room the Giants' coach, Don Hay, stood mistyeyed. "I'm just so proud of these guys," he said. "Just look
around the locker room. There isn't one guy who didn't
buy in wholeheartedly."
Canadian hockey is a meritocracy. Thousands of Canadian boys begin to play the sport at the "novice" level,
before they are even in kindergarten. From that point on,
there are leagues for every age class, and at each of those
levels, the players are sifted and sorted and evaluated,
with the most talented separated out and groomed for
the next level. By the time players reach their midteens,
the very best of the best have been channeled into an elite
league known as Major Junior A, which is the top of the
pyramid. And if your Major Junior A team plays for the
16

THE MATTHEW EFFECT

Memorial Cup, that means you are at the very top of the
top of the pyramid.
This is the way most sports pick their future stars. It's
the way soccer is organized in Europe and South America, and it's the way Olympic athletes are chosen. For that
matter, it is not all that different from the way the world
of classical music picks its future virtuosos, or the way
the world of ballet picks its future ballerinas, or the way
our elite educational system picks its future scientists and
intellectuals.
You can't buy your way into Major Junior A hockey. It
doesn't matter who your father or mother is, or who your
grandfather was, or what business your family is in. Nor
does it matter if you live in the most remote corner of the
most northerly province in Canada. If you have ability,
the vast network of hockey scouts and talent spotters will
find you, and if you are willing to work to develop that
ability, the system will reward you. Success in hockey is
based on individual merit-and both of those words are
important. Players are judged on their own performance,
not on anyone else's, and on the basis of their ability, not
on some other arbitrary fact.
Or are they?

2.
This is a book about outliers, about men and women who
do things that are out of the ordinary. Over the course of
the chapters ahead, I'm going to introduce you to one kind
of outlier after another: to geniuses, business tycoons, rock
stars, and software programmers. We're going to uncover

OUTLIERS

the secrets of a remarkable lawyer, look at what separates
the very best pilots from pilots who have crashed planes,
and try to figure out why Asians are so good at math. And
in examining the lives of the remarkable among us-the
skilled, the talented, and the driven - I will argue that
there is something profoundly wrong with the way we
make sense of success.
What is the question we always ask about the successful?
We want to know what they're like-what kind of personalities they have, or how intelligent they are, or what kind of
lifestyles they have, or what special talents they might have
been born with. And we assume that it is those personal
qualities that explain how that individual reached the top.
In the autobiographies published every year by the billionaire/entrepreneur/rock starlcelebrity, the story line is
always the same: our hero is born in modest circumstances
and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to
greatness. In the Bible, Joseph is cast out by his brothers
and sold into slavery and then rises to become the pharaoh's
right-hand man on the strength of his own brilliance and
insight. In the famous nineteenth-century novels of Horatio
Alger, young boys born into poverty rise to riches through
a combination of pluck and initiative. "I think overall it's a
disadvantage," Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his
business career that he was the son of an American president
and the brother of an American president and the grandson
of a wealthy Wall Street banker and US senator. When he
ran for governor of Florida, he repeatedly referred to himself as a "self-made man," and it is a measure of how deeply
we associate success with the efforts of the individual that
few batted an eye at that description.

THE MATTHEW EFFECT

"Lift up your heads," Robert Winthrop told the crowd
many years ago at the unveiling of a statue of that great
hero of American independence Benjamin Franklin, "and
look at the image of a man who rose from nothing, who
owed nothing to parentage or patronage, who enjoyed no
advantages of early education which are not open - a hundredfold open - to yourselves, who performed the most
menial services in the businesses in which his early life
was employed, but who lived to stand before Kings, and
died to leave a name which the world will never forget."
In Outliers, I want to convince you that these kinds of
personal explanations of success don't work. People don't
rise from nothing. We do owe something to parentage and
patronage. The people who stand before kings may look
like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to
learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways
others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we
grew up. The culture we belong to and the legacies passed
down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine. It's not enough
to ask what successful people are like, in other words. It is
only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the
logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't.
Biologists often talk about the "ecology" of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just
because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest
also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil
around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its
bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it

OUTLIERS

matured. We all know that successful people come from
hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight
that warmed them, the soil in which they put down the
roots, and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky
enough to avoid? This is not a book about tall trees. It's a
book about forests-and hockey is a good place to start
because the explanation for who gets to the top of the
hockey world is a lot more interesting and complicated
than it looks. In fact, it's downright peculiar.

3.
Here is the player roster of the 2007 Medicine Hat Tigers.
Take a close look and see if you can spot anything strange
about it.
No. Name

Pos. UR Height Weight Birth Date

9

C

R

Brennan

5'8"

Hometown

173

Feb. 14,1988 Martensville,
SK

Bosch
11

Scott Wasden C

R

6'1 "

188

Jan.4,1988

12

Colton Grant LW L

5'9"

177

Mar. 20, 1989 Standard, AB

14

Darren Helm LW L

6'

182

Jan. 21, 1987 St. Andrews,
MB

Westbank, BC

15

Derek Dorsett RW L

5'11 "

178

Dec. 20, 1986 Kindersley, SK

16

DaineTodd

R

5'10"

173

Jan. 10, 1987 Red Deer,AB

17

Tyler Swystun RW R

5'11 "

185

Jan. 15, 1988 Cochrane, AB

C

19

Matt Lowry

C

R

6'

186

Mar. 2,1988 Neepawa,MB

20

Kevin
Undershute

LW L

6'

178

Apr. 12, 1987 Medicine Hat,
AB

21

Jerrid Sauer

RW R

5'10"

196

Sep. 12, 1987 Medicine Hat,
AB

20

THE MATTHEW EFFECT

No. Name

Pos. LlR Height Weight Birth Date

Hometown

22

Tyler Ennis

C

L

5'9'

160

Oct. 6, 1989 Edmonton,
AB

23

Jordan
Hickmott

C

R

6'

183

Apr. 11, 1990 Mission,BC

25

Jakub Rumpel RW R

5'8 '

166

Jan. 27, 1987 Hrnciarovce,
SLO

R

5'11 '

168

Jan. 26,1989 Didsbury, AB

36

Chris Stevens LW L

5'10 '

197

Aug. 20, 1986 Dawson
Creek, BC

3

Gord Baldwin D

L

6'5'

205

Mar. 1, 1987 Winnipeg, MB

4

David
Schlemko

D

L

6'1'

195

May 7, 1987

5

Trever Glass

D

L

6'

190

Jan. 22, 1988 Cochrane, AB

10

Kris Russell

D

L

5'10'

177

May 2,1987

Caroline, AB

18

Michael Sauer D

R

6'3 '

205

Aug. 7, 1987

Sartell,MN

24

Mark
Isherwood

D

R

6'

183

Jan. 31, 1989 Abbotsford,
BC

27

Shayne Brown D

L

6'1 '

198

Feb. 20,1989 Stony Plain,
AB

29

Jordan
Bendfeld

R

6'3 '

230

Feb. 9, 1988

31

Ryan Holfeld G

L

5'11 '

166

Jun. 29, 1989 LeRoy,SK

33

Matt Keetley G

R

6'2'

189

Apr. 27, 1986 Medicine Hat,
AB

28

Bretton

C

Cameron

D

Edmonton,
AB

Leduc,AB

Do you see it? Don't feel bad if you don't, because
for many years in the hockey world no one did. It wasn't
until the mid-I98os, in fact, that a Canadian psychologist
named Roger Barnsley first drew attention to the phenomenon of relative age.
Barnsley was at a Lethbridge Broncos hockey game in

2 I

OUTLIERS

southern Alberta, a team that played in the same Major Junior
A league as the Vancouver Giants and the Medicine Hat
Tigers. He was there with his wife, Paula, and their two boys,
and his wife was reading the program, when she ran across a
roster list just like the one above that you just looked at.
"Roger," she said, "do you know when these young
men were born?"
Barnsley said yes. "They're all between sixteen and
twenty, so they'd be born in the late sixties."
"No, no," Paula went on. "What month."
"1 thought she was crazy," Barnsley remembers. "But
1 looked through it, and what she was saying just jumped
out at me. For some reason, there were an incredible number of January, February, and March birth dates."
Barnsley went home that night and looked up the birth
dates of as many professional hockey players as he could
find. He saw the same pattern. Barnsley, his wife, and a colleague, A. H. Thompson, then gathered statistics on every
player in the Ontario Junior Hockey League. The story
was the same. More players were born in January than in
any other month, and by an overwhelming margin. The
second most frequent birth month? February. The third?
March. Barnsley found that there were nearly five and a
half times as many Ontario Junior Hockey League players born in January as were born in November. He looked
at the all-star teams of eleven-year-olds and thirteen-yearolds-the young players selected for elite traveling squads.
Same story. He looked at the composition of the National
Hockey League. Same story. The more he looked, the more
Barnsley came to believe that what he was seeing was not
a chance occurrence but an iron law of Canadian hockey:

22

THE MATTHEW EFFECT

in any elite group of hockey players-the very best of
the best-40 percent of the players will have been born
between January and March, 30 percent between April
and June, 20 percent between July and September, and 10
percent between October and December.
"In all my years in psychology, I have never run into
an effect this large," Barnsley says. "You don't even need
to do any statistical analysis. You just look at it."
Look back at the Medicine Hat roster. Do you see it
now? Seventeen out of the twenty-five players on the team
were born in January, February, March, or April.
Here is the play-by-play for the first two goals in the
Memorial Cup final, only this time I've substituted the players' birthdays for their names. It no longer sounds like the
championship of Canadian junior hockey. It now sounds
like a strange sporting ritual for teenage boys born under
the astrological signs Capricorn, Aquarius, and Pisces.
March 11 starts around one side of the Tigers' net, leaving the puck for his teammate January 4, who passes it
to January 22, who flips it back to March 12, who shoots
point-blank at the Tigers' goalie, April 27. April 27 blocks
the shot, but it's rebounded by Vancouver's March 6. He
shoots! Medicine Hat defensemen February 9 and February 14 dive to block the puck while January 10 looks on
helplessly. March 6 scores!

Let's go to the second period now.
Medicine Hat's turn. The Tigers' scoring leader,January
21, charges down the right side of the ice. He stops and

23

OUTLIERS

circles, eluding the Vancouver defenseman February 15.
January 21 then deftly passes the puck to his teammate
December 20-wow! what's he doing out there?!-who
shrugs off the onrushing defender May 17 and slides a
cross-crease pass back to January 21. He shoots! Vancouver defenseman March 12 dives, trying to block the shot.
Vancouver's goalie, March 19, lunges helplessly. January
21 scores! He raises his hands in triumph. His teammate
May 2 jumps on his back with joy.

4.
The explanation for this is quite simple. It has nothing to
do with astrology, nor is there anything magical about the
first three months of the year. It's simply that in Canada
the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January I. A
boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing
alongside someone who doesn't turn ten until the end of
the year-and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelvemonth gap in age represents an enormous difference in
physical maturity.
This being Canada, the most hockey-crazed country
on earth, coaches start to select players for the traveling
"rep" squad-the all-star teams-at the age of nine or ten,
and of course they are more likely to view as talented
the bigger and more coordinated players, who have had
the benefit of critical extra months of maturity.
And what happens when a player gets chosen for a
rep squad? He gets better coaching, and his teammates
are better, and he plays fifty or seventy-five games a
season instead of twenty games a season like those left

THE MATTHEW EFFECT

behind in the "house" league, and he practices twice as
much as, or even three times more than, he would have
otherwise. In the beginning, his advantage isn't so much
that he is inherently better but only that he is a little older.
But by the age of thirteen or fourteen, with the benefit of
better coaching and all that extra practice under his belt,
he really is better, so he's the one more likely to make it
to the Major Junior A league, and from there into the big
leagues."
Barnsley argues that these kinds of skewed age distributions exist whenever three things happen: selection,
streaming, and differentiated experience. If you make a
decision about who is good and who is not good at an early
age; if you separate the "talented" from the "untalented";
and if you provide the "talented" with a superior experience, then you're going to end up giving a huge advantage
to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff
date.
In the United States, football and basketball don't
select, stream, and differentiate quite as dramatically. As

':. The way Canadians select hockey players is a beautiful example of what the sociologist Robert Merton famously called a "selffulfilling prophecy" -a situation where "a false definition, in the
beginning ... evokes a new behavior which makes the original false
conception come true." Canadians start with a false definition of who
the best nine- and ten-year-old hockey players are. They're just picking the oldest every year. But the way they treat those "all-stars" ends
up making their original false judgment look correct. As Merton puts
it: "This specious validity of the self-fulfilling prophecy perpetuates
a reign of error. For the prophet will cite the actual course of events as
proof that he was right from the very beginning."

25

OUTLIERS

a result, a child can be a bit behind physically in those
sports and still playas much as his or her more mature
peers.';- But baseball does. The cutoff date for almost all
nonschool baseball leagues in the United States is July 31,
with the result that more major league players are born in
August than in any other month. (The numbers are striking: in 2005, among Americans playing major league baseball 505 were born in August versus 313 born in July.)
European soccer, similarly, is organized like hockey
and baseball-and the birth-date distributions in that
sport are heavily skewed as well. In England, the eligibility date is September I, and in the football association's
premier league at one point in the 1990S, there were 288
players born between September and November and only
136 players born between June and August. In international soccer, the cutoff date used to be August I, and
in one recent junior world championship tournament,
135 players were born in the three months after August
I, and just 22 were born in May, June, and July. Today
the cutoff date for international junior soccer is January I. Take a look at the roster of the 2007 Czechoslovakian National Junior soccer team, which made the Junior
World Cup finals.
Here we go again:

;f A physically immature basketball player in an American city can
probably playas many hours of basketball in a given year as a relatively older child because there are so many basketball courts and so
many people willing to play. It's not like ice hockey, where you need a
rink. Basketball is saved by its accessibility and ubiquity.

THE MATTHEW EFFECT

Birth Date

Position

No.

Player
Marcel Gecov

Jan. I, 1988

MF

2

Ludek Frydrych

Jan. 3, 1987

GK

3

Petr Janda

Jan. 5, 1987

MF

4

Jakub Dohnalek

Jan. 12,1988

DF

5

Jakub Mares

Jan. 26, 1987

MF

6

Michal Held

Jan. 27, 1987

DF

7

Marek Strestik

Feb. I, 1987

FW

8

Jiri Valenta

Feb. 14, 1988

MF

9

Jan Simunek

Feb. 20, 1987

DF

10

Tomas Oklestek

Feb. 21, 1987

MF

11

Lubos Kalouda

Feb. 21, 1987

MF

12

RadekPetr

Feb. 24, 1987

GK

13

Ondre; Mazuch

Mar. IS, 1989

DF

14

Ondre; Kudela

Mar. 26, 1987

MF

15

Marek Suchy

Mar. 29, 1988

DF

16

Martin Fenin

Apr. 16,1987

FW

17

Tomas Pekhart

May 26,1989

FW

18

Lukas Kuban

Jun. 22, 1987

DF

19

Tomas Cihlar

Jun. 24,1987

DF

20

Tomas Frystak

Aug. 18, 1987

GK

21

Tomas Micola

Sep. 26, 1988

MF

At the national team tryouts, the Czech soccer coaches
might as well have told everyone born after midsummer
that they should pack their bags and go home.
Hockey and soccer are just games, of course, involving
a select few. But these exact same biases also show up in

OUTLIERS

areas of much more consequence, like education. Parents
with a child born at the end of the calendar year often
think about holding their child back before the start of
kindergarten: it's hard for a five-year-old to keep up with
a child born many months earlier. But most parents, one
suspects, think that whatever disadvantage a younger child
faces in kindergarten eventually goes away. But it doesn't.
It's just like hockey. The small initial advantage that the
child born in the early part of the year has over the child
born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into
patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for
years.
Recently, two economists - Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey-Iooked at the relationship between scores
on what is called the Trends in International Mathematics
and Science Study, or TIMSS (math and science tests given
every four years to children in many countries around the
world), and month of birth. They found that among fourth
graders, the oldest children scored somewhere between
four and twelve percentile points better than the youngest children. That, as Dhuey explains, is a "huge effect." It
means that if you take two intellectually equivalent fourth
graders with birthdays at opposite ends of the cutoff date,
the older student could score in the eightieth percentile,
while the younger one could score in the sixty-eighth
percentile. That's the difference between qualifying for a
gifted program and not.
"It's just like sports," Dhuey said. "We do ability grouping early on in childhood. We have advanced reading groups
and advanced math groups. So, early on, if we look at
28

THE MATTHEW EFFECT

young kids, in kindergarten and first grade, the teachers
are confusing maturity with ability. And they put the
older kids in the advanced stream, where they learn better skills; and the next year, because they are in the higher
groups, they do even better; and the next year, the same
things happens, and they do even better again. The only
country we don't see this going on is Denmark. They
have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of ten." Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have
evened out.
Dhuey and Bedard subsequently did the same analysis, only this time looking at college. What did they find?
At four-year colleges in the United States-the highest
stream of postsecondary education - students belonging
to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6 percent. That initial difference
in maturity doesn't go away with time. It persists. And for
thousands of students, that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college - and having a real shot
at the middle class - and not.'!"I mean, it's ridiculous," Dhuey says. "It's outlandish that our arbitrary choice of cutoff dates is causing

>f Even more social phenomena can be linked to relative age. Barnsley and two colleagues, for instance, once found that students who
attempt suicide are also more likely to be born in the second half of
the school year. Their explanation is that poorer school performance
can lead to depression. The connection between relative age and suicide, however, isn't nearly as pronounced as the correlation between
birth date and athletic success.

29

OUTLIERS

these long-lasting effects, and no one seems to care about
them."

5.
Think for a moment about what the story of hockey and
early birthdays says about success.
It tells us that our notion that it is the best and the
brightest who effortlessly rise to the top is much too simplistic. Yes, the hockey players who make it to the professional level are more talented than you or me. But they
also got a big head start, an opportunity that they neither
deserved nor earned. And that opportunity played a critical role in their success.
The sociologist Robert Merton famously called this
phenomenon the "Matthew Effect" after the New Testament verse in the Gospel of Matthew: "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance.
But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that
which he hath." It is those who are successful, in other
words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It's the rich
who get the biggest tax breaks. It's the best students who
get the best teaching and most attention. And it's the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching
and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like
to call "accumulative advantage." The professional hockey
player starts out a little bit better than his peers. And
that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes
that difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turn leads

30

THE MATTHEW EF FEC T

to another opportunity, which makes the initially small
difference bigger still-and on and on until the hockey
player is a genuine outlier. But he didn't start out an outlier. He started out just a little bit better.
The second implication of the hockey example is
that the systems we set up to determine who gets ahead
aren't particularly efficient. We think that starting all-star
leagues and gifted programs as early as possible is the best
way of ensuring that no talent slips through the cracks.
But take a look again at that roster for the Czech Republic
soccer team. There are no players born in July, October,
November, or December, and only one each in August
and September. Those born in the last half of the year have
all been discouraged, or overlooked, or pushed out of the
sport. The talent of essentially half of the Czech athletic
population has been squandered.
So what do you do if you're an athletic young Czech
with the misfortune to have been born in the last part of the
year? You can't play soccer. The deck is stacked against you.
So maybe you could play the other sport that Czechs are
obsessed with - hockey. But wait. (I think you know what's
coming.) Here's the roster of the 2007 Czech junior hockey
team that finished fifth at the world championships.

No.

Player

Birth Date

Position

David Kveton

Jan. 3, 1988

Forward

2

Jiri Suchy

Jan. 3, 1988

Defense

3

Michael Kolarz

Jan. 12, 1987

Defense

4

Jakub Vojta

Feb. 8, 1987

Defense

3I

OUTLIERS

Player

Birth Date

Position

5

Jakub Kindl

Feb. 10, 1987

Defense

6

Michael Frolik

Feb. 17, 1989

Forward

7

Martin Hanzal

Feb. 20, 1987

Forward

8

Tomas Svoboda

Feb. 24, 1987

Forward

9

No.

Jakub Cerny

Mar. 5, 1987

Forward

10

Tomas Kudelka

Mar. 10, 1987

Defense

11

Jaroslav Barton

Mar. 26, 1987

Defense

12

H . O . Pozivil

Apr. 22, 1987

Defense

13

Daniel Rakos

May 25,1987

Forward

14

David Kuche;da

Jun. 12, 1987

Forward

IS

Vladimir Sobotka

Jul. 2, 1987

Forward

16

Jakub Kovar

Jul. 19, 1988

Goalie

17

Lukas Vamuch

Ju1.20, 1987

Forward

18

Jakub Voracek

Aug. 15,1989

Forward

19

Tomas Pospisil

Aug. 25, 1987

Forward

20

Ondre; Pavelee

Aug. 31, 1987

Goalie

21

Tomas Kana

Nov. 29, 1987

Forward

22

Michal Repik

Dec. 31, 1988

Forward

Those born in the last quarter of the year might as well
give up on hockey too.
Do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success? Because 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

32

THE MATTHEW EFFECT

dismissive of those who fail. And, most of all, we become
much too passive. We overlook just how large a role we all
play-and by "we" I mean society-in determining who
makes it and who doesn't.
If we chose to, we could acknowledge that cutoff
dates matter. We could set up two or even three hockey
leagues, divided up by month of birth. Let the players
develop on separate tracks and then pick all-star teams. If
all the Czech and Canadian athletes born at the end of the
year had a fair chance, then the Czech and the Canadian
national teams suddenly would have twice as many athletes to choose from.
Schools could do the same thing. Elementary and
middle schools could put the January through April-born
students in one class, the May through August in another
class, and those born in September through December in the third class. They could let students learn with
and compete against other students of the same maturity
level. It would be a little bit more complicated administratively. But it wouldn't necessarily cost that much more
money, and it would level the playing field for those
who - through no fault of their own - have been dealt a
big disadvantage by the educational system. We could easily take control of the machinery of achievement, in other
words - not just in sports but, as we will see, in other
more consequential areas as well. But we don't. And why?
Because we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we
all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society
don't matter at all.

33

OUTLIERS

6.
Before the Memorial Cup final, Gord Wasden-the father
of one of the Medicine Hat Tigers-stood by the side
of the ice, talking about his son Scott. He was wearing
a Medicine Hat baseball cap and a black Medicine .hat
T-shirt. "When he was four and five years old," Wasden
remembered, "his little brother was in a walker, and he
would shove a hockey stick in his hand and they would
play hockey on the floor in the kitchen, morning till night.
Scott always had a passion for it. He played rep hockey
throughout his minor-league hockey career. He always
made the Triple A teams. As a first-year peewee or a firstyear bantam, he always played on the [top] rep team."
Wasden was clearly nervous: his son was about to play in
the biggest game of his life. "He's had to work very hard
for whatever he's got. I'm very proud of him."
Those were the ingredients of success at the highest level: passion, talent, and hard work. But there was
another element. When did Wasden first get the sense that
his son was something special? "You know, he was always
a bigger kid for his age. He was strong, and he had a knack
for scoring goals at an early age. And he was always kind
of a standout for his age, a captain of his team ...."
Bigger kid for his age? Of course he was. Scott Wasden
was born on January 4, within three days of the absolute
perfect birthday for an elite hockey player. He was one of
the lucky ones. If the eligibility date for Canadian hockey
were later in the year, he might have been watching the
Memorial Cup championship from the stands instead of
playing on the ice.

34

CHAPTER TWO

The 10,OOO-Hour Rule
"IN HAMBURG, WE HAD TO PLAY
FOR EIGHT HOURS."

1.
The University of Michigan opened its new Computer
Center in 1971, in a brand-new building on Beal Avenue in Ann Arbor, with beige-brick exterior walls and a
dark-glass front. The university's enormous mainframe
computers stood in the middle of a vast white room,
looking, as one faculty member remembers, "like one of
the last scenes in the movie 200[: A Space Odyssey." Off
to the side were dozens of keypunch machines - what
passed in those days for computer terminals. In 1971,
this was state of the art. The University of Michigan had
one of the most advanced computer science programs in
the world, and over the course of the Computer Center's
life, thousands of students passed through that white
room, the most famous of whom was a gawky teenager
named Bill Joy.
Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the

35

OUTLIERS

Computer Center opened. He was sixteen. He was tall
and very thin, with a mop of unruly hair. He had been
voted "Most Studious Student" by his graduating class at
North Farmington High School, outside Detroit, which,
as he puts it, meant that he was a "no-date nerd." He had
thought he might end up as biologist or a mathematician. But late in his freshman year, he stumbled across the
Computer Center-and he was hooked.
From that point on, the Computer Center was his life.
He programmed whenever he could. Joy got a job with
a computer science professor so he could program over
the summer. In 1975, he enrolled in graduate school at
the University of California at Berkeley. There, he buried
himself even deeper in the world of computer software.
During the oral exams for his PhD, he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the fly that, as one of his
many admirers has written, "so stunned his examiners
[that] one of them later compared the experience to 'Jesus
confounding his elders.' "
Working in collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy took on the task of rewriting UNIX, which
was a software system developed by AT&T for mainframe
computers. Joy's version was very good. It was so good, in
fact, that it became-and remains-the operating system
on which literally millions of computers around the world
run. "If you put your Mac in that funny mode where you
can see the code," Joy says, "I see things that I remember
typing in twenty-five years ago." And do you know who
wrote much of the software that allows you to access the
Internet? Bill Joy.
After graduating from Berkeley, Joy cofounded the

THE IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

Silicon Valley firm Sun Microsystems, which was one of
the most critical players in the computer revolution. There
he rewrote another computer language-Java-and his
legend grew still further. Among Silicon Valley insiders,
Joy is spoken of with as much awe as someone like Bill
Gates of Microsoft. He is sometimes called the Edison of
the Internet. As the Yale computer scientist David Gelernter says, "Bill Joy is one of the most influential people
in the modern history of computing."
The story of Bill Joy's genius has been told many times,
and the lesson is always the same. Here was a world that
was the purest of meritocracies. Computer programming
didn't operate as an old-boy network, where you got ahead
because of money or connections. It was a wide-open field
in which all participants were judged solely on their talent
and their accomplishments. It was a world where the best
men won, and Joy was clearly one of those best men.
It would be easier to accept that version of events, however, if we hadn't just looked at hockey and soccer players.
Theirs was supposed to be a pure meritocracy as well. Only
it wasn't. It was a story of how the outliers in a particular
field reached their lofty status through a combination of
ability, opportunity, and utterly arbitrary advantage.
Is it possible the same pattern of special opportunities
operate in the real world as well? Let's go back over the
story of Bill Joy and find out.

2.
For almost a generation, psychologists around the world
have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that

37

OUTLIERS

most of us would consider to have been settled years ago.
The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent?
The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born
in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only
some do-the innately talented ones. Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that
the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted,
the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the
bigger the role preparation seems to play.
Exhibit A in the talent argument is a study done in
the early 1990S by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson
and two colleagues at Berlin's elite Academy of Music.
With the help of the Academy's professors, they divided
the school's violinists into three groups. In the first group
were the stars, the students with the potential to become
world-class soloists. In the second were those judged to
be merely "good." In the third were students who were
unlikely to ever play professionally and who intended
to be music teachers in the public school system. All of
the violinists were then asked the same question: over the
course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up
the violin, how many hours have you practiced?
Everyone from all three groups started playing at
roughly the same age, around five years old. In those first
few years, everyone practiced roughly the same amount,
about two or three hours a week. But when the students
were around the age of eight, real differences started to
emerge. The students who would end up the best in their
class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours
a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve, sixteen hours a week by age fourteen, and up and up, until by

THE

IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

the age of twenty they were practicing-that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with
the intent to get better-well over thirty hours a week. In
fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each
totaled ten thousand hours of practice. By contrast, the
merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours,
and the future music teachers had totaled just over four
thousand hours.
Ericsson and his colleagues then compared amateur
pianists with professional pianists. The same pattern
emerged. The amateurs never practiced more than about
three hours a week over the course of their childhood, and
by the age of twenty they had totaled two thousand hours
of practice. The professionals, on the other hand, steadily
increased their practice time every year, until by the age of
twenty they, like the violinists, had reached ten thousand
hours.
The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he
and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians
who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any
"grinds," people who worked harder than everyone else, yet
just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their
research suggestes that once a musician has enough ability
to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes
one performer from another is how hard he or she works.
That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't
work just harder or even much harder than everyone else.
They work much, much harder.
The idea that excellence at performing a complex task
requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again

39

OUTLIERS

and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have
settled on what they believe is the magic number for true
expertise: ten thousand hours.
"The emerging picture from such studies is that ten
thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level
of mastery associated with being a world-class expert-in
anything," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. "In
study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction
writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up
again and again. Of course, this doesn't address why some
people get more out of their practice sessions than others
do. But no one has yet found a case in which true worldclass 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."
This is true even of people we think of as prodigies.
Mozart, for example, famously started writing music
at six. But, writes the psychologist Michael Howe in his
book Genius Explained,
by the standards of mature composers, Mozart's early
works are not outstanding. The earliest pieces were
all probably written down by his father, and perhaps
improved in the process. Many of Wolfgang's childhood
compositions, such as the first seven of his concertos for
piano and orchestra, are largely arrangements of works
by other composers. Of those concertos that only contain music original to Mozart, the earliest that is now
regarded as a masterwork (No.9, K. 271) was not com-

THE 10,OOO-HOUR RULE

posed until he was twenty-one: by that time Mozart had
already been composing concertos for ten years.
The music critic Harold Schonberg goes further: Mozart,
he argues, actually" developed late," since he didn't produce his greatest work until he had been composing for
more than twenty years.
To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take
about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to
that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him
nine years.) And what's ten years? Well, it's roughly how
long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice.
Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.
Here is the explanation for what was so puzzling about
the rosters of the Czech and Canadian national sports
teams. There was practically no one on those teams born
after September I, which doesn't seem to make any sense.
You'd think that there should be a fair number of Czech
hockey or soccer prodigies born late in the year who are so
talented that they eventually make their way into the top
tier as young adults, despite their birth dates.
But to Ericsson and those who argue against the primacy of talent, that isn't surprising at all. That late-born
prodigy doesn't get chosen for the all-star team as an
eight-year-old because he's too small. So he doesn't get
the extra practice. And without that extra practice, he
has no chance at hitting ten thousand hours by the time
the professional hockey teams start looking for players.
And without ten thousand hours under his belt, there is
no way he can ever master the skills necessary to play at

41

OUTLIERS

the top level. Even Mozart-the greatest musical prodigy of all time-couldn't hit his stride until he had his
ten thousand hours in. Practice isn't the thing you do once
you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.
The other interesting thing about that ten thousand
hours, of course, is that ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time. It's all but impossible to reach
that number all by yourself by the time you're a young
adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can't be poor, because if you have to hold
down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet,
there won't be time left in the day to practice enough. In
fact, most people can reach that number only if they get
into some kind of special program-like a hockey all-star
squad - or if they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours.

3.
So, back to Bill Joy. It's 1971. He's tall and gawky and sixteen years old. He's the math whiz, the kind of student
that schools like MIT and Caltech and the University of
Waterloo attract by the hundreds. "When Bill was a little
kid, he wanted to know everything about everything way
before he should've even known he wanted to know," his
father, William, says. "We answered him when we could.
And when we couldn't, we would just give him a book."
When it came time to apply to college, Joy got a perfect
score on the math portion of the Scholastic Aptitude Test.
"It wasn't particularly hard," he says matter-of-factly.
"There was plenty of time to check it twice."

THE

IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

He has talent by the truckload. But that's not the only
consideration. It never is. The key to his development is
that he stumbled across that nondescript building on Beal
Avenue.
In the early 197os, when Joy was learning about programming, computers were the size of rooms. A single
machine (which might have less power and memory than
your microwave now has) could cost upwards of a million dollars-and that's in 1970S dollars. Computers were
rare. If you found one, if was hard to get access to it; if you
managed to get access, renting time on it cost a fortune.
What's more, programming itself was extraordinarily
tedious. This was the era when computer programs were
created using cardboard punch cards. Each line of code
was imprinted on the card using a keypunch machine. A
complex program might include hundreds, if not thousands, of these cards in tall stacks. Once a program was
ready, you walked over to whatever mainframe computer
you had access to and gave the stack of cards to an operator. Since computers could handle only one task at a time,
the operator made an appointment for your program, and
depending on how many people were ahead of you in
line, you might not get your cards back for a few hours or
even a day. And if you made even a single error-even a
typographical error-in your program, you had to take
the cards back, track down the error, and begin the whole
process agam.
Under those circumstances, it was exceedingly difficult for anyone to become a programming expert. Certainly becoming an expert by your early twenties was all
but impossible. When you can "program" for only a few

43

OUTLIERS

minutes out of every hour you spend in the computer
room, how can you ever get in ten thousand hours of practice? "Programming with cards," one computer scientist
from that era remembers, "did not teach you programming. It taught you patience and proofreading."
It wasn't until the mid-196os that a solution to the
programming problem emerged. Computers were finally
powerful enough that they could handle more than one
"appointment" at once. If the computer's operating system
was rewritten, computer scientists realized, the machine's
time could be shared; the computer could be trained to
handle hundreds of tasks at the same time. That, in turn,
meant that programmers didn't have to physically hand
their stacks of computer cards to the operator anymore.
Dozens of terminals could be built, all linked to the
mainframe by a telephone line, and everyone could be
working-online-all at once.
Here is how one history of the period describes the
advent of time-sharing:
This was not just a revolution. It was a revelation. Forget
the operator, the card decks, the wait. With time-sharing,
you could sit at your Teletype, bang in a couple of commands, and get an answer then and there. Time-sharing
was interactive: A program could ask for a response,
wait for you to type it in, act on it while you waited, and
show you the result, all in "real time."
This is where Michigan came in, because Michigan
was one of the first universities in the world to switch
over to time-sharing. By 1967, a prototype of the system

44

THE

IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

was up and running. By the early 1970s, Michigan had
enough computing power that a hundred people could be
programming simultaneously in the Computer Center.
"In the late sixties, early seventies, I don't think there was
anyplace else that was exactly like Michigan," Mike Alexander, one of the pioneers of Michigan's computing system, said. "Maybe MIT. Maybe Carnegie Mellon. Maybe
Dartmouth. I don't think there were any others."
This was the opportunity that greeted Bill Joy when he
arrived on the Ann Arbor campus in the fall of 1971. He hadn't
chosen Michigan because of its computers. He had never
done anything with computers in high school. He was interested in math and engineering. But when the programming
bug hit him in his freshman year, he found himself- by the
happiest of accidents-in one of the few places in the world
where a seventeen-year-old could program all he wanted.
"Do you know what the difference is between the
computing cards and time-sharing?" Joy says. "It's the difference between playing chess by mail and speed chess."
Programming wasn't an exercise in frustration anymore.
It was fun.
"I lived in the north campus, and the Computer Center
was in the north campus," Joy went on. "How much time
did I spend there? Oh, a phenomenal amount of time. It
was open twenty-four hours. I would stay there all night,
and just walk home in the morning. In an average week in
those years, I was spending more time in the Computer
Center than on my classes. All of us down there had this
recurring nightmare of forgetting to show up for class at
all, of not even realizing we were enrolled.
"The challenge was that they gave all the students

45

OUTLIERS

an account with a fixed amount of money, so your time
would run out. When you signed on, you would put in
how long you wanted to spend on the computer. They
gave you, like, an hour of time. That's all you'd get. But
someone figured out that if you put in 'time equals' and
then a letter, like t equals k, they wouldn't charge you,"
he said, laughing at the memory. "It was a bug in the software. You could put in t equals k and sit there forever."
Just look at the stream of opportunities that came Bill
Joy's way. Because he happened to go to a farsighted school
like the University of Michigan, he was able to practice on
a time-sharing system instead of with punch cards; because
the Michigan system happened to have a bug in it, he could
program all he wanted; because the university was willing
to spend the money to keep the Computer Center open
twenty-four hours, he could stay up all night; and because
he was able to put in so many hours, by the time he happened
to be presented with the opportunity to rewrite UNIX,
he was up to the task. Bill Joy was brilliant. 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.
"At Michigan, I was probably programming eight or
ten hours a day," he went on. "By the time I was at Berkeley I was doing it day and night. I had a terminal at home.
l'd stay up until two or three o'clock in the morning,
watching old movies and programming. Sometimes l'd
fall asleep at the keyboard" - he mimed his head falling
on the keyboard- "and you know how the key repeats
until the end, and it starts to go beep, beep, beep? After

THE

IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

that happens three times, you have to go to bed. I was
still relatively incompetent even when I got to Berkeley. I
was proficient by my second year there. That's when I
wrote programs that are still in use today, thirty years
later." He paused for a moment to do the math in his
head-which for someone like Bill Joy doesn't take very
long. Michigan in 1971. Programming in earnest by sophomore year. Add in the summers, then the days and nights
in his first year at Berkeley. "So, so maybe ... ten thousand
hours?" he said, finally. "That's about right."

4.
Is the ten-thousand-hour rule a general rule of success? If
we scratch below the surface of every great achiever, do
we always find the equivalent of the Michigan Computer
Center or the hockey all-star team-some sort of special
opportunity for practice?
Let's test the idea with two examples, and for the sake
of simplicity, let's make them as familiar as possible: the
Beatles, one of the most famous rock bands ever; and Bill
Gates, one of the world's richest men.
The Beatles-John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George
Harrison, and Ringo Starr-came to the United States in
February of 1964, starting the so-called British Invasion
of the American music scene and putting out a string of
hit records that transformed the face of popular music.
The first interesting thing about the Beatles for our
purposes is how long they had already been together
by the time they reached the United States. Lennon and

47

OUTLIERS

McCartney first started playing together in 1957, seven
years prior to landing in America. (Incidentally, the time
that elapsed between their founding and their arguably
greatest artistic achievements-Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts
Club Band and The Beatles [White AlbumJ-is ten years.)
And if you look even more closely at those long years of
preparation, you'll find an experience that, in the context
of hockey players and Bill Joy and world-class violinists,
sounds awfully familiar. In 1960, while they were still just
a struggling high school rock band, they were invited to
play in Hamburg, Germany.
"Hamburg in those days did not have rock-and-roll
music clubs. It had strip clubs," says Philip Norman, who
wrote the Beatles biography Shout! "There was one particular club owner called Bruno, who was originally a fairground
showman. He had the idea of bringing in rock groups to
play in various clubs. They had this formula. It was a huge
nonstop show, hour after hour, with a lot of people lurching
in and the other lot lurching out. And the bands would play
all the time to catch the passing traffic. In an American redlight district, they would call it nonstop striptease.
"Many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from
Liverpool," Norman went on. "It was an accident. Bruno
went to London to look for bands. But he happened to meet
an entrepreneur from Liverpool in Soho who was down
in London by pure chance. And he arranged to send some
bands over. That's how the connection was established.
And eventually the Beatles made a connection not just with
Bruno but with other club owners as well. They kept going
back because they got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex."

THE

IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn't
that it paid well. It didn't. Or that the acoustics were fantastic. They weren't. Or that the audiences were savvy and
appreciative. They were anything but. It was the sheer
amount of time the band was forced to play.
Here is John Lennon, in an interview after the Beatles
disbanded, talking about the band's performances at a
Hamburg strip club called the Indra:
We got better and got more confidence. We couldn't help
it with all the experience playing all night long. It was
handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder,
put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.
In Liverpool, we'd only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same
ones, at everyone. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight
hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.

Eight hours?
Here is Pete Best, the Beatles' drummer at the time:
"Once the news got out about that we were making a show,
the club started packing them in. We played seven nights a
week. At first we played almost nonstop till twelve-thirty,
when it closed, but as we got better the crowds stayed till
two most mornings."
Seven days a week?
The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times
between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they
played 106 nights, five or more hours a night. On their
second trip, they played 92 times. On their third trip, they

49

OUTLIERS

played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last
two Hamburg gigs, in November and December of 1962,
involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they
performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By
the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in
fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred
times. Do you know how extraordinary that is? Most
bands today don't perform twelve hundred times in their
entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is one of the things
that set the Beatles apart.
"They were no good onstage when they went there
and they were very good when they came back," Norman
went on. "They learned not only stamina. They had to
learn an enormous amount of numbers - cover versions
of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit
of jazz too. They weren't disciplined onstage at all before
that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one
else. It was the making of them."

5.
Let's now turn to the history of Bill Gates. His story is
almost as well known as the Beatles'. Brilliant, young math
whiz discovers computer programming. Drops out of Harvard. Starts a little computer company called Microsoft
with his friends. Through sheer brilliance and ambition
and guts builds it into the giant of the software world.
That's the broad outline. Let's dig a little bit deeper.
Gates's father was a wealthy lawyer in Seattle, and
his mother was the daughter of a well-to-do banker. As

50

THE IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

a child Bill was precocious and easily bored by his studies. So his parents took him out of public school and, at
the beginning of seventh grade, sent him to Lakeside, a
private school that catered to Seattle's elite families. Midway through Gates's second year at Lakeside, the school
started a computer club.
"The Mothers' Club at school did a rummage sale
every year, and there was always the question of what the
money would go to," Gates remembers. "Some went to
the summer program, where inner-city kids would come
up to the campus. Some of it would go for teachers. That
year, they put three thousand dollars into a computer terminal down in this funny little room that we subsequently
took control of. It was kind of an amazing thing."
It was an "amazing thing," of course, because this
was 1968. Most colleges didn't have computer clubs in the
1960s. Even more remarkable was the kind of computer
Lakeside bought. The school didn't have its students learn
programming by the laborious computer-card system, like
virtually everyone else was doing in the 1960s. Instead,
Lakeside installed what was called an ASR-33 Teletype,
which was a time-sharing terminal with a direct link to
a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. "The whole
idea of time-sharing only got invented in nineteen sixtyfive," Gates continued. "Someone was pretty forwardlooking." Bill Joy got an extraordinary, early opportunity
to learn programming on a time-share system as a freshman in college, in 1971. Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968.
From that moment forward, Gates lived in the computer

OUTLIERS

room. He and a number of others began to teach themselves how to use this strange new device. Buying time
on the mainframe computer the ASR was hooked up to
was, of course, expensive-even for a wealthy institution
like Lakeside-and it wasn't long before the $3,000 put
up by the Mothers' Club ran out. The parents raised more
money. The students spent it. Then a group of programmers at the University of Washington formed an outfit called Computer Center Corporation (or C-Cubed),
which leased computer time to local companies. As luck
would have it, one of the founders of the firm - Monique
Rona-had a son at Lakeside, a year ahead of Gates.
Would the Lakeside computer club, Rona wondered, like
to test out the company's software programs on the weekends in exchange for free programming time? Absolutely!
After school, Gates took the bus to the C-Cubed offices
and programmed long into the evening.
C-Cubed eventually went bankrupt, so Gates and his
friends began hanging around the computer center at the
University of Washington. Before long, they latched onto
an outfit called lSI (Information Sciences Inc.), which
agreed to let them have free computer time in exchange
for working on a piece of software that could be used to
automate company payrolls. In one seven-month period
in 1971, Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of computer time on the lSI mainframe, which averages out to
eight hours a day, seven days a week.
"It was my obsession," Gates says of his early high
school years. "I skipped athletics. I went up there at night.
We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week
that we wouldn't get twenty or thirty hours in. There was

THE IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

a period where Paul Allen and I got in trouble for stealing a bunch of passwords and crashing the system. We
got kicked out. I didn't get to use the computer the whole
summer. This is when I was fifteen and sixteen. Then I
found out Paul had found a computer that was free at the
University of Washington. They had these machines in
the medical center and the physics department. They were
on a twenty-four-hour schedule, but with this big slack
period, so that between three and six in the morning they
never scheduled anything." Gates laughed. "I'd leave at
night, after my bedtime. I could walk up to the University
of Washington from my house. Or I'd take the bus. That's
why I'm always so generous to the University of Washington, because they let me steal so much computer time."
(Years later, Gates's mother said, "We always wondered
why it was so hard for him to get up in the morning.")
One of the founders of lSI, Bud Pembroke, then got a
call from the technology company TRW, which had just
signed a contract to set up a computer system at the huge
Bonneville Power station in southern Washington State.
TRW desperately needed programmers familiar with
the particular software the power station used. In these
early days of the computer revolution, programmers with
that kind of specialized experience were hard to find. But
Pembroke knew exactly whom to call: those high school
kids from Lakeside who had been running up thousands
of hours of computer time on the lSI mainframe. Gates
was now in his senior year, and somehow he managed to
convince his teachers to let him decamp for Bonneville
under the guise of an independent study project. There he
spent the spring writing code, supervised by a man named

53

OUTLIERS

John Norton, who Gates says taught him as much about
programming as almost anyone he'd ever met.
Those five years, from eighth grade through the end of
high school, were Bill Gates's Hamburg, and by any measure, he was presented with an even more extraordinary
series of opportunities than Bill Joy.
Opportunity number one was that Gates got sent to
Lakeside. How many high schools in the world had access to
a time-sharing terminal in 1968? Opportunity number two
was that the mothers of Lakeside had enough money to pay
for the school's computer fees. Number three was that, when
that money ran out, one of the parents happened to work
at C-Cubed, which happened to need someone to check
its code on the weekends, and which also happened not to
care if weekends turned into weeknights. Number four was
that Gates just happened to find out about lSI, and lSI just
happened to need someone to work on its payroll software.
Number five was that Gates happened to live within walking distance of the University of Washington. Number six
was that the university happened to have free computer time
between three and six in the morning. Number seven was
that TRW happened to call Bud Pembroke. Number eight
was that the best programmers Pembroke knew for that particular problem happened to be two high school kids. And
number nine was that Lakeside was willing to let those kids
spend their spring term miles away, writing code.
And what did virtually all of those opportunities have
in common? They gave Bill Gates extra time to practice.
By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own software company,

54

THE

IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

he'd been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past ten thousand hours. How
many teenagers in the world had the kind of experience
Gates had? "If there were fifty in the world, 1'd be
stunned," he says. "There was C-Cubed and the payroll
stuff we did, then TRW -all those things came together.
1 had a better exposure to software development at a young
age than 1 think anyone did in that period of time, and all
because of an incredibly lucky series of events."

6.
If we put the stories of hockey players and the Beatles and
Bill Joy and Bill Gates together, 1 think we get a more complete picture of the path to success. Joy and Gates and the
Beatles are all undeniably talented. Lennon and McCartney had a musical gift of the sort that comes along once in
a generation, and Bill Joy, let us not forget, had a mind so
quick that he was able to make up a complicated algorithm
on the fly that left his professors in awe. That much is
obvious.
But what truly distinguishes their histories is not
their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities. The Beatles, for the most random of reasons, got
invited to go to Hamburg. Without Hamburg, the Beatles
might well have taken a different path. "I was very lucky,"
Bill Gates said at the beginning of our interview. That
doesn't mean he isn't brilliant or an extraordinary entrepreneur. It just means that he understands what incredible
good fortune it was to be at Lakeside in 1968.

55

OUTLI ERS

All the outliers we've looked at so far were the beneficiaries of some kind of unusual opportunity. Lucky
breaks don't seem like the exception with software billionaires and rock bands and star athletes. They seem like
the rule.
Let me give you one final example of the hidden opportunities that outliers benefit from. Suppose we do another
version of the calendar analysis we did in the previous
chapter with hockey players, only this time looking at
birth years, not birth months. To start with, take a close

look at the following list of the seventy-five richest people
in human history. The net worth of each person is calculated in current US dollars. As you can see, it includes
queens and kings and pharaohs from centuries past, as
well as contemporary billionaires, such as Warren Buffett
and Carlos Slim.
No.

Name

Wealth in
Billions

Origin

Company or

Source of
Wealth

(USD)
JohnD.
Rockefeller

318.3

United States

Standard Oil

2

Andrew
Carnegie

298.3

Scotland

Carnegie Steel
Company

3

Nicholas
II of Russia

253.5

Russla

House of
Romanov

4

William Henry 231.6
Vanderbilt

United
States

Chicago,
Burlington and
Quincy Railroad

5

Osman Ali
210.8
Khan, AsafJah
VII

Hyderabad

Monarchy

THE IO,OOO-HOUR RUL E

No.

Name

Wealth in
Billions
(USO)

Origin

Company or
Source of
Wealth

6

AndrewW.
Mellon

188.8

United States

Gulf Oil

7

Henry Ford

188.1

United States

Ford Motor
Company

8

Marcus

169.8

Roman
Republic

Roman Senate

Basil II

169.4

Byzantine Empire Monarchy

10

Cornelius
Vanderbilt

167.4

United States

New York and
Harlem Railroad

11

Alanus Rufus

166.9

England

Investments

12

Amenophis III 155.2

Ancient Egypt

Pharaoh

William de

153.6

England

Earl of Surrey

151.7

England

Monarchy

Licinius
Crassus

9

13

Warennc, 1st

Earl of Surrey
14

William II of
England

15

Elizabeth I

142.9

England

House of Tudor

16

JohnD.
Rockefeller Jr.

141.4

United States

Standard Oil

17

Sam Walton

128.0

United States

Wal-Mart

18

John Jacob
Astor

115.0

Germany

American Fur
Company

19

Odo of Bayeux 110.2

England

Monarchy

20

Stephen Girard 99.5

France

First Bank of the
United States

21

Cleopatra

95.8

Ancient Egypt

Ptolemaic
Inheritance

22

Stephen Van
Rensselaer III

88.8

United States

Rensselaerswyck
Estate

57

OUTLIERS

No.

Name

Wealth in
Billions
(USD)

Origin

Company or
Source of
Wealth

23

Richard B.
Mellon

86·3

United States

Gulf Oil

24

Alexander
84-7
Turney Stewart

Ireland

Long Island Rail
Road

25

William
Backhouse
Astor Jr.

84-7

United States

Inheritance

26

Don Simon
Iturbi Patino

81.2

Bolivia

Huanuni tin mine

27

Sultan
Hassanal
Bolkiah

80·7

Brunei

Kral

28

Frederick
80·4
Weyerhaeuser

Germany

Weyerhaeuser
Corporation

29

Moses Taylor

United States

Citibank

30

Vincent Astor 73·9

United States

Inheritance

31

Carlos Slim
Hel"

72.4

Mexico

Telmex

32

T. V.Soong

67. 8

C hina

Central Bank of
China

33

Jay G ould

67· t

United States

Union Pacific

34

Marshall Field 66·3

United States

Marshall Field and
Company

35

George F.
Baker

63·6

United States

Central Railroad
of New Jersey

36

Hetty Green

58. 8

United States

Seaboard National
Bank

37

Bill Gates

58.0

United States

Microsoft

38

Lawrence

58.0

United States

Oraele
Corporation

56 .2

England

Derwent Valley
Mills

79·3

Joseph Ellison
39

Richard
Arkwright

THE IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

No.

Name

Wealth in
Billions
(USD)

Origin

Company or
Source of
Wealth

40

Mukesh
Ambani

55. 8

India

Reliance
Industries

41

Warren Buffeu 52·4

United States

Berkshire
Hathaway

42

Lakshmi Mittal 51.0

India

Miual Steel
Company

43

J. Paul Getty

50 . 1

United States

GeuyOil
Company

44

James G. Fair

47. 2

United States

Consolidated
Virginia Mining
Company

45

William
Weightman

46. 1

United States

Merck &
Company

46

Russell Sage

41-'

United States

Western Union

47

John Blair

45. 1

United States

Union Pacific

48

AnilAmbani

45. 0

India

Reliance
Communications

49

Leland
Stanford

44·9

United States

Central Pacific
Railroad

;0

Howard
Hughes Jr.

43·4

United States

HughesTool
Company,
Hughes Aircraft
Company, Summa
Corporation,

TWA
51

Cyrus Curtis

43. 2

United States

Curtis Publishing
Company

52

John Insley
Blair

4 2 .4

United States

Delaware,
Lackawanna and
Western Railroad

53

Edward Henry 40.9

United States

Union Pacific
Railroad

Harriman

59

OUTLI E RS

No.

Name

Wealth in
Billions

Origin

Company or
Source of
Wealth

(USD)
54

HenryH.
Rogers

40.9

United States

Standard Oil
Company

55

Paul Allen

40.0

United States

Microsoft, Vulcan
Inc.

56

John Kluge

40.0

Germany

Metropolitan
Broadcasting
Company

57

J. P. Morgan

39.8

United States

General Electric,
US Steel

58

OliverH.
Payne

38.8

United States

Standard Oil
Company

59

Yoshiaki
Tsutsumi

38.1

Japan

Seibu Corporation

60

Henry Clay
Frick

37.7

United States

Carnegie Steel
Company

61

John Jacob
AstorlV

37.0

United States

Inheritance

62

George
Pullman

35.6

United States

Pullman Company

63

Collis Potter
Huntington

34.6

United States

Central Pacific
Railroad

64

Peter Arrell
Brown
Widener

33.4

United States

American Tobacco

Philip
Danforth

33.4

United States

Armour
Refrigerator Line

65

Company

Armour

66

WilliamS.
O'Brien

33.3

United States

Consolidated
Virginia Mining
Company

67

Ingvar
Kamprad

33.0

Sweden

IKEA

60

THE

IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

No.

Name

Wealth in
Billions
(USD)

Origin

Company or
Source of
Wealth

68

K. P. Singh

32.9

India

DLF Universal
Limited

69

James C. Flood 32.5

United States

Consolidated
Virginia Mining
Company

70

Li Ka-shing

32.0

China

Hutchison
Whampoa
Limited

71

AnthonyN.
Brady

31.7

United States

Brooklyn Rapid
Transit

72

Elias Hasket
Derby

31.4

United States

Shipping

73

Mark Hopkins 30.9

United States

Central Pacific
Railroad

74

Edward Clark 30.2

United States

Singer Sewing
Machine

75

Prince
AI-Waleed
bin Talal

29.5

Saudi Arabia

Kingdom Holding
Company

Do you know what's interesting about that list? Of the
seventy-five names, an astonishing fourteen are Americans born within nine years of one another in the midnineteenth century. Think about that for a moment.
Historians start with Cleopatra and the pharaohs and comb
through every year in human history every since, looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth, and almost 20 percent of the names they end
up with come from a single generation in a single country.

61

OUTLIERS

Here's the list of those Americans and their birth years:
1. John D. Rockefeller, 1839

2.
28.
33.
34.
35.
36.
44.
54.
57.
58.
62.
64.
65.

Andrew Carnegie, 1835
Frederick Weyerhaeuser, 1834
Jay Gould, 1836
Marshall Field, 1834
George F. Baker, 1840
Hetty Green, 1834
James G. Fair, 1831
Henry H. Rogers, 1840
J. P. Morgan, 1837
Oliver H. Payne, 1839
George Pullman, 1831
Peter Arrell Brown Widener, 1834
Philip Danforth Armour, 1832

What's going on here? The answer becomes obvious if you think about it. In the 1860s and 1870s, the
American economy went through perhaps the greatest
transformation in its history. This was when the railroads were being built and when Wall Street emerged. It
was when industrial manufacturing started in earnest. It
was when all the rules by which the traditional economy
had functioned were broken and remade. What this list
says is that it really matters how old you were when that
transformation happened.
If you were born in the late 1840S you missed it. You
were too young to take advantage of that moment. If you
were born in the 1820S you were too old: your mind-set
was shaped by the pre-Civil War paradigm. But there was
a particular, narrow nine-year window that was just per-

THE 10,000-HOUR RULE

fect for seeing the potential that the future held. All of the
fourteen men and women on the list above had vision and
talent. But they also were given an extraordinary opportunity, in the same way that hockey and soccer players born
in January, February, and March are given an extraordinary opportunity.':Now let's do the same kind of analysis for people like
Bill Joy and Bill Gates.
If you talk to veterans of Silicon Valley, they'll tell
you that the most important date in the history of the
personal computer revolution was January 1975. That was
when the magazine Popular Electronics ran a cover story
on an extraordinary machine called the Altair 8800. The
Altair cost $397. It was a do-it-yourself contraption that
you could assemble at home. The headline on the story
read: "PROJECT BREAKTHROUGH! World's First
Minicomputer Kit to Rival Commercial Models."
To the readers of Popular Electronics, in those days the
bible of the fledgling software and computer world, that
headline was a revelation. Computers up to that point had

;, The sociologist C. Wright Mills made an additional observation
about that special cohort from the 1830s. He looked at the backgrounds of the American business elite from the Colonial Era to the
twentieth century. In most cases, not surprisingly, he found that business leaders tended to come from privileged backgrounds. The one
exception? The 1830S group. That shows how big the advantage was
of being born in that decade. It was the only time in American history when those born in modest circumstances had a realistic shot at
real riches. He writes: "The best time during the history of the United
States for the poor boy ambitious for high business success to have
been born was around the year 1835."

OUTLIERS

been the massive, expensive mainframes of the sort sitting
in the white expanse of the Michigan Computer Center.
For years, every hacker and electronics whiz had dreamt
of the day when a computer would come along that was
small and inexpensive enough for an ordinary person to
use and own. That day had finally arrived.
If January 1975 was the dawn of the personal computer
age, then who would be in the best position to take advantage of it? The same principles apply here that applied to
the era of John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie.
"If you're too old in nineteen seventy-five, then you'd
already have a job at IBM out of college, and once people
started at IBM, they had a real hard time making the transition to the new world," says Nathan Myhrvold, who was
a top executive at Microsoft for many years. "You had this
multibillion-dollar company making mainframes, and if
you were part of that, you'd think, Why screw around
with these little pathetic computers? That was the computer industry to those people, and it had nothing to do
with this new revolution. They were blinded by that being
the only vision of computing. They made a nice living. It's
just that there was no opportunity to become a zillionaire
and make an impact on the world."
If you were more than a few years out of college in
1975, then you belonged to the old paradigm. You had
just bought a house. You're married. A baby is on the way.
You're in no position to give up a good job and pension for
some pie-in-the-sky $397 computer kit. So let's rule out all
those born before, say, 1952.
At the same time, though, you don't want to be too

THE

IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

young. You really want to get in on the ground floor, right
in 1975. and you can't do that if you're still in high school.
So let's also rule out anyone born after, say, 1958. The perfect age to be in 1975, in other words, is old enough to be
a part of the coming revolution but not so old that you
missed it. Ideally, you want to be twenty or twenty-one,
which is to say, born in 1954 or 1955.
There is an easy way to test this theory. When was Bill
Gates born?
Bill Gates: October 28, 1955
That's the perfect birth date! Gates is the hockey player
born on January 1. Gates's best friend at Lakeside was
Paul Allen. He also hung out in the computer room with
Gates and shared those long evenings at lSI and C-Cubed.
Allen went on to found Microsoft with Bill Gates. When
was Paul Allen born?
Paul Allen: January 21,1953
The third-richest man at Microsoft is the one who has
been running the company on a day-to-day basis since
2000, one of the most respected executives in the software
world, Steve Ballmer. Ballmer's birth date?
Steve Ballmer: March 24, 1956
Let's not forget a man every bit as famous as Gates: Steve
Jobs, the cofounder of Apple Computer. Unlike Gates,

OUTLIERS

Jobs wasn't from a rich family and he didn't go to Michigan, like Joy. But it doesn't take much investigation of
his upbringing to realize that he had his Hamburg too.
He grew up in Mountain View, California, just south of
San Francisco, which is the absolute epicenter of Silicon
Valley. His neighborhood was filled with engineers from
Hewlett-Packard, then as now one of the most important
electronics firms in the world. As a teenager he prowled
the flea markets of Mountain View, where electronics
hobbyists and tinkerers sold spare parts. Jobs came of
age breathing the air of the very business he would later
dominate.
This paragraph from Accidental Millionaire, one of the
many Jobs biographies, gives us a sense of how extraordinary his childhood experiences were. Jobs
attended evening talks by Hewlett-Packard scientists.
The talks were about the latest advances in electronics
and Jobs, exercising a style that was a trademark of his
personality, collared Hewlett-Packard engineers and
drew additional information from them. Once he even
called Bill Hewlett, one of the company's founders, to
request parts. Jobs not only received the parts he asked
for, he managed to wrangle a summer job. Jobs worked
on an assembly line to build computers and was so fascinated that he tried to design his own ...
Wait. Bill Hewlett gave him spare parts? That's on a par
with Bill Gates getting unlimited access to a time-share terminal at age thirteen. It's as if you were interested in fashion
and your neighbor when you were growing up happened to
be Giorgio Armani. And when was Jobs born?
66

THE

IO,OOO-HOUR RULE

Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955

Another of the pioneers of the software revolution was
Eric Schmidt. He ran Novell, one of Silicon Valley's most
important software firms, and in 2001, he became the
chief executive officer of Google. Birth date?

Eric Schmidt: April 27, 1955
I don't mean to suggest, of course, that every software
tycoon in Silicon Valley was born in 1955. Some weren't,
just as not every business titan in the United States
was born in the mid-1830S. But there are very clearly patterns here, and what's striking is how little we seem to
want to acknowledge them. We pretend that success is
exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there's nothing in any of the histories we've looked at so far to suggest
things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about
people who were given a special opportunity to work
really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of
age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded
by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their
own making. It was a product of the world in which they
grew up.
By the way, let's not forget Bill Joy. Had he been just
a little bit older and had he had to face the drudgery of
programming with computer cards, he says, he would
have studied science. Bill Joy the computer legend would
have been Bill Joy the biologist. And had he come along a
few years later, the little window that gave him the chance
to write the supporting code for the Internet would have

OUTLIERS

closed. Again, Bill Joy the computer legend might well
have been Bill Joy the biologist. When was Bill Joy born?

Bill Joy: November 8,1954
Joy would go on, after his stint at Berkeley, to become one
of the four founders of Sun Microsystems, one of the oldest and most important of Silicon Valley's software companies. And if you still think that accidents of time and place
and birth don't matter all that much, here are the birthdays of the three other founders of Sun Microsystems:

Scott McNealy: November 13, 1954
Vinod Khosla: January 28, 1955
Andy Bechtolsheim: September 30,1955

68

CHAPTER THREE

The Trouble with
Geniuses, Part 1
"KNOWLEDGE OF A BOY'S IQ IS OF
LITTLE HELP IF YOU ARE FACED WITH
A FORMFUL OF CLEVER BOYS."

1.
In the fifth episode of the 2008 season, the American television quiz show I VS. 100 had as its special guest a man
named Christopher Langan.
The television show I VS. 100 is one of many that
sprang up in the wake of the phenomenal success of Who
Wants to Be a Millionaire. It features a permanent gallery
of one hundred ordinary people who serve as what is called
the "mob." Each week they match wits with a special
invited guest. At stake is a million dollars. The guest has
to be smart enough to answer more questions correctly
than his or her one hundred adversaries - and by that
standard, few have ever seemed as superbly qualified as
Christopher Langan.
"Tonight the mob takes on their fiercest competition
yet," the voice-over began. "Meet Chris Langan, who many

OUTLIERS

call the smartest man in America." The camera did a slow
pan of a stocky, muscular man in his fifties. "The average person has an IQ of one hundred," the voice-over
continued. "Einstein one fifty. Chris has an IQ of one
ninety-five. He's currently wrapping his big brain around
a theory of the universe. But will his king-size cranium
be enough to take down the mob for one million dollars?
Find out right now on One versus One Hundred."
Out strode Langan onto the stage amid wild applause.
"You don't think you need to have a high intellect to
do well on One versus One Hundred, do you?" the show's
host, Bob Saget, asked him. Saget looked at Langan oddly,
as if he were some kind of laboratory specimen.
"Actually, I think it could be a hindrance," Langan
replied. He had a deep, certain voice. "To have a high
IQ, you tend to specialize, think deep thoughts. You
avoid trivia. But now that I see these people" - he glanced
at the mob, the amusement in his eyes betraying just how
ridiculous he found the proceedings - "I think 1'11 do
okay."
Over the past decade, Chris Langan has achieved a
strange kind of fame. He has become the public face of
genius in American life, a celebrity outlier. He gets invited
on news shows and profiled in magazines, and he has been
the subject of a documentary by the filmmaker Errol Morris, all because of a brain that appears to defy description.
The television news show 20120 once hired a neuropsychologist to give Langan an IQ test, and Langan's score
was literally off the charts-too high to be accurately
measured. Another time, Langan took an IQ test specially
designed for people too smart for ordinary IQ tests. He

THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART 1

got all the questions right except one." He was speaking
at six months of age. When he was three, he would listen
to the radio on Sundays as the announcer read the comics
aloud, and he would follow along on his own until he had
taught himself to read. At five, he began questioning his
grandfather about the existence of God - and remembers
being disappointed in the answers he got.
In school, Langan could walk into a test in a foreignlanguage class, not having studied at all, and if there
were two or three minutes before the instructor arrived,
he could skim through the textbook and ace the test. In
his early teenage years, while working as a farmhand, he
started to read widely in the area of theoretical physics. At
sixteen, he made his way through Bertrand Russell and
Alfred North Whitehead's famously abstruse masterpiece
Principia Mathematica. He got a perfect score on his SAT,
even though he fell asleep at one point during the test.
"He did math for an hour," his brother Mark says of
Langan's summer routine in high school. "Then he did
French for an hour. Then he studied Russian. Then he
would read philosophy. He did that religiously, every day."
Another of his brothers, Jeff, says, "You know, when
Christopher was fourteen or fifteen, he would draw things
just as a joke, and it would be like a photograph. When he
was fifteen, he could match Jimi Hendrix lick for lick on
a guitar. Boom. Boom. Boom. Half the time, Christopher
didn't attend school at all. He would just show up for tests
>f The super IQ test was created by Ronald K. Hoeflin, who is himself
someone with an unusually high IQ. Here's a sample question, from
the verbal analogies section. "Teeth is to Hen as Nest is to ?" If you
want to know the answer,