Outliers Read online

  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 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 star/celebrity, 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.

  “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 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.NamePos. L/RHeightWeightBirth DateHometown

  9 Brennan Bosch C R 5′8″ 173 Feb. 14, 1988 Martensville, SK

  11 Scott Wasden C R 6′1″ 188 Jan. 4, 1988 Westbank, BC

  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

  15 Derek Dorsett RW L 5′11″ 178 Dec. 20, 1986 Kindersley, SK

  16 Daine Todd C R 5′10″ 173 Jan. 10, 1987 Red Deer, AB

  17 Tyler Swystun RW R 5′11″ 185 Jan. 15, 1988 Cochrane, AB

  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

  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

  28 Bretton Cameron C 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 Edmonton, AB

  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 D R 6′3″ 230 Feb. 9, 1988 Leduc, AB

  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

  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-1980s, 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 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.”

  “I thought she was crazy,” Barnsley remembers. “But I 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-year-olds—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: in any elite group of hockey players—the very best of the best—40 percent of the players will have been born betwe
en 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 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 1. 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 twelve-month 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 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 a result, a child can be a bit behind physically in those sports and still play as 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 1, 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 1, and in one recent junior world championship tournament, 135 players were born in the three months after August 1, and just 22 were born in May, June, and July. Today the cutoff date for international junior soccer is January 1. 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:

  No.PlayerBirth DatePosition

  1 Marcel Gecov Jan. 1, 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. 1, 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 Radek Petr Feb. 24, 1987 GK

  13 Ondrej Mazuch Mar. 15, 1989 DF

  14 Ondrej 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 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—looked 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 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 sam
e 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 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 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.