Book Tittle:
OUTLIERS
Author:
MALCOLM GLADWELL
Reviewer:
MATTHEW UJAH-PETER
Is there such a thing as innate talent? The answer of course,
is yes. But Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers reveals that opportunity and preparation,
not talent, are chiefly responsible for top performance. According to Gladwell, findings
show that when one puts up to 10,000 hours of practice into any endeavours that
lies in the path of his innate talents with a view to becoming better in it, he
would doubtless become a world class performer in it. An experiment that was
carried out in Berlin Elite Academy of Music proved this, according to
Gladwell.
The students were separated
into three groups according to their level of skills and quality of performance.
The elite performers were found to have put in enough hours of practice and
rehearsals and had totalled at least 10,000 hours of practising with their musical
instruments by the time they were 20 years of age. These were regarded as
highly talented world class performers. The second group made up of those regarded
as very good instrumentalists were found to have totalled between 7,000 to 8,000
hours of practice. The third group was made up of those who would later become
instructors in schools and were studying with the view to becoming instructors
in schools and were found to have totalled over 4,000 hours of practice with
the view of improving their skills.
Researchers have settled for 10,000 hours as the magic
number of hours of practice that guarantee true expertise. To truly be a top or
world class performer, 10, 000 hours must be invested into learning and
practice in any field of endeavour. To pound home this truth Gladwall takes the
reader on a trip into the lives of well known outliers such as Bill Joy, Bill
Gates, The Beatles, etc.
According to Gladwell, it was Bill Joy (sometimes referred
to as Edison of the Internet), working in collaboration with a small group, who
rewrote UNIX, which was originally developed by AT & T for mainframe
computers. Joy’s version was said to be so good that it became and remains the operative
system on which literally millions of computers around the world run. As Bill
Joy himself said, ‘’if you put your mac in that funny mode where you can see
the code, I see things that I remember typing in twenty five years ago.’’ (at the time of publishing outliers). And
do you know who wrote much of the software that allows you to access the
Internet? Bill Joy did. It was he who rewrote the computer language called
java, and in Gladwell’s words, ‘’... his legend grew’’.
But Bill Joy’s success was not just because he had talents
by the truckloads. When Joy was learning programming, computers were the size
of rooms. Those were the days of mainframe computers when computers were rare
and programming was extremely hard and tedious, and that is, if you were fortunate
to find a computer and gain access to it. If you managed to gain access to one,
it would cost you a fortune to rent a time on it.
The year was 1971, the same year that Joy was admitted into
the University of Michigan. The computer centre happened to open in the same
university that same year. Joy was only sixteen and was voted ‘’the most
studious student’’ by his high school. He was not at the university to study
computer or programming. But when he stumbled across that newly opened computer
centre in his freshman year, he became attracted and in Gladwell’s word, ‘’he
was hooked.’’ From then on he buried himself in the world of programming and
computer software. By 1975, Joy enrolled in graduate school of the University
of California, Berclay. He even got a job with a computer science professor so
he could program any time he could.
These were the opportunities that greeted Bill Joy. He found
himself by the happiest of accidents in the few places in the world where, as a
teenager, he could have enough access to the rarest of machine and work with it
for as much time as he wanted. ‘’I lived in the north campus, and the computer
centre was in the north campus’’, Joy revealed. The computer centre opened
24-hours and Joy stayed there all night to programme. ‘’In an average week in
those years, I was spending more time in the computer centre than in my
classes,’’ Joy said. ‘’At Michigan, I was probably programming eight or ten
hours in a day. By the time I was at Berclay I was doing it day and night. I
had a terminal at home. I’d stay up until two or three O’clock in the
morning...programming.’’ When he paused to do the math, he concluded that he
must have put in ‘’so, so may be...ten thousand hours?’’
If we scratch below the surface of other great achievers, do
we always find the equivalence of the Bill Joy’s experience? First, let’s again
look at the stream of opportunities that came Joy’s way. Just as in the game of
basketball, for instance an aspiring pro must first have the height and then
other things such as skills, discipline, etc., Joy had the talent to give him
the head start. He was a maths wizkid. But all maths wizkids don’t end up going
to the University of Michigan at a time when the computer centre was opened and
had a bug in it where someone could figure out that if you put in ‘’time
equals’’ and then letter, like t
equals k, they wouldn't charge you,
then you could sit there forever learning programming.
Since the school was
willing to spend the money to keep the computer centre open twenty four hours,
he could stay up all night and put in as much hour as was needed to become a
skilful programmer. He was able to pay the due - the number of hours required to
come top as a renowned programmer. And he was ready and up to the task by the
time the opportunity to rewrite UNIX came his way. Thus his willingness to learn
and gain mastery in the art of programming helped him along with his innate
talent to prepare him for the big brake ahead.
Let’s turn to another outlier whose history Gladwell ties to the 10,000 hour rule along with the gifts
of opportunity and legacy: Bill Gates. Gates undoubtedly towers above Joy in
fame. But both share a common thread that run through their stories. Bill Gates
too, started out as a brilliant, young maths wizkid. Then, he dropped out of Harvard, founded
Microsoft with his pal, Paul Allen, and through sheer brilliance, vision and
plucks built Microsoft into a multinational software organisation from the
scratch and went on to become a world richest man. Wow! Now, those are lines
you probably must have become bored with. But, let’s scratch below the surface
of Gate’s history and see if those lines fit well into the underlining factors
of this outlier’s resounding success.
‘’Gate’s father was a wealthy lawyer in Seattle, and his mother was
the daughter of a well-to-do banker’’, says Gladwell. Just like Joy, Gates had
stream of opportunities lined up ahead. He was taken out of public school and sent
to a private school that catered to Seattle’s elite families. There midway
through his second year, the school started a computer club that was sponsored
by the mother’s club. This was 1968 and most colleges did not even have a
computer in those days. But here is a high school with a state-of-the-art
computer facility.
Amazingly, the type of computer installed in that high
school club was what was called ASR-33 Teletype – a time sharing terminal with
direct link to a mainframe computer. This was totally different and a world
apart from the computer Bill Joy used which was a far more laborious means of
learning programming back in those days. Now, while Bill Joy learned programming
by time sharing system right in 1971 as a sixteen year old freshman at the
University of Michigan, Bill Gates was
already learning programming via real time
as an eighth grader back in 1968. Gates lived virtually in the computer
room from that moment onwards. But buying time on the mainframe computer was
expensive. Thanks to the Mother’s Club who put up 3,000 Dollars. When that amount
of money ran out, the parents raised more money. Again the students spent it.
At the time a group
of programmers at the University of Washington formed the Computer Centre
Corporation (C-Cubed) which leased computer time to local companies.
Fortunately for Gates, a student in his school happened to be the son of one of
the founders of C-Cubed. Monique Rona, the parent of the boy wondered if the
Lakeside School (Gates’ school) computer club would like to test out C-Cubed’s
software programme on the weekends in exchange for free programming time.
Gates jumped at the offer. He would take the bus after
school to the C-Cubed office and programmed long into the evening. Well, eventually
C-Cubed went bankrupt and Gates started hanging around with his friends near
the computer centre of the University of Washington. Before long, a door of opportunity opened at
the Information Science Incorporation (ISI). ISI 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.
‘’It was my obsession’’, Gates said. ‘’I skipped athletics. I
went up there at night...it would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or
thirty hours in. There was a period when Paul Allen and I got in trouble for
stealing a bunch of passwords and crashing the system. We got kicked
out....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 this machine
in the medical centre and the physics department. They were on twenty-four-
hour schedule, but with this big black period, so that between three and six in
the morning, they never scheduled anything. 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.’’ Gates narrated.
 |
| Malcolm Gladwell |
Again, fortune smiled on Bill Gates when one of the founders
of ISI, Bud Pemboke was called from TWR, a technology company which had just
signed a contract to set up a computer system at Bonneville Power Station in Southern
Washington. Programmer familiar with the particular software the power station
used was desperately needed. This was the early days of the computer revolution
and programmers with that king of specialized experience were difficult to
find. But Pemboke knew that those high school kids from Lakeside who have being
running up thousands of hours of computer time on their mainframe would
perfectly foot the bill. Bill Gates and his friends were contacted. Gates was now
in his senior year and somehow managed to convince his teachers to let him
decamp for Bronneville under the guise of an independent study project. There
under the supervision of John Norton, and with Norton’s help he wrote codes.
Gates, as it turned out was presented with even greater
opportunities than Bill Joy. When Gates started programming at an even younger
age-three years before Joy, Joy probably don’t even know what programming or
computer was. So by the time Gates dropped out of Harvard, he had already put
in hours and hours non-stop, programming for at least seven consecutive years. He
was able to pay the 10,000 hour price. How many kids in the world back in the
1960s and 1970s had so much opportunities such as were piled on each other
along both Joy’s and Gates’ ways? As the saying goes, ‘’Luck is when
preparation meet opportunity.
