Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell

Something a little different this weekend: I've just read the new book by Malcolm Gladwell, he of Tipping Point fame (The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference). The book, Outliers: The Story of Success tells the stories of the people many would call geniuses, those who have been remarkable in some way.

And oddly, I think the book actually has a few lessons for the left in there too.

Outliers is a fascinating book. Malcolm Gladwell looks at successful people, and how they got there, in an interesting way. Some of the conclusions are perhaps what we have suspected, but he has done the legwork to find the data that backs it up. I really do recommend you take a look at it.

Many of us look at successful people, in whatever field, and assume that they must have a gift, that there is something about them which is special. Gladwell, however, has examined these people, to try and find what connects them all, what they have each done to get to where they are.

And what is this magic ingredient? What is this special something that connects all these people?

10,000 hours.

Yes, the first answer is 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours of work and practice. 10,000 hours, day after day, month after month, year after year, of sheer effort on whatever it is they are now successful in. The figures seem to hold for everything from music, to law, to ice hockey. People start to get good, really good, when they have spent 10,000 hours doing what they do.

Now, this isn't really that surprising an answer. It may be a little disappointing, but it's not surprising. It's disappointing because all of us secretly would like to think that the people who are successful are somehow gifted - that their success has literally been given to them. But it turns out that successful people really aren't that different than the rest of us.

Sure, you need a certain base level of intelligence, or a little bit of skill, but then it is is the amount of effort that is put in that effects how successful you are.

Well, mostly, anyway.

Because that brings us to the second answer, the second reason some people are successful and others aren't. And that is the environment they were surrounded by, mainly as children.

Why did Bill Gates get to be the richest man in the world, and the most successful nerd ever? Is it because of a special genius? No, not particularly - not to see he isn't a genius, but that's no guarantee of success.

Is it the amount of work he put in? Well, yes - he began writing software code as a schoolboy, and continued to do so, religiously, fanatically, throughout his adolescence, and beyond.

But Gates also got to be successful because he was one of the first few people to have the opportunity to do this. His school was unique in having access to a computer at a time when they took up a room and cost millions. He was able to continue coding, in a series of odd events, throughout his adolescence. He was able to get his 10,000 hours in early, before others were able to. And it was this that left him in a perfect position to take advantage of the personal computer boom of the 70s and 80s.

So what's the lesson for the left?

The mantra of this government when it comes to education, and indeed to society, has been that equality of outcome was a perverse and wrong thing to aim for. Instead, it was fairer to offer equality of opportunity.

But this book shows us, through various examples, that we simply don't all get an equal chance. Opportunities are always going to unevenly spread. On the whole, this is unavoidable - the book shows through some remarkable examples that sometimes we can't even tell what will turn out to be an opportunity, or an advantage, until long after the time.

Importantly, though, the book does look specifically at education, and the achievements of children from richer and poorer backgrounds. There has long been a difference in educational achievement between rich and poor. But through the examination of test results, we can see it doesn't have to be this way, or at least the difference can be substantially reduced.

It turns out that poorer children get at least as much benefit out of education as richer. Tracking the test scores from the beginning of the school year to the end, the improvements are pretty much uniform.

But where the differences really start to show is testing from the end of one school year to the start of the next. Poorer kids stay at the same level, or even fall back slightly - they have (not unreasonably...) spent the summer playing games, having fun, and building those memories of long hot summers that seemed to go on for ever.

The richer kids, however, have continued to move forward. The environment they are in at home is one that is conducive to learning - their parents push them to learn, or they are surrounded by books, or whatever. They keep learning, and being educated, in their own time.

Now, this isn't much of a difference over one summer, but over all the summers of a child's school lifetime, it really mounts up.

So the obvious answer, if we want to reduce the difference that the financial background of a child's parents makes to their educational achievement, is to provide children with an environment that consistently enables them to learn. Having a long break in the school year, not surprisingly, stops poorer children learning.

So why not get rid of it? If we're really serious about enabling opportunity for all, why are we holding onto a summer holiday that enables children to take part in a harvest? We are no longer an agriculture based society. We are an urban society, who need to be based primarily around knowledge industries. So let's stop making kids take a break from gaining knowledge every year.

So yes, I rather liked this book. Outliers: The Story of Success is on Amazon, or you could, you know, actually go to a local bookshop.