Does the year you were born have anything to do with how successful you are?

After reading Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, I had to wonder just how much the year I was born has had to do with my lot in life. Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success is an easy read, much like his previous writings, The Tipping Point and Blink. Each chapter is prefaced with a quote that reflects the point he makes in the chapter; and, gave me plenty to consider about the cultural, environmental or genetic factors; being in the right place at the right time, such as not only the year, but the month one is born; or simply the concept of practice makes perfect that can have a positive or negative impact one’s success.

Several of the concepts, such as practice makes perfect - the 10,000 hour theory, that Gladwell highlights are already widely recognized. One of the examples Gladwell used to highlight 10,000 hour theory is the Beatles. Yes, the George, John, Ringo, and Paul Beatles. Gladwell posits that the Beatles’ success was firmly grounded in the fact that the band was regularly asked to play in the clubs in Hamburg, Germany early and often in their career, which meant that they played solid sets 7 days a week and for hours and hours at a time thus contributing to their 10,000 hour of practice, practice, practice. The 10,000 hour theory purports that regardless of one’s natural, or supposed gifted ability, 10,000 hours at most any given task secures one’s success at that task.

I found two of the chapters of the book particularly interesting. One is the chapter called The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes, which explored the unprecedented high rate of Korean Air Lines airplane crashes during the 1980s and 90s; at the time, specifically seventeen times higher than that of United Airlines. Gladwell describes how six layers of complex Korean communicative culture directly resulted in the high rate of airplane crashes by relating the theory that Dutch psychologist Geert Hofstede coined as Hofestede’s Dimensions. Hofstede’s Dimensions are comprised of uncertainty, which measures how well a culture tolerates ambiguity; and the individualism-collectivism scale, which is a scale of measurement that can distinguish one culture from another according to how much they expect individuals to look after themselves. One of the points that Hofstede makes about these dimensions is that a country’s scale on any of these dimensions doesn’t connote a better society; rather the scales just denote what is. Another of Hofstede’s dimensions is the power distance index which is a direct result of how comfortable one is or isn’t in questioning a supervisor’s authority, or the layers of communication in light of social standing. Gladwell does a good job of explaining the tie between the complex and multi layered Korean culture and communication structure in regard to Hofstede’s theory to explain Korean Airlines higher than usual plane crash rates.

The other chapter I found particularly interesting is the chapter called Harlan, Kentucky. Ever hear about the feud between the Hatfield-McCoy feud? This chapter examines cultural predisposition rooted in a current culture yet stemming from hundreds of years ago. The predisposition present within a group that has not only evolved, but moved across the globe, hence the current still permeates the behavior even when far removed by time and geography. In the case of Kentucky, most immigrants that settled in Kentucky were from one of the most ferocious cultures of honor, the borderlands region of the lowlands of Scotland and Northern Ireland. The harsh and turbulent area was steeped in violence; and, making a living was especially hard. The combination of these circumstances resulted in tight knit families with a fierce sense of loyalty. Fast forward 400 years and although these families and people have been long removed from the harsh environment of Scotland/Ireland, the criminality of the American South demonstrates much higher rates of personal violent crime, rather than crimes that reflect property or stranger crimes. The cultural sense of loyalty has remained inherent in this regional group of people for hundreds of years. Gladwell expands upon this evidence by drawing from David Hackett Fisher’s book, Albion’s Seed: Four British Folkways in America, which describes the premise that cultural legacies remarkably present themselves for generations. Gladwell also uses the description of an experiment that was conducted in the early 1990s by two psychologists, Cohen and Nisbett that measured culture of honor tolerance. The experiment involved purposely insulting students at the University of Michigan from the north and the south and discovered that the reaction to a variety of means of insult for southerners produced almost immediate effects of aggression, while the northerners were consistently not even fazed by the same behavior targeted at them. Environment factors, you might say? Not so. These students weren’t living in anywhere near the circumstances of their ancestors; they were all living in the twentieth century in a sufficiently metropolitan area and traveled from the south to attend school in the north. Nonetheless, as Gladwell explains, “They still acted like they were living in nineteenth-century Harlan, Kentucky.”(p.174).

Gladwell’s book left me with the realization that success and failure are much more complicated than I would have imagined; the result of a host of advantages and extenuating circumstances that we most often have no control over and most often never recognize, much less understand. They can be simple or complicated and derive from a variety of factors that can be hard to recognize much less pinpoint and that the focus on the individual, which has most often been the case, is a nearsighted view in light of the influence of culture, family, community, social heritage, and a host of indistinguishable factors provide an opportunity for success or subdue one’s opportunity for success.