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Tuesday, November 4, 2014
What About the Others?
In his book, Outliers, Malcom Gladwell uses birthdays as a way to explain how successful people became that way. Their birthdays influenced their opportunities. For example, most hockey players in the U19 Division in Canada were born in January-March. The cutoff for age divisions is January first so someone who turns 10 later in January could be playing with someone who doesn't turn 10 until December. This allows for visible maturity between the two boys and more attention given to the older one. This gives the older boy more opportunities than the younger one. Now Gladwell mainly used birthdays to exemplify stories of success in countries like Canada and the United States. Is this true for developing countries? Are most of the few successful people there born in the same month?
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I think that Gladwell uses the birthdays to show how lucky certain people are. As he points out countless times, there is usually only a small window of opportunity for success. It's those who manage to squeeze themselves through that window that are the more successful people. Usually when an idea comes around, there's only a limited amount of people who can act on it and make a maximum profit from it.
ReplyDeleteI am reading Outliers as well, and I found it remarkably interesting how the fact that a birthday is in the early months of the year can basically determine a person's success. Not only does a birth month but a birth year can be noticeably related within successful people. Reading Gladwell's thoughts on birthdays made me think about our own class of 2016. If we take the top ten percent of our class, how many of those teenagers have birthdays in the months of January, February, and March? Maybe that knowledge can prove Gladwell's point even further.
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