Outliers (29 page)

In the 1960s, my mother wrote a book about her experiences. It was entitled
Brown Face, Big Master,
the “brown face” referring to herself, and the “big master” referring, in the Jamaican dialect, to God. At one point, she describes a time just after my parents were married when they were living in London and my eldest brother was still a baby. They were looking for an apartment, and after a long search, my father found one in a London suburb. On the day after they moved in, however, the landlady ordered them out. “You didn’t tell me your wife was Jamaican,” she told my father in a rage.

In her book, my mother describes her long struggle to make sense of this humiliation, to reconcile her experience with her faith. In the end, she was forced to acknowledge that anger was not an option and that as a colored Jamaican whose family had benefited for generations from the hierarchy of race, she could hardly reproach another for the impulse to divide people by the shade of their skin:

I complained to God in so many words: “Here I was, the wounded representative of the negro race in our struggle to be accounted free and equal with the dominating whites!” And God was amused; my prayer did not ring true with Him. I would try again. And then God said, “Have you not done the same thing? Remember this one and that one, people whom you have slighted or avoided or treated less considerately than others because they were different superficially, and you were ashamed to be identified with them. Have you not been glad that you are not more colored than you are? Grateful that you are not black?” My anger and hate against the landlady melted. I was no better than she was, nor worse for that matter....We were both guilty of the sin of self-regard, the pride and the exclusiveness by which we cut some people off from ourselves.

It is not easy to be so honest about where we’re from. It would be simpler for my mother to portray her success as a straightforward triumph over victimhood, just as it would be simpler to look at Joe Flom and call him the greatest lawyer ever—even though his individual achievements are so impossibly intertwined with his ethnicity, his generation, the particulars of the garment industry, and the peculiar biases of the downtown law firms. Bill Gates could accept the title of genius, and leave it at that. It takes no small degree of humility for him to look back on his life and say, “I was very lucky.” And he was. The Mothers’ Club of Lakeside Academy bought him a computer in 1968. It is impossible for a hockey player, or Bill Joy, or Robert Oppenheimer, or any other outlier for that matter, to look down from their lofty perch and say with truthfulness, “I did this, all by myself.” Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky—but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

My great-great-great-grandmother was bought at Alligator Pond. That act, in turn, gave her son, John Ford, the privilege of a skin color that spared him a life of slavery. The culture of possibility that Daisy Ford embraced and put to use so brilliantly on behalf of her daughters was passed on to her by the peculiarities of the West Indian social structure. And my mother’s education was the product of the riots of 1937 and the industriousness of Mr. Chance. These were history’s gifts to my family—and if the resources of that grocer, the fruits of those riots, the possibilities of that culture, and the privileges of that skin tone had been extended to others, how many more would now live a life of fulfillment, in a beautiful house high on a hill?

Notes

INTRODUCTION

John G. Bruhn and Stewart Wolf have published two books on their work in Roseto:
The Roseto Story
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1979) and
The Power of Clan: The Influence of Human Relationships on Heart Disease
(New Brunswick, N.J.: Transaction Publishers, 1993). For a comparison of Roseto Valfortore, Italy, and Roseto, Pennsylvania, USA, see Carla Bianco,
The Two Rosetos
(Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1974). Roseto might be unique among small Pennsylvania towns in the degree of academic interest it has attracted.

ONE: THE MATTHEW EFFECT

Jeb Bush’s fantasies about being a self-made man are detailed in S. V. Dáte’s
Jeb: America’s Next Bush
(New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Penguin, 2007), esp. pages 80–81. Dáte writes: “In both his 1994 and 1998 runs, Jeb made it clear: not only was he not apologizing for his background, he was proud of where he was financially, and certain that it was the result of his own pluck and work ethic. ‘I’ve worked real hard for what I’ve achieved and I’m quite proud of it,’ he told the
St. Petersburg Times
in 1993. ‘I have no sense of guilt, no sense of wrongdoing.’

“The attitude was much the same as he had expressed on CNN’s
Larry King Live
in 1992: ‘I think, overall, it’s a disadvantage,’ he said of being the president’s son when it came to his business opportunities. ‘Because you’re restricted in what you can do.’

“This thinking cannot be described as anything other than delusional.”

The Lethbridge Broncos, who were playing the day that Paula and Roger Barnsley first noticed the relative-age effect, were a junior ice hockey team in the Western Hockey League from 1974 until 1986. They won the WHL Championship in 1982–83, and three years later were brought back to Swift Current in Saskatchewan. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lethbridge_Broncos
.

For an overview of the relative-age effect, see Jochen Musch and Simon Grondin, “Unequal Competition as an Impediment to Personal Development: A Review of the Relative Age Effect in Sport,” published in
Developmental Review
21, no. 2 (2001): 147–167.

Roger Barnsley and A. H. Thompson have put their study on a Web site,
http://www.socialproblemindex.ualberta.ca/relage.htm
.

-Self-fulfilling prophecies can be traced back to ancient Greek and Indian literature, but the term itself was coined by Robert K. Merton in
Social Theory and Social Structure
(New York: Free Press, 1968).

Barnsley and his team branched out into other sports. See R. Barnsley, A. H. Thompson, and Philipe Legault, “Family Planning: Football Style. The Relative Age Effect in Football,” published in the
International Review for the Sociology of Sport
27, no. 1 (1992): 77–88.

The statistics for the relative-age effect in baseball come from Greg Spira, in
Slate
magazine,
http://www.slate.com/id/2188866/
.

A. Dudink, at the University of Amsterdam, showed how the cutoff date for English Premier League soccer creates the same age hierarchy as is seen in Canadian hockey. See “Birth Date and Sporting Success,”
Nature
368 (1994): 592.

Interestingly, in Belgium, the cutoff date for soccer used to be August 1, and back then, almost a quarter of their top players were born in August and September. But then the Belgian soccer federation switched to January 1, and sure enough, within a few years, there were almost no elite soccer players born in December, and an overwhelming number born in January. For more, see Werner F. Helsen, Janet L. Starkes, and Jan van Winckel, “Effects of a Change in Selection Year on Success in Male Soccer Players,”
American Journal of Human Biology
12, no. 6 (2000): 729–735.

Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dhuey’s data comes from “The Persistence of Early Childhood Maturity: International Evidence of Long-Run Age Effects,” published in the
Quarterly Journal of Economics
121, no. 4 (2006): 1437–1472.

TWO: THE 10,000-HOUR RULE

Much of the discussion of Bill Joy’s history comes from Andrew Leonard’s
Salon
article, “BSD Unix: Power to the People, from the Code,” May 16, 2000,
http://archive.salon.com/tech/fsp/2000/05/16/chapter_2_part_one/index.html
.

For a history of the University of Michigan Computer Center, see “A Career Interview with Bernie Galler,” professor emeritus in the Electrical Engineering and Computer Science department at the school,
IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
23, no. 4 (2001): 107–112.

One of (many) wonderful articles by Ericsson and his colleagues about the ten-thousand-hour rule is K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer, “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,”
Psychological Review
100, no. 3 (1993): 363–406.

Daniel J. Levitin talks about the ten thousand hours it takes to get mastery in
This Is Your Brain on Music: The Science of a Human Obsession
(New York: Dutton, 2006), p. 197.

Mozart’s development as a prodigy is discussed in Michael J. A. Howe’s
Genius Explained
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), p. 3.

Harold Schonberg is quoted in John R. Hayes,
Thinking and Learning Skills
. Vol. 2:
Research and Open Questions
, ed. Susan F. Chipman, Judith W. Segal, and Robert Glaser (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1985).

For chess’s exception to the rule, grandmaster Bobby Fischer, see Neil Charness, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Ulrich Mayr in their essay “The Role of Practice and Coaching in Entrepreneurial Skill Domains: An International Comparison of Life-Span Chess Skill Acquisition,” in
The Road to Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports and Games
, ed. K. Anders Ericsson (Hillsdale, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, 1996), pp. 51–126, esp. p. 73.

To read more about the time-sharing revolution, see Stephen Manes and Paul Andrews’s
Gates: How Microsoft’s Mogul Reinvented an Industry—And Made Himself the Richest Man in America
(New York: Touchstone, 1994), p. 26.

Philip Norman wrote the Beatles’ biography
Shout!
(New York: Fireside, 2003).

John Lennon and George Harrison’s reminiscences about the band’s beginning in Hamburg come from
Hamburg Days
by George Harrison, Astrid Kirchherr, and Klaus Voorman (Surrey: Genesis Publications, 1999). The quotation is from page 122.

Robert W. Weisberg discusses the Beatles—and computes the hours they spent practicing—in “Creativity and Knowledge: A Challenge to Theories” in
Handbook of Creativity,
ed. Robert J. Sternberg (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999): 226–250.

The complete list of the richest people in history can be found at
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wealthy_historical_figures_2008
.

The reference to C. Wright Mills in the footnote comes from
The American Business Elite: A Collective Portrait,
published in the
Journal of Economic History
5 (December 1945): 20–44.

Steve Jobs’s pursuit of Bill Hewlett is described in Lee Butcher’s
Accidental Millionaire: The Rise and Fall of Steve Jobs at Apple Computer
(New York: Paragon House, 1987).

THREE: THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART 1

The episode of
1 vs. 100
featuring Chris Langan aired January 25, 2008.

Leta Hollingworth, who is mentioned in the footnote, published her account of “L” in
Children Above 180 IQ
(New York: World Books, 1942).

Among other excellent sources on the life and times of Lewis Terman are Henry L. Minton, “Charting Life History: Lewis M. Terman’s Study of the Gifted” in
The Rise of Experimentation in American Psychology,
ed. Jill G. Morawski (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1988); Joel N. Shurkin,
Terman’s Kids
(New York: Little, Brown, 1992); and May Seagoe,
Terman and the Gifted
(Los Altos: Kauffman, 1975). The discussion of Henry Cowell comes from Seagoe.

Liam Hudson’s discussion of the limitations of IQ tests can be found in
Contrary Imaginations: A Psychological Study of the English Schoolboy
(Middlesex: Penguin Books, 1967). Hudson is an absolute delight to read.

The Michigan Law School study “Michigan’s Minority Graduates in Practice: The River Runs Through Law School,” written by Richard O. Lempert, David L. Chambers, and Terry K. Adams, appears in
Law and Social Inquiry
25, no. 2 (2000).

Pitirim Sorokin’s rebuttal to Terman was published in
Fads and Foibles in Modern Sociology and Related Sciences
(Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956).

FOUR: THE TROUBLE WITH GENIUSES, PART 2

Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin,
American Prometheus: The Triumph and Tragedy of J. Robert Oppenheimer
(New York: Knopf, 2005).

Robert J. Sternberg has written widely on practical intelligence and similar subjects. For a good, nonacademic account, see
Successful Intelligence: How Practical and Creative Intelligence Determine Success in Life
(New York: Plume, 1997).

As should be obvious, I loved Annette Lareau’s book. It is well worth reading, as I have only begun to outline her argument from
Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003).

Another excellent discussion of the difficulties in focusing solely on IQ is Stephen J. Ceci’s
On Intelligence: A Bioecological Treatise on Intellectual Development
(Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996).

For a gentle but critical assessment of Terman’s study, see “The Vanishing Genius: Lewis Terman and the Stanford Study” by Gretchen Kreuter. It was published in the
History of Education Quarterly
2, no. 1 (March 1962): 6–18.

FIVE: THE THREE LESSONS OF JOE FLOM

The definitive history of Skadden, Arps and the takeover culture was written by Lincoln Caplan,
Skadden: Power, Money, and the Rise of a Legal Empire
(New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 1993).

Alexander Bickel’s obituary ran in the
New York Times
on November 8, 1974. The transcript of his interview is from the American Jewish Committee’s oral history project, which is archived at the New York Public Library.