TOW #4 - IRB: Section one of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

After having read just the first section of Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, I’m already hooked. The introduction to the book starts off in a lone Pennsylvanian town named Roseto in which only around two thousand people live, all of who are Italian immigrants from a village of the same name in southeastern Italy. At the time, heart disease was an even larger epidemic in the US then, and was the number one killer of men under age sixty-five. However, in Roseto, virtually no one showed any signs of having this disease. Scientists and phycologists tested the residents to see if it was their diet, genetics, or exercise habits that was what allowed them to so effectively avoid the disease, but found that none of those were contributing factors. Instead, a doctor named Stewart Wolf discovered that it was their culture that allowed them to resist the disease so well. The societal norm of having three family generations under the same roof, saying hello to people as they walk down the street, sitting out on one’s porch simply enjoying the day, etc. The discovery was groundbreaking by adding the entirely new concept that where we’re from and who we surround ourselves can actually affect the state of our health. Gladwell then states, “In Outliers, I want to do for our understanding of success what Stewart Wolf did for our understanding of health.” (Gladwell 11) In the next chapter, he uses the example of professional hockey players’ birth months as an example of a previously unthought of factor to success. He uses actual teams’ roster information that includes their birthdays to show that an overwhelming majority of professional players are born in either January, February, or March. Why? Because the cutoff date for hockey leagues that precede the professional one is always January 1st. This means that as children, someone born on that day as opposed to someone born on December 31st of the same year will have a significant physical advantage of someone nearly twelve months younger. Then they will be selected for a better team, receive better coaching, practice more, and their advantage grows. Ultimately, it results in the best players virtually all being born early in the year due to an unearned and unfair advantage simply because of the cutoff date. These are the underlying factors of success that Gladwell attempts to point out and have his audience notice primarily through the use of statistics and specific examples.

Image courtesy of The New York Times