Indians are obsessed with success. Validation is almost exclusively given only to those who succeed. According to the stringent Indian success standards, coming second or almost making it is not even mention-worthy. But it also makes one wonder why, while success is celebrated with such grandeur, privilege is silently brushed under the carpet while no one’s looking. Isn’t privilege the magical password to success?
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As children, we are all fed with the same role models. People who have braved all odds and worked hard to get to the top. I can’t stress how much this rags to riches story has penetrated into the mind of an average Indian. So much so that, we all grow up blind to privilege. We understand success to be the fruit of hard work and hard work. Nothing else.
As a child, it is perfectly fine to view the world as an equal society where everyone is the same but if you keep clinging to those views, even after the advent of adulthood, you badly need a reality check! Outliers written by Malcolm Gladwell will do exactly that for you!
Outliers talks about success! But it is definitely not your run of the mill success book. Take it from me, this book does not have the secret that will change your life. But this book will definitely expand your horizons and forever change the way you see successful people.
Disclaimer: I completely understand that all successful people have worked hard to get where they are today. But I really don’t want to repeat it over and over again. So let us just get it over now.
Hard work
Hard work
Hard work
Hard work
I hope this covers it.
WHAT DO SUCCESSFUL PEOPLE HAVE?
Did you know that Bill Gates’s private school had a computer, at a time when most colleges didn’t have computers? The Beatles performed 8 hour-long concerts in Germany for months together at the very beginning of their career. Bill Joy found a loophole to spend several hours at the University of Michigan’s Computer Center without being charged. Hockey players in Canada had a significant advantage if they were born soon after the cut-off date, because they would be older, stronger and would have had more hours of practice, than those born right before the cut-off date.
From fortunate birth dates to lucky breaks and privileged backgrounds, all successful people have one or many factors that led them to where they are. The concept of a self-made person is very aspirational but it’s rarely true!
10,000 HOURS TO SUCCESS
All successful people have something else in common and that’s hours and hours of practice. To be precise, 10,000 hours. Malcolm Gladwell brings up this number often in the book.
“The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
If you read the above lines and thought to yourself, I could do 10,000 hours too! Let me break it down for you. 10,000 hours is roughly 415 days. If you worked at your area of interest for 3 hours a day, it would take 9 years for you to get to 10,000 hours. And that’s a really long time.
If everybody has the same 24 hours, everybody can do the 10,000 hours too, right?
Umm…not really?
First of all, the framework to identify talent at the right time is both time-consuming and expensive. Even if you somehow identify your talents, does everybody get the chance to pursue their talent without financial pressure and a super supportive environment at home?
24 hours of a person who doesn’t even have to do chores at home are not the same as someone supporting the family while pursuing his passion. You get the gist, right?
THE SELF-MADE PERSON
Do you ever read these stories and interviews of successful people? As someone who has written her fair share of success stories and interviews, I can tell you that nobody tells you about the advantages they had. Either they don’t see them at all or they just don’t want to admit it. They always want to downplay their background, the people who helped them out and the opportunities they had to experiment, learn and make mistakes. While it’s perfectly fine to want the spotlight for yourself, if you really think about it, it is also unfair for anyone reading, learning about them.
“No one-not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses-ever makes it alone”
Here, the word alone doesn’t just refer to your support system or the people in your life. Throughout our lives, we all carry traces of our culture and heritage. No matter where you go and what you make of yourself, it always lingers. For some of us, it’s a burden, for others it’s an advantage, and only a few would have really earned it.
MEANWHILE IN INDIA
Unlike the rest of the world, in India, the conversation of privilege is multi-layered. Courtesy of, you guessed it right! The caste system, among other things. For those on the upper rungs of any ladder, these privileges criss-cross to form a nice cosy nest, while others have to make do with what they get. And most of them who emerge successful and become outliers, like everybody else in the country, refuse to admit their privileges. When someone asks them for advice, they simply say, work hard, like no one ever thought of that!
The idea behind understanding who outliers are and how privilege operates in our society is not to diminish the fame of hard work of individuals. It is simply to understand how we can function better as a community to equally distribute opportunity and success. Corrective measures such as reservations in education and employment were brought about to bridge this very gap. And there is a still a lot more we can do. In Malcolm Gladwell's words,
“To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages today that determine success--the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history--with a society that provides opportunities for all.”
Outliers is a great read for anyone who wants to understand our society a little better than they did yesterday. It's very hard to present so much data in a engaging and informative narrative but somehow, he does it. But even if you aren't somebody who reads, start observing! Observe the people around you. Understand your own privileges and be empathetic towards those who aren't as privileged as you.
P.S. Malcolm Gladwell's journey in Outliers starts with his own, that started in Jamaica, generations ago. Even if you give the book a miss, don't miss the epilogue about the author.
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