One day in the mid-1980s, a Canadian man took his wife and sons to a Lethbridge Broncos hockey game in Alberta. As the man, a psychologist named Roger Barnsley, watched the game with his sons, his wife Paula scanned the roster listing the players’ names, height, weight, and date of birth. She discovered something.
Why was it that an overwhelming majority of the hockey players were born in January, February, and March?
Outliers by Canadian journalist Malcolm Gladwell begins with this seemingly innocent yet phenomenal discovery made at a hockey game. Using this strange statistic as a launching pad, Gladwell introduces an entirely new perspective with which we can view the lives of successful people. Rest assured that Outliers is the farthest thing from a typical self-help book, neatly divided into chapters about working hard and not wasting time; Gladwell nips these concepts in the bud. Certainly, those are important assets of successful people. But could there be something else? Why do we faithfully believe that the secret to success is held within the successful person? Why don’t we consider the context of that success: the birthday, the lineage, the culture, and historical epoch in which that person grew up? The opportunities they were given, the legacy they received?
We’re taught that the successful are born into modest circumstances, but with a fiery drive and shining talent within them, they fight their way up to the top of the world. What Gladwell argues is that no one makes it to the top alone. That belief is scarcely half of the full story, an incomplete tale that has completely misled us for decades because no one thought to look any further.
Part one of Outliers is called “Opportunity”: it contains several stories outlining some of the many opportunities that have propelled the successful forward, an advantage that somehow, no one discovered. Until that little exchange at a hockey rink in Alberta. The discovery that his wife made at that Broncos game led Barnsley into a fascinating new pool of data, revealing a stunningly clear pattern: people born within the first three months of the year tend to grow up to become the strongest players on the best hockey teams. The explanation is deceptively simple: the birthday cutoff for age-class hockey in Canada is January 2nd. This means that a little boy who turns 10 on January 2nd will be competing alongside someone who doesn’t turn ten until the end of that year. During adolescence, a ten-month difference is significant in physical maturity and coordination. And then, in the following years, the gap only widens between the two boys. The January-born is viewed as the best player on the team; he gets better coaching and more attention; he is chosen for a rep squad; he ends up playing twice as many games per season as the December-born. As this pattern repeats itself, by the time the boys are old enough to join major leagues, the gap has become insurmountable. Hence the abundance of Capricorns, Aquariuses, and Pisces on that roster of the Broncos in the 1980s.
Yes, very amusing—but what of it? Well, this is a discovery that has more implications than you may realize—which Gladwell meticulously dissects throughout Part 1 of the book. Take a more universally relevant area: school. The children with earlier birthdays will likely have a slightly better grasp of reading comprehension, articulation, communication, and critical thinking that their later-born peers. What does this mean? The January-borns will be the brightest students in the class, and have scores to qualify them for gifted programs, positive attention from teachers, and better academic opportunities throughout their school career. Do you see where this is going? There’s a Bible verse after which this phenomenon is named: The Matthew Effect. “For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath.” Essentially, this is one key part of the story of success that we’ve been missing: those who are successful are the ones who are presented with opportunities to get them even further ahead on the path to success. Smarter students get better teaching. Stronger athletes get better coaching. The Matthew Effect is what, at the end of the day, creates the outliers that we have previously believed to be self-sufficient successful people.
This isn’t to say a boy born in August can’t be a star hockey player or a girl born in November can’t be the smartest student in her class. Of course they can, and certainly there are many successful athletes and entrepreneurs who were born later in the year. But Gladwell has essentially discovered an underlying trend in our perception of success that can open our eyes a little and allow for a clearer, more critical view of how people become successful. He has found a missing part of the story. And there are so many more.
If there’s a takeaway to all of this, it might be the fact that the talent of over half of the population has been overlooked, discouraged, pushed off to the side. Wasted.
