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 Matthew 25 29 outliers the story of success is a book written by Malcolm Gladwell that challenges the conventional understanding of what makes people successful drawing on a wide range of examples from sports music business and history Gladwell argues that success is not just a matter of individual talent and hard work but is also influenced by a complex web of external factors such as cultural background family upbringing and timing by exploring the stories of high Achievers and their unique paths to success Gladwell provides a fresh perspective on the nature of success and offers insights into how individuals and organizations can foster opportunities and create a Level Playing Field for all in this book glavo presents a compelling case for why we need to rethink our understanding of success and what it takes to achieve it outliers the story of success written and read by Malcolm Gladwell outlier noun 1. something that is situated away from or classed differently from a main or related body to a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others of the sample introduction the Rosetto mystery these people were dying of old age that's it risotto of alphatorre Lies 100 miles Southeast of Rome in the apanine foothills of the Italian province of fojia in the style of medieval Villages the town is organized around a large Central Square facing the square is the Palazzo marcosale the Palace of the seguese family once the great landowner of these parts an archway to one side leads to a church the Madonna Del carmini narrow Stone steps run up the hillside flanked by closely clustered two-story Stone houses with red towel roofs for centuries the paisane of Rosetto worked in the marble Quarries in the surrounding Hills or cultivated the fields in the terraced valley below walking four and five miles down the mountain in the morning and then making the long journey back up the hill at night it was a hard life the townsfolk were barely literate and desperately poor and without much hope for economic betterment until word reached Rosetta at the end of the 19th century of the land of opportunity across the ocean in January of 1882 a group of 11 rosettans ten man and one boy set sail for New York they spent their first night in America sleeping on the floor of a Tavern on Mulberry Street in Manhattan's Little Italy then they ventured West eventually finding jobs in a slate quarried 90 miles west of the city near the town of Bangor Pennsylvania the following year 15 rosettans left Italy for America and several members of that group ended up in Bangor as well joining their compatriots in the Slate Quarry those immigrants in turn sent word back to Rosetto about the promise of the new world and soon one group of rosettans after another packed their bags and headed for Pennsylvania until the initial stream of immigrants became a flood in 1894 alone some 1200 rosettans applied for passports to America leaving entire streets of their Old Village abandoned the rosettans began buying land on a rocky Hillside connected to Bangor by a steep rutted wagon path they built closely clustered two-story Stone houses with slate roofs on narrow streets running up and down the hillside they built a church and called it Our Lady of Mount Carmel and named The Main Street on which it stood Garibaldi Avenue after the great hero of Italian unification in the beginning they called the town New Italy but they soon changed it to Rosetto which seemed only appropriate given that in the previous decade almost all of them had come from the same Village in Italy in 1896 a dynamic young priest by the name of Father Pasquale denisco took over at Our Lady of Mount Carmel dinisco set up spiritual societies and organized festivals he encouraged the town folk to clear the land and plant onions beans potatoes melons and fruit trees in the long backyards behind their houses he gave out seeds and Bulbs the town came to life the rosettans began raising pigs in their backyards and growing grapes for homemade wine schools a park a Convent and a cemetery were built small shops and bakeries and restaurants and bars opened along Garibaldi Avenue more than a dozen factories sprang up making blouses for the Garment trade neighboring Bangor was largely Welsh in English and the next town over was overwhelmingly German which meant given the fractious relationships between the English and Germans and Italians in those years that Rosetto stayed strictly for resentence if you had wandered up and down the streets of Rosetto in Pennsylvania in the first few decades after 1900 you'd have heard only Italians spoken and not just any Italian but the precise Southern fojian dialect spoken back in the Italian Rosetto Rosetto Pennsylvania was its own tiny self-sufficient world all but unknown but the society around it and may well have remained so but for a man named Stuart Wolfe Wolff was a physician he studied digestion in the stomach and taught in the medical school at the University of Oklahoma he spent his Summers on a farm in Pennsylvania not far from Rosetto although that of course didn't mean much since Rosetta was so much in its own world it was possible to live one town over and never know much about it one of the times when we were up there for the summer this would have been in the late 1950s I was invited to give a talk at the local medical society wolf said years later in an interview after the talk was over one of the local doctors invited me to have a beer and while we were having a drink he said you know I've been practicing for 17 years I get patients from all over and I rarely find anyone from Rosetto under the age of 65 with heart disease wolf was taken aback this was the 1950s years before the Advent of cholesterol-lowering drugs and aggressive prevention of heart disease heart attacks were an epidemic in the United States they were the leading cause of death in men under the age of 65. it was impossible to be a doctor of Common Sense said a Nazi heart disease Wolff decided to investigate he Enlisted the support of some of his students and colleagues from Oklahoma they gathered together the death certificates from residents of the town going back as many years as they could they analyzed Physicians records they took medical histories and constructed family genealogies we got busy wolf said we decided to do a preliminary study we started in 1961 the mayor said all my sisters are going to help you he had four sisters he said you could have the Town Council room I said where are you going to have Council meetings he said well we'll postpone them for a while the ladies would bring us lunch we had little booths so we would take blood do EKGs we were there for four weeks then I talked with the authorities they gave us the school for the summer we invited the entire population of Rosetto to be tested the results were astonishing in Rosetto virtually no one under 55 had died of a heart attack or showed any signs of heart disease for men over 65 the death rate from heart disease in Rosetto was roughly half that of the United States as a whole the death way from all causes in Rosetto in fact was 30 or 35 percent lower than it should have been Wolff brought in a friend of his a sociologist from Oklahoma named John brune to help him I hired medical students in sociology grad students as interviewers and in Rosetta we went house to house and talked to every person aged 21 and over roon remembers this happened more than 50 years ago the Bruins still had a sense of amazement in his voice as he described what they found there was no suicide no alcoholism no drug addiction and very little crime they didn't have anyone on welfare then we looked at peptic ulcers they didn't have any of those either these people were dying of old age that's it Wolf's profession had a name for a place like Rosetto a place that lay outside everyday experience where the normal rules did not apply Rosetto was an outlier wolves first thought was that the rosettans must have held onto some dietary practices from the old world that left them healthier than other Americans but he quickly realized that wasn't true the resents were cooking with lar instead of the much healthier olive oil they'd use back in Italy Pizza in Italy was a thin crust with salt oil and perhaps in tomatoes anchovies or onions Pizza in Pennsylvania was bread dough plus sausage pepperoni salami ham and sometimes eggs sweets like biscotti and tarali used to be reserved for Christmas and Easter in Rosetta now they were eaten all year round when wolf had dietitians analyze the typical resentence eating habits he found that a whopping 41 of their calories came from fat nor was this a town where people got up at dawn to do yoga and run a Brisk six miles the Pennsylvanian rosettans smoked heavily and many were struggling with obesity if it wasn't diet and exercise then what about genetics the rosettans were a close-knit group from the same region of Italy and Will's next thought was whether they were of a particularly hearty stock that protected them from disease so he Tracked Down relatives of the rosettans who were living in other parts of the United States to see if they shared the same remarkable good health as their cousins in Pennsylvania they didn't he then looked at the region where the rosettans lived was it possible that there was something about living in the foothills of eastern Pennsylvania that was good for their health the two closest towns to Rosetto were Banger which was just down the hill and Nazareth a few miles away these were both about the same size as Rosetto and populated with the same kind of hard-working European immigrants wolf combed through both towns medical records for men over 65 the death rates from heart disease in Nazareth and Bangor were something like three times that of Rosetta another dead end what wolf began to realize was that the secret of Rosetta wasn't diet or exercise or genes or location it had to be Rosetto itself as brune and wolf walked around the town they figured out why they looked at how the rosettans visited one another stopping to chat in Italian on the street or cooking for Jetta in their backyards they learned about the extended family Clans at underlay the town's social structure they saw how many homes had three generations living Under One Roof and how much respect grandparents commanded they went to mass at Our Lady of Mount Carmel and saw the unifying and calming effect of the church they counted 22 separate Civic organizations in a town of just under 2 000 people they picked up on the particular egalitarian ethos of community that discouraged the wealthy from flaunting their success and helped the unsuccessful obscure their failures in transplanting the paisani culture of southern Italy to the hills of eastern Pennsylvania the rosettans had created a powerful protective social structure capable of insulating them from the pressures of the modern world the rosettans were healthy because of where they were from because of the world they had created for themselves in their tiny little town in the Hills I remember going to Rosetto for the first time and you'd see three generational family meals all the bakeries the people walking up and down the street sitting on their porches talking to each other the blouse Mills the women worked during the day while the men worked in the Slate quarries brune said it was magical when Bruno first presented their findings to the medical community you can imagine the kind of skepticism they faced they went to conferences where their peers were presenting long rows of data a raid in complex charts and referring to this kind of gene or that kind of physiological process and they talked and said about the mysterious and magical benefits of people stopping to talk to one another on the street and having three generations living Under One Roof living a long life the conventional wisdom said at the time depended to a great extent on who we were that is our genes it depended on the decisions people made and what they chose to eat and how much they chose to exercise and how effectively they were treated by the medical system no one was used to thinking about health in terms of community wolf and brune had to convince the medical establishment to think about health and heart attacks in an entirely new way they had to get them to realize that you couldn't understand why someone was healthy if all you did was think about an individual's choices or actions in isolation you had to look beyond the individual you had to understand the culture they were a part of and who their friends and families were and what town their families came from you had to appreciate the idea that the values of the world we inhabit and the people we surround ourselves with has a profound effect on Who We Are in outliers I want to do for our understanding of success what Stuart Wolff did for our understanding of Health part one opportunity chapter one The Matthew effect you don't even have to do any statistical analysis you just look at it one warm spring Day in May of 2007. the medicine hack tigers and the Vancouver Giants met for the Memorial Cup hockey championships in Vancouver British Columbia the Tigers and the Giants were the two finest teams in the Canadian hockey league which in turn is the finest Junior Hockey League in the world these were the future stars of the sport 17 18 and 19 year olds who have been skating and shooting pucks since they were barely more than toddlers the game was broadcast on Canadian national television up and down the streets of downtown Vancouver Memorial Cup banners hung from the lampposts the arena was sold out a long red carpet was rolled out on the ice and the announcer introduced The Game's dignitaries first can the premier British Columbia Gordon Campbell then amid tumultuous Applause I'll walk Gordie Howe one of the legends of the game ladies and gentlemen the announcer boomed Mr Hockey for the next 60 Minutes the two teams played spirited aggressive hockey Vancouver scored first early in the second period on a rebound by Mario bliznik late in the second period it was medicine Hat's turn as the team's scoring leader Darren Helm fired a quick shot past Vancouver's goalie Tyson sexpeth Vancouver answered in the third quarter scoring the game's deciding goal and then when Medicine Hat pulled its goalie in desperation Vancouver scored a third time in the aftermath of the game the players and their families and Sports reporters from across the country crammed into the winning team's locker room the era was filled with cigar smoke and a smell of champagne and sweat-soaked hockey gear on the wall was a hand-painted Banner embrace the struggle in the center of the room the Giants coach Don hay stood misty-eyed I'm just so proud of these guys he said just look around the locker room there isn't one guy who didn't buy in wholeheartedly Canadian hockey is a meritocracy thousands of Canadian boys begin to play the sport at the novice level before they are even in kindergarten from that point on there are leagues for every age class at each of those levels the players are sifted and sorted and evaluated with the most talented separated out and groomed for the next level by the time players reached their mid-teens the very best of the best had been channeled into an elite League known as major Junior a which is the top of the pyramid and if your major Junior a team plays for the Memorial Cup that means you at the very top of the very top of the pyramid this is the way most sports pick their future stars it's the way soccer is organized in Europe and South America and the way Olympic athletes are chosen for that matter it's not all that different from the way the world of classical music picks its future virtuosos and the way the world of ballet picks its future ballerinas and the way that our Elite educational system picks its future scientists and intellectuals you can't buy your way into major Junior a hockey it doesn't matter who your father or mother is or who your grandfather was or what business your family is in nor does it matter if you live in the most remote corner of the most Northerly province in Canada if you have ability the vast network of hockey Scouts and town spotters will find you and if you're willing to work to develop that ability the system will reward you success in hockey is based on individual Merit and both of those words are important players are judged on their own performance not anyone else's and on the basis of ability not some other arbitrary fact or are they this is a book about outliers about men and women who do things that are out of the ordinary over the course of the chapters ahead I'm going to introduce you to one kind of outlier after another to Geniuses business tycoons rock stars and software programmers we're going to uncover the secrets of a remarkable lawyer look at what separates the very best pilots from pilots who have crashed planes and try to figure out why Asians are so good at math and in examining the lines of the remarkable Among Us the skilled the talented and the driven I will argue that there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success what is the question we always ask about successful we want to know what they're like what kind of personalities they have or how intelligent they are or what kind of Lifestyles they have or what special towns they might have been born with and we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how an individual reaches the top in the autobiographies published every year by the billionaire entrepreneur rock star celebrity the storyline is always the same our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to Greatness in the Bible Joseph is cast out by his brothers and sold into slavery and then Rises to become the pharaoh's right-hand man on the strength of his own Brilliance and insight in the famous 19th century novels of Horatio Alger young boys born into poverty Rise To Riches through a combination of pluck and initiative I think overall it's a disadvantage Jeb Bush once said of what it meant for his business career that he was the son of an American president and the brother of an American president and the grandson of a wealthy Wall Street banker and a U.S senator when he ran for governor of Florida he repeatedly referred to himself as a self-made man and it is a measure of how deeply we associate success with the efforts of the individual that few batted an eyelid at that description lift up your heads Robert Winthrop told the crowd many years ago at the unveiling of a statue of that great hero of American independence Benjamin Franklin and look at the image of a man who Rose from nothing who owed nothing to parentage or patronage who enjoyed no advantages of Early Education which are not open a hundred fold open to yourselves who performed the most menial services in the business in which his early life was employed but who lived to stand before Kings and died to leave a name which the world will never forget in outliers I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work people don't rise from nothing we do owe something to parentage and patronage the people who stand before Kings may look like they did it all by themselves but in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in a way others cannot it makes a difference where and when we grew up the culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine it's not enough to ask what successful people are like in other words it is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't biologists often talk about the Ecology of an organism the tallest oak in the forest is not just the tallest because it grew from the heartiest acorn it is also the tallest because no other trees blocked at sunlight because the soil around it was deep and Rich because no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling and because no Lumberjack cut it down before it matured we all know that successful people come from hearty seeds but do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them the soil in which they put down their roots and the rabbits and Lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid this is not a book about tall trees it's a book about forests and hockey is a good place to start because the explanation for who gets to the top of the hockey world is a lot more interesting and complicated than it looks in fact it's downright peculiar if you were to look at the player roster of the 2007 medicine hack tigers you might see something strange about it but even if you didn't you shouldn't feel bad because for many years in the hockey world no one did it wasn't until the mid-1980s in fact that a Canadian psychologist named Roger Barnsley first Drew attention to the phenomenon of relative age Barnsley was in a lethridge Broncos hockey game in Southern Alberta a team that played in the same major Junior a league as the Vancouver Giants and the Medicine Hat tigers he was there with his wife Paula and their two boys and his wife was reading the program when she ran across the roster list Roger she said do you know when these young men were born Sie said yes there are between 16 and 20 so they'd be born in the late 1960s no no Paula went on what month I thought she was crazy Barnsley remembered but I looked through it and what she was saying just jumped out at me for some reason they're an incredible number of January February and March birth dates Barnsley went home that night and looked at the birth dates of as many professional hockey players as he could find he saw the same pattern Barnsley his wife and a colleague age Thompson then gathered statistics on every player in the Ontario Junior Hockey League the story was the same more players are born in January than any other month and by an overwhelming margin the second most frequent birth month February the 3rd March Bonzi found that they were nearly five and a half times as many Ontario hockey league players born in January as were born at the end of the year in November he looked at the all-star teams of 11 year olds and 13 year olds the young players selected for elite traveling squads same story he looked at the composition of the National Hockey League same story the more he looked the more Barnsley came to believe that what he was seeing was not a chance occurrence but an iron law of Canadian hockey that any time you look at an elite group of hockey players the very best of the best you can reliably assume that 40 of the players will be born between January and March 30 between April and June 20 between July and September and 10 between October and December in all my years in Psychology I have never run into an effect this large Ponzi says you don't even need to do any statistical analysis you just look at it what would you have seen if you'd looked about Medicine Hat roster 17 out of the 25 players on the team were born in January February March or April here is the play-by-play for the first two goals in the Memorial Cup Final only this time I've substituted the player's birthdays for their names it no longer sounds like the championship of Canadian Junior Hockey it now sounds like a strange sporting ritual for teenage boys born under the astrological signs Capricorn Aquarius and Pisces March 11th starts around one side of the Tiger's net leaving the park for his teammate January 4th who passes it to January 22nd who flips it back to March 12th who shoots Point Blank at the Tigers goalie April 27th April 27th blocks the shot but it's rebounded by Vancouver's March 6. he shoots Medicine Hat defenseman February 9th and February 14th dive to block the puck while January 10th looks on helplessly March 6 scores let's go to the second period now medicine hats turn the Tigers scoring leader January 21st charges down the right side of the ice he stops in circles eluding the Vancouver defenseman February 15th January 21st then deftly passes the puck to his teammate December 20th wow what's he doing out there who shrugs off the unrushing defender May 17th and slides across crease pass back to January 21st he shoots Vancouver defenseman March 12 Dives trying to block the shot Vancouver's goalie March 19th lunges helplessly January 21st scores he raises his hands in Triumph his teammate May 2nd jumps on his back with joy the explanation for this is quite simple it has nothing to do with astrology or anything magical about the first three months of the year it's simply that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1st a boy who turns 10 on January 2nd then could be playing alongside someone who doesn't turn 10 until the end of the year and at that age in pre-adolescence a 12-month Gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity this being Canada the most hockey crazed country on Earth coaches start to select players for the traveling rep Squad the all-star teams at the age of 9 or 10 and of course they are more likely to view as talented the bigger and more coordinated players who have had the benefit of those extra critical months of maturity and what happens when a player gets chosen for a rep Squad he gets better coaching and his teammates are better and he plays 50 or 75 games a season instead of 20 games a season like those left behind in the house league and he practices twice or even three times more than he would have otherwise in the beginning his Advantage wasn't so much that he was inherently better but only that he was a little older but by the age of 13 or 14 with the benefit of better coaching and all that extra practice under his belt he really is better so he's the one more likely to make it to Major Junior a and from there into the big leagues Barnsley argues that these kind of skewed age distributions exist wherever three things happen selection streaming and differentiated experience if you make a decision about who is good and who is not at an early age if you separate the so-called talented from the so-called untalented and if you provide the so-called talented with a superior experience then you're going to end up giving a huge advantage to that small group of people born closest to the cutoff date in the United States football and basketball don't have these problems they don't select and stream and differentiate quite as dramatically as a result a child can be a bit behind physically in those Sports and still play as much as his or her more mature peers but baseball does the cutoff day for almost all non-school baseball leagues in the United States is July 31st with the result that more major league players are born in August than any other month the numbers are striking in 2005 they were 505 Americans born in August playing Major League Baseball versus 313 born in July European soccer similarly is organized like hockey and baseball and the birthday distributions in that sport are heavily skewed as well in England the eligibility date is September 1st and then the Football association's Premier League at one point in the 1990s there were 288 players born between September and November and only 136 players born between June and August in international soccer the cutoff day used to be August 1st and in one recent Junior world championship tournament there were 135 players born in the first three months after August 1st and just 22 born in May June and July today the cutoff date for International Junior Soccer is January 1st and if you look at the roster of the 2007 Czechoslovakian National Junior soccer team which made the junior World Cup finals do you know what you find of the team's 21 players six were born in January six were born in February three were born in March one was born in April and no one on the team was born after the end of September at the national team tryouts the Czech Soccer Coaches might as well have told everyone born after mid-summer to pack their bags and go home hockey and soccer are just games of course involving a select few but these exact same biases also show up in areas of much more consequence like education parents with a child born at the end of the calendar year often think about holding their child back before the start of kindergarten it's hard for a five-year-old to keep up with a child born many months earlier but most parents one suspects think that whatever disadvantage a younger child faces in kindergarten eventually goes away but it doesn't it's just like hockey the small initial advantage of the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists it locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement encouragement and discouragement that stretch on for years and years recently two economists Kelly Bedard and Elizabeth Dewey decided to look at the relationship between scores on what's called Timbs the math and science test given every four years to children around the world and month of birth they found that among fourth graders the oldest children score summer between 4 and 12 percentile points better than the youngest children that is Dewey explains is a huge effect it means that if you take two intellectual equivalent fourth graders with birthdays at opposite ends of the cutoff date the older student could score in the 80th percentile while the younger one could score in his 68th percentile that's the difference between qualifying for a gifted program and not it's just like sports Stewie said we do ability grouping early on in childhood we have advanced reading groups and advanced math groups so early on if we look at young kids in kindergarten and first grade the teachers are confusing maturity with ability and they put the older kids in the advanced stream where they learn better skills of the next year because they're in the higher groups they do even better and the next year the same thing happens and they do even better again the only country we don't see this going on is in Denmark they have a national policy where they have no ability grouping until the age of 10. in other words Denmark waits to make selection decisions until maturity differences by age have evened out Dewey and Bedard subsequently did the same analysis only this time looking at college what did they find at four-year colleges in the United States the highest stream of post-secondary Education students belonging to the relatively youngest group in their class are underrepresented by about 11.6 percent that initial difference in maturity doesn't go away with time it persists and for thousands of students that initial disadvantage is the difference between going to college and having a real shot of the middle class and not I mean it's ridiculous Stewie says think for a moment about what the story of hockey in early birthdays tells us about success it tells us that our notion that it is the best and the brightest who effortlessly rise to the top is much too simplistic yes the hockey players who make it to the professional level are more talented than you or me but they also got a big head start an opportunity that they neither deserved nor earned and that opportunity played a critical role in their success the sociologist Robert Merton famously called this kind of phenomenon the Matthew effect after the New Testament verse in the gospel of Matthew 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 it is those who are successful who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success it's the rich who get the biggest tax breaks it's the best students who get the best teaching and the most attention and it's the biggest 9 and 10 year olds who get the most coaching and practice success is the result of what sociologists like to call accumulative Advantage the professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers and that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity that makes the initially small difference bigger still and on and on until a hockey player is a genuine outlier but he didn't start out an outlier he started out just a little bit better the second implication of the haki example is that the systems we set up to determine who gets ahead aren't particularly efficient we think that starting All-Star leagues and gifted programs as early as possible is the best way of ensuring that no Talent slips through the cracks but take a look again at that roster for the Czech Republic junior soccer team there are no players born in July October November or December and only one each from August and September those born in the last half of the year have all been discouraged or overlooked or pushed out of the sport the talent of essentially half of the Czech athletic population has been squandered so what do you do if you're an athletic young check with The Misfortune to have been born the last part of the year you can't play soccer the deck is stacked against you so maybe you could play the other sport the checks are obsessed with hockey but wait I think you know it's coming the 2007 Czech junior hockey team that finished fifth at the World Championships had three players born in January five born in February three born in March and only two born after August 31st those born in the last quarter of the Year might as well give up on hockey as well do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success because we so profoundly personalized success we miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung we make rules to frustrate achievement we prematurely write off people's failures we are much to in awe of those who succeed and far too dismissive of those who fail and most of all we become much too passive we Overlook just how large a role we all play and by we I mean Society in determining who makes it and who doesn't if we chose to we could acknowledge the cutoff dates matter we could set up two or even three hockey leagues divided up by month of birth let the players develop on separate tracks and then pick all-star teams if all the Czech and Canadian athletes born at the end of the year had a fair chance then the Czech and the Canadian national teams would suddenly have twice as many athletes to choose from schools could do the same thing elementary and middle schools could put their January February March and April students in one class and the summer borns in another class and the fall in winterborns in a third class they could let students learn with and compete against other students of the same maturity level it would be a little bit more complicated administratively but it wouldn't necessarily cost that much more money and it would level the playing field for those who for no fault of their own had been dealt a big disadvantage by the educational system we could easily take control of the Machinery of achievement in other words and not just in sports but as we will see in other more consequential areas as well but we don't and why because we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual Merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all before the Memorial Cup Final Gord wasden the father of one of the Medicine Hat Tigers stood by the side of the ice talking about his son Scott he was wearing a Medicine Hat baseball cap and a black Medicine Hat t-shirt when he was four and five years old was and remembered his little brother was in a walker and he would shove a hockey stick in his hand and they would play hockey on the floor in the kitchen morning till night Scott always had a passion for it he played rap hockey throughout his minor league hockey career he always made the AAA teams as a first-year Peewee or a first year Bantam he always played on the top rep team wisdom was clearly nervous his son was about to play in the biggest game of his life he's had to work very hard for whatever he's got I'm very proud of him these were the ingredients of success at the highest level passion talent and hard work but there was another element when did Watson first get the sense that his son was something special you know he was always a bigger kid for his age he was strong and he had a knack for scoring gold at an early age and he was always kind of a standout for his age the captain of his team big for his age of course he was Scott wasden was born on January 4th within three days of the absolute perfect birthday for an elite hockey player he was one of the lucky ones and if by some whim the eligibility date for Canadian hockey was later in the year he might have been watching the Memorial Cup Championship from the stands instead of playing on the ice chapter 2. the 10 000 hour rule in Hamburg we had to play for eight hours the University of Michigan opened its new computer center in 1971. in a brand new building on Beale Avenue in Ann Arbor the beige brick exterior walls and dark glass front the University's enormous mainframe computers stood in the middle of a vast White Room looking as one faculty member remembers like one of the last scenes in the movie 2001 A Space Odyssey off to the side were dozens of key punch machines what passed in those days for computer terminals in 1971 this was state of the art the University of Michigan had one of the most advanced computer science programs in the world and over the course of the computer Center's life thousands of students passed through that white room the most famous of whom was a gawky teenager named Bill Joy Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the computer center opened he was 16. he was tall and very thin with a mop of unruly hair he had been voted most studious student by his graduating class at North Farmington High School outside of Detroit which as he puts it meant that he was a no date nerd he had thought he might end up as a biologist or a mathematician but late in his freshman year he stumbled across the Computing Center and he was hooked from that point on the computer center was his life he programmed whenever he could Joy got a job with a computer science Professor so he could program over the summer in 1975 Joy enrolled in graduate school at the University of California at Berkeley there he buried himself even deeper into the world of computer software during the oral exams for his PhD he made up a particularly complicated algorithm on the Fly that as one of his many admirers has written so stunned his examiners that one of them later compared the experience to Jesus confounding his elders working in collaboration with a small group of programmers Joy took on the task of rewriting Unix which was a software system developed by a t for mainframe computers Joy's version was very good it was so good in fact that it became and Remains the operating system on which literally millions of computers around the world run if you put your Mac in that funny mode where you can see the code Joy says I see things that I remember typing in 25 years ago and when you go online do you know who wrote much of the software that allows you to access the internet Bill Joy after graduating from Berkeley Joy co-founded the Silicon Valley firm's Sun Microsystems which was one of the most critical players in the computer Revolution then he rewrote another computer language Java and his Legend grew still further among Silicon Valley insiders Joy is spoken of with as much awe as someone like Bill Gates of Microsoft he is sometimes called the Edison of the internet as the Yale computer scientist David gallertner says Bill Joy is one of the most influential people in the modern history of computing the story of Bill Joy's genius has been told many times and the lesson is always the same here was a world that was the purest of meritocracies computer programming didn't operate as an old boy Network where you got ahead because of money or connections it was a wide open field in which all participants were judged solely by their talent and their accomplishments it was a world with the best men won and joy was clearly one of those best men it would be easier to accept that version of events however if we hadn't just looked at hockey and soccer players theirs was supposed to be a pure meritocracy as well only it wasn't it was a story of how the outliers in a particular field reached their lofty status through a combination of ability opportunity and utterly arbitrary advantage is it possible the same pattern of special opportunities operate in the real world as well let's go back over the story of Bill Joy and find out for almost a generation psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would have considered settled years ago the question is this is there such a thing as innate Talent the obvious answer is yes not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level only some do The innately Talented ones achievement is Talent Plus preparation problem with this view though is that The Closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted the smaller the role innate Talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play exhibit a in this argument is a study done in the early 1990s by the psychologist K Anders Erickson and two colleagues at Berlin's Elite Academy of Music with the help of the Academy's professors they divided the school's violinists into three groups in the first group with the Stars the students with the potential to become world-class soloists in a second were those judged to be merely good in the third were students who were unlikely to ever play professionally and who intended to be music teachers in the public school system all of the violinists were then ask the same question over the course of your entire career ever since you first picked up the violin how many hours have you practiced everyone from all three groups started playing it roughly the same time around the age of five in those first few years everyone practiced roughly the same amount about two or three hours a week but around the age of eight real differences started to emerge the students who would end up as the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else six hours a week by age nine eight hours a week by age twelve 16 hours a week by age 14 and up and up until by the age of 20 they were practicing that is purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better well over 30 hours a week in fact by the age of 20 the elite performers had totaled 10 000 hours of practice over the course of their lives by contrast the merely good students had totaled 8 000 hours and the future music teachers had totaled just over four thousand hours Erickson and his colleagues then compared amateur pianists with professional penis the same pattern emerged the amateurs never practiced more than about three hours a week over the course of their childhood and by the age of 20 had totaled 2 000 hours of practice the professionals on the other hand steadily increased their practice time every year until by the age of 20 they had reached 10 000 hours the thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any Naturals musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did nor could they find any grinds people who worked harder than everyone else yet just didn't have what it takes to break into the top ranks their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works that's it and what's more the people at the very top don't just work much harder than everyone else they work much much harder this idea that Excellence at a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice Services 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 the emerging picture from such studies is that 10 000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of Mastery associated with being a world-class expert in anything writes the neurologist Daniel Leviton in study after study of composers basketball players fiction writers ice skaters concert pianists chess players Master criminals and what have you this number comes up again and again ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day or 20 hours a week of practice over 10 years of course this doesn't address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others but no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time it seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery this is true even of people we think of as prodigies Mozart for example famously started writing music at six but according to the psychologist Michael Howe in his book genius explained by the standards of mature composers Mozart's early works are not outstanding the earliest pieces were probably written down by his father and perhaps improved in the process many of Wolfgang's childhood compositions such as the first seven of his concertos for piano and Orchestra are largely Arrangements of works by other composers of those concertos that only contain music original to Mozart the earliest that is now regarded as a Masterwork number nine k-271 was not composed until he was 21. by that time Mozart had already been composing concertos for 10 years the music critic Harold Schoenberg goes further Mozart he argues actually developed late since he didn't produce his greatest work until he had been composing for over 20 years to become a chess Grandmaster also seems to take about 10 years only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that Elite level in less than that time it took him nine years and what's 10 years well it's roughly how long it takes to put in 10 000 hours apart practice 10 000 hours is the magic number of greatness here is the explanation for what was so puzzling about the rosters of the Czech in Canadian national sports teams there was virtually no one on those teams born after September 1st which doesn't seem to make any sense you think that there should be a fair number of Czech hockey or soccer prodigies born late in the year who are so talented that they eventually make their way into the top tier as young adults but to Erickson and those who argue against the Primacy of talent that isn't surprising at all that late-born Prodigy doesn't get chosen for the All-Star team as an eight-year-old because he's too small so he doesn't get the extra practice and without that extra practice he has no chance at hitting 10 000 hours by the time the professional hockey teams start looking for players and without ten thousand hours under his belt there is no way he can ever master the skills necessary to play the top level even Mozart the greatest musical prodigy of all time couldn't hit his stride until he had his ten thousand hours in practice isn't the thing you do once you're good it's the thing you do that makes you good the other interesting thing about that ten thousand hours number of course is at ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time it's all but impossible to reach that number by the time your young adult all by yourself you have to have parents who encourage and support you you can't be poor because if you have to hold down a part-time job on a side to help make ends meet there won't be enough time left over in the day to practice in fact most people can only really reach that number if they get into some kind of special program like a hockey All-Star squad or they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours so back to Bill Joy it's 1971. he's tall and gawky and 16 years old he's the math whiz the kind of student at schools like MIT or Caltech or the University of Waterloo are tracked by the hundreds when Bill was a little boy he wanted to know everything about everything way before he should have even known what he wanted to know his father William says we answered him when we could when we couldn't we would just give him a book when it came time to apply to college Joy got a perfect score on the math portion of the Scholastic aptitude test he wasn't particularly hard he says matter of factly there was plenty of time to check it twice he has talent by the truckload but that's not the only consideration it never is the key to his development is that he stumbled across that non-descript building on Beale Avenue in the early 1970s when Joy was learning about programming computers were the size of rooms a single machine which might have less power in memory than your microwave now has could cost upwards of a million dollars and that's in 1970s dollars computers were rare if you found them they were hard to get access to and if you manage to get access renting time on them cost a fortune what's more programming itself was extraordinarily tedious this was the era when computer programs were created using cardboard Punch Cards each line of code was imprinted on the card using a key punch machine a complex program might include hundreds if not thousands of these cards in tall stacks once the program was ready you walked over to whatever Mainframe computer you had access to and gave the stack of cards to an operator since computers could only handle one task at a time the operator made an appointment for your program and depending how many people were ahead of you in line you might not get your cards back for a few hours or even a day and if you made even a single error even a typographical error in your program you had to take the cards back track down the air and begin the whole process again under those circumstances it was exceedingly difficult for anyone to become a programming expert certainly becoming an expert by her early twenties was all but impossible when you can only program for a few minutes out of every hour you spend in the computer room how can you ever get to ten thousand hours of practice programming with cards one computer scientist from that era remembers did not teach you programming it taught you patience and proofreading it wasn't until the mid-1960s that a solution to the programming problem emerged computers were finally powerful enough that they could handle more than one appointment at once if you rewrote the computer's operating system computer scientists realized the machine's time could be shared it could be trained to handle hundreds of tasks at the same time that in turn meant that programmers didn't have to physically hand their stack of computer cards to the operator anymore you could build dozens of terminals link them all to the Mainframe by a telephone line and have everyone working online all at once here is how one history of the period describes the Advent of time sharing this was not just a revolution it was a revelation forget the operator the card decks the weight with time sharing you could sit at your teletype bang in a couple of commands and get an answer then and there time sharing was Interactive a program could ask for a response wait for you to type it in act on it while you waited and show you the result all in real time this is where Michigan came in because Michigan was one of the first universities in the world to switch over to time sharing by 1967 a prototype of the system was up and running by the early 1970s Michigan had enough computing power that a hundred people could be programming simultaneously in the computer center in the late 60s early 70s I don't think there was anywhere else that was exactly like Michigan Alexander who was one of the Pioneers at Michigan in setting up the University's computer system said maybe MIT maybe Carnegie Mellon maybe Dartmouth I don't think they were any others this was the opportunity that greeted Bill Joy when he arrived on the Ann Arbor campus in the fall of 1971. he hadn't chosen Michigan because of its computers he had never done anything with computers in high school he was interested in math and engineering and biology but when the programming bug hit him in his freshman year he found himself by the happiest of accidents in one of the few places in the world where a 17 year old could program all he wanted do you know what the difference is between the Computing cards and time sharing Joyce says it's the difference between playing chess by mail and speed chess programming wasn't an exercise in frustration anymore it was fun I lived in the north campus and the computer center was in the north campus Joy went on how much time did I spend there oh a phenomenal amount of time it was open 24 hours I would stay there all night and just walk home in the morning in an average week in those years I was spending more time in the computer center than in my classes all of us down there had this recurring nightmare of forgetting to show up for class at all I'm not even realizing we were enrolled the challenge was that they gave all the students an account with a fixed amount of money so your time would run out when you signed on you would put in how long you wanted to spend on the computer they gave you like an hour of time that's all you'd get he said laughing at the memory but someone figured out that if you put in time equals and then a letter like T equals K they wouldn't charge you it was a bug in the software you could put in t equals K and sit there forever just look at the stream of opportunities that came Bill Joy's way because he happened to go to a far-sighted school like the University of Michigan he was able to practice on a time sharing system instead of Punch Cards because the Michigan system happened to have a bug in it he could program all he wanted because the University was willing to spend the money to keep the computer center open 24 hours he could stay up all night and because he was able to put in so many hours by the time he happened to be presented with the opportunity to rewrite Unix he was up to the task Bill Joy was brilliant he wanted to learn that was a big part of it but before he could become an expert someone had to give him the opportunity to learn how to be an expert at Michigan I was probably programming 8 or 10 hours a day he went on by the time I was at Berkeley I was doing it day and night I had a terminal at home I'd stay up until two or three o'clock in the morning watching old movies and programming sometimes I'd fall asleep at the keyboard he mined his head falling onto the keyboard and you know how the key repeats until the end and it starts to go beep beep beep after that happens three times you have to go to bed I was still relatively incompetent even when I got to Berkeley I was proficient by my second year there that's when I wrote programs that are still in use today 30 years later he paused for a moment to do the math in his head which for someone like Bill Joy doesn't take very long Michigan in 1971 programming in Earnest by sophomore year at in the Summers and the days and nights in his first year at Berkeley it's five years he said finally I didn't start the day I started at Michigan so maybe 10 000 hours that's about right is the 10 000 hour rule a general rule of success if we scratch below the surface of every great achiever do we always find the equivalent of the Michigan computer center or the hockey All-Star team some sort of special opportunity for practice Let's test the idea with two examples and for the sake of Simplicity let's make them as familiar as possible The Beatles one of the most famous rock bands ever and Bill Gates one of the world's richest men The Beatles John Lennon Paul McCartney George Harrison and Ringo Starr came to the United States in February of 1964. starting the so-called British Invasion of the American Music Scene and putting out a string of hit records that transformed the face of popular music the first interesting thing about the Beatles for our purposes is how long they had already been together by the time they reached the United States Lennon and McCartney first started playing together in 1957 seven years prior to Landing in America incidentally the time that elapsed between their founding and their arguably greatest artistic achievements Sergeant Pepper's only Hearts Club Band and the Beatles White Album is 10 years and if you look even more closely at those long years of preparation you'll find an experience that in the context of hockey players in Bill Joy in world class violinists sounds awfully familiar in 1960 while they were still a struggling High School Rock Band The Beatles were invited to play in Hamburg Germany Hamburg in those days did not have rock and roll music clubs it had strip clubs says Philip Norman who wrote The Beatles biography Shout there was one particular Pub owner called Bruno who was originally a Fairground Showman he had the idea of bringing in rock groups to play in various clubs they had this formula it was a huge non-stop show hour after hour with a lot of people lurching in and the other lot lurching out and the bands at play all the time to catch the passing traffic in an American red light district they would call it non-stop striptease many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from Liverpool Roman went on it was an accident Bruno went to London to look for bands but he happened to meet an entrepreneur from Liverpool in SoHo who was down in London by pure chance and he arranged to send some bands over that's how the connection was established and eventually The Beatles made a connection not just with Bruno but with other club Owners as well they kept going back because they got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex and what was so special about Hamburg it wasn't at a paid well it didn't or that the Acoustics were fantastic they weren't or that the audiences were Savvy and appreciative they were anything but it was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play here is John Lennon in an interview after the Beatles disbanded talking about the band's performances at a Hamburg strip club called the Indra we got better and got more confidence we couldn't help it with all the experience playing all night long it was handy them being foreign we'd try even harder put our heart and soul into it to get ourselves over in Liverpool we'd only ever done one hour sessions we just used to do our best numbers the same ones that everyone in Hamburg we had to play for eight hours so we really had to find a new way of playing eight hours here is Pete best The Beatles drummer at the time once the news got out about that we were making a show the club started packing them in we played seven nights a week at first we played almost non-stop until 12 30 in the morning when it closed but as we got better the crowd stayed till two most mornings seven days a week The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. on the first trip they played 106 nights five or more hours a night on their second trip they played 92 times on their third trip they played 48 times for a total of 172 hours on stage the last two hombre gigs in November and December of 1962 involved another 90 hours of performing all told they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half by the time they had their first burst of success in 1964 in fact they had performed live an estimated 1200 times do you know how extraordinary that is most bands today don't perform 1200 times in their entire careers the Hamburg Crucible is one of the things that set the Beetles apart they were no good on stage when they first went there and they were very good when they came back Norma went on they learned not only stamina they had to learn an enormous amount of numbers cover versions of everything that you can think of not just rock and roll a bit of jazz too they weren't disciplined on stage before that but when they came back they sounded like no one else it was the making of them let's now turn to the history of Bill Gates his story is almost as well known as The Beatles brilliant young math whiz discovers computer programming drops out of Harvard starts a little computer company with his friends called Microsoft through sheer Brilliance and ambition and guts builds it into the giant of the software world that's the broad outline now let's dig a little bit deeper Gates's father was a wealthy lawyer in Seattle and his mother was the daughter of a well-to-do banker as a child bill was precocious and easily bored by his studies so his parents took him out of public school and the beginning of seventh grade sent him to Lakeside a private school that catered to Seattle's Elite families Midway through Gates's second year at Lakeside the school started a computer Club the mother's club at school did a rummage sale every year and there was always a question of what the money would go to Gates remembers some went to the summer program where inner city kids would come up to the campus some of it would go for teachers that year they put three thousand dollars into a computer terminal down in this funny little room that we subsequently took control of it was kind of an amazing thing it was an amazing thing of course because this was 1968. most colleges didn't have computer clubs in the 1960s even more remarkable was the kind of computer Lakes I bought the school didn't have its students learn programming by the laborious computer card system like everyone else was doing in the 1960s instead Lakeside and stalbot was called an ASR 33 teletype which was a time-sharing terminal with a direct link to a Mainframe computer in downtown Seattle the whole idea of time sharing only got started in 1965 Gates continued someone was pretty forward-looking Bill Joy got an extraordinary early opportunity to learn programming on a timeshare system as a freshman in college in 1971. Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968. from that moment forward Gates lived in the computer room he and a number of others began to teach themselves how to use this strange new device buying time on the Mainframe computer the ASR was hooked up to of course was expensive even for a wealthy institution like Lakeside and it wasn't long before the three thousand dollars put up by the mothers club ran out parents raised more money students spent it then a group of programmers at the University of Washington formed an outfit called computer center Corporation or C cubed which leased computer time to local companies as luck would have it one of the founders of the firm Monique Rona had a son at Lakeside a class ahead of gates would the Lakeside Computer Club Runner wondered like to test out the company's software programs on the weekends in exchange for free programming time absolutely after school Gates took the bus to the C cubed offices and programmed long into the evening CQ eventually went bankrupt so Gates and his friends began hanging around the computer center at the University of Washington before long they lashed on to another outfit called isi which agreed to let them have free computer time in exchange for working on a piece of software that could be used to automate company payrolls in one seven month period in 1971 Gates and his cohorts ran up 1575 hours of computer time on the isi Mainframe which averages out to eight hours a day seven days a week it was my obsession Kate says of his early high school years I skipped Athletics I went up there at night we were programming on weekends it would be a rare week that we wouldn't get 20 or 30 hours in it was a period where Paul Allen and I got in trouble for stealing a bunch of passwords and crashing the system we got kicked out I didn't get to use the computer the whole summer this is when I was 15 and 16. then I found out Paul had found a computer that was free at the University of Washington they had these machines in the medical center and the physics department they were on a 24-hour schedule but with this big slap period so that between three and six in the morning they never scheduled anything Gates laughed I'd leave at night after my bedtime I could walk up to the University of Washington from my house or I'd take the bus that's why I'm always so generous to the University of Washington because they let me steal so much computer time years later Gates's mother said we always wondered why it was so hard for him to get up in the morning one of the founders of isi but Pembroke then got a call from the technology company TRW which had just signed a contract to set up a computer system at the huge Bonneville power station in southern Washington State TRW desperately needed programmers familiar with the particular software the power station used in these early days of the computer Revolution programmers with that kind of specialized experience were hard to find but Pembroke knew exactly who to call those high school kids from Lakeside who had been running up thousands of hours of computer time on the isi Mainframe Gates was now in his senior year and somehow he managed to convince his teachers to let him to camp for Bonneville under the guise of an independent study project there he spent the spring writing code under the direction of a man named John Norton who Gates says taught him as much about programming as almost anyone else he'd ever met those five years from eighth grade to the end of high school were Bill Gates is homburg and by any measure he was presented with an even more extraordinary series of opportunities than Bill Joy opportunity number one was the gates got sent to Lakeside how many high schools in the world had access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968 opportunity number two was that the mothers of Lakeside had enough money to pay for the school's computer fees number three was that when that money ran out one of the parents happened to work at C cubed which happened to need someone to check its code on the weekends and which also happened not to care if weekends turned into weeknights number four was the gates just happened to find out about isi and isi just happened to need someone to work on its payroll software and number five was the gates happened to live within walking distance of the University of Washington and number six was that the university happened to have free computer time between three and six in the morning and number seven was the TRW happened to call Bud Pembroke and number eight was the best programmers Pembroke knew for that particular problem happened to be two high school kids and number nine was that Lakeside was willing to let those kids spend their spring term miles away writing code and what did virtually all those opportunities have in common they gave Bill Gates extra time to practice by the time Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own software company he'd been programming non-stop for seven consecutive years he was way past ten thousand hours how many teenagers in the world had the kind of experience Gates had if they were 50 in the world I'd be stunned he says there was C cube in the payroll stuff we did then TRW all those things came together I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time and all because of an incredibly Lucky series of events if we put the stories of hockey players and the Beatles and Bill Joy and Bill Gates together I think we get a more complete picture of the path to success Joey and gates in the Beatles are all undeniably talented Lennon and McCartney had a musical gift of A Sort that comes along once in a generation and Bill Joy let's not forget had a mind so quick that he was able to make up a complicated algorithm on the Fly that left his professors in awe that much is obvious but what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities The Beatles for the most random of reasons got invited to go to Hamburg without Hamburg The Beatles might well have taken a very different path I was very lucky Bill Gates said at the very beginning of our interview that doesn't mean he isn't brilliant or an extraordinary entrepreneur it just means that he understands what incredible good fortunate was to be at Lakeside in 1968. all the outliers we've looked at so far with the beneficiaries of some kind of unusual opportunity lucky breaks don't seem like the exception with software billionaires and rock bands and star athletes they seem like the rule let me give you one final example of the Hidden opportunities that outliers benefit from suppose we do another version of the calendar analysis we did in the last chapter with hockey players and this time we'll look at a list of the 75 richest people in human history it includes queens and kings and Pharaohs from centuries past as well as contemporary billionaires like Warren Buffett and Carlos Slim do you know what's interesting about this list of the 75 names an astonishing 14 are Americans born within nine years of one another in the mid-19th century think about that for a moment historians start with Cleopatra and the Pharaohs and comb through every year in human history ever since looking in every corner of the world for evidence of extraordinary wealth and almost 20 percent of the names they end up with come from a single generation in a single country here is a list of those Americans and their birth dates the first American is the richest man of all time John D Rockefeller born in 1839. the second richest man of all time is also on the list Andrew Carnegie born in 1835 the 28th richest man of all time Frederick weyerhauser born in 1834. number 33 of all time Jay Gould born in 1836. the 34th richest Marshall field born in 1834. 35th richest George Baker born in 1840. number 36 Eddie green 1834. number 44 James G Fair born in 1831 then Henry Rogers born in 1840 JP Morgan born in 1837 Oliver Payne born in 1839. George Pullman born in 1831 Peter Weidner born in 1834 and Philip armor born in 1832. what's going on here the answer becomes obvious if you think about it in the 1860s and 1870s the American economy went through perhaps the greatest transformation in its history this is when the railroads were built and when Wall Street emerged it was when industrial manufacturing started in Earnest it was when all the rules by which the traditional economy had functioned were broken and remade what that list says is that it really matters how old you were when that transformation happened if you were born in the late 1840s you missed it you were too young to take advantage of that moment if you were born in the 1820s you were too old your mindset was shaped by the pre-civil war paradigm but there was a particular narrow nine-year window that was just perfect for seeing the potential that the future held all of the 14 men and women on that list had vision and talent but they were also given an extraordinary opportunity in the same way that hockey and soccer players born in January February March were given an extraordinary opportunity so let's do the same kind of analysis for people like Bill Joy and Bill Gates if you talk to Veterans of Silicon Valley they'll tell you that the most important date in the history of the personal computer Revolution was January 1975. that was when the magazine popular Electronics ran a cover story on an extraordinary machine called the Altair 8800 the Altair cost 397 dollars it was a do-it-yourself contraption that you could assemble at home the headline on the story read project breakthrough world's first mini computer kit to rival commercial models to the readers of popular Electronics in those days the Bible of the fledgling software in computer world that headline was a revelation computers up to that point had been the massive expensive mainframes of the sort sitting in the white expanse of the Michigan Computing Center for years every hacker in electronics whiz had dreamed of the day when a computer would come along that was small and inexpensive enough for an ordinary person to use and own that day it finally arrived if January 1975 was the dawn of the computer age then who would be in the best position to take advantage of it the same principles apply here that applied to the era of John Rockefeller and Andrew Carnegie if you're too old in 1975 then you'd already have a job at IBM out of college and once people started at IBM they had a real hard time making the transition to the new world says Nathan merveled who was a top executive at Microsoft for many years you had this multi-billion dollar company making mainframes and if you were part of that you'd think why screw around with these little pathetic computers that was the computer industry to those people and it had nothing to do with this new Revolution they were blinded by that being the only vision of computing they made a nice living it's just that there was no opportunity to become a zillionaire and make an impact on the world if he were more than a few years out of college in 1975 then you belong to the old paradigm you had just bought a house you married a baby's on the way you're in no position to give up a good job and pension for some pie in the sky 397 dollar computer kit so let's rule out all those born before say 1952. at the same time though you don't want to be too young you really want to get in on the ground floor right in 1975 and you can't do that if you're still in high school so let's also rule out anyone born after say 1958. the perfect age to be in 1975 in other words is old enough to see the coming Revolution but not so old to have missed it ideally you'd want to be 20 or 21 which is to say born in 1954 or 1955. there's an easy way to test this Theory when was Bill Gates born October 28 1955. the perfect birth date Gates is the hockey player born on January 1st Gates's best friend at Lakeside was Paul Allen he also hung out in the computer room with Gates and shared those long evenings at isi and C cubed Allen went on to found Microsoft with Bill Gates Paula January 21st 1953. the third richest man at Microsoft is the one who's been running the company on a day-to-day basis since 2000 one of the most respected Executives in the software World Steve bomber Steve bomber March 24 1956. let's not forget a man every bit as famous as Gates Steve Jobs the co-founder of Apple computer he wasn't from a rich family like Gates and he didn't go to Michigan like Joy but it doesn't take much investigation of his upbringing to realize that he had his Hamburg too he grew up in Mountain View California just south of San Francisco which is the absolute epicenter of Silicon Valley his neighborhood was filled with Engineers from Hewlett-Packard then as now one of the most important Electronics firms in the world as a teenager he proud the flea markets at Mountain View where electronics hobbyists and tinkerers sold spare parts jobs came of age breathing the air the very business he would later dominate here is a paragraph from accidental millionaire one of the many jobs biographies that gives you a sense of how extraordinary his childhood experiences were jobs attended evening Talks by Hewlett-Packard scientists the talks are about the latest advances in electronics and jobs exercising a style that was a trademark of his personality colored Hewlett-Packard engineers and Drew additional information from them one seed even called Bill Hewlett one of the company's Founders to request parts jobs not only receive the parts he asked for he managed to Wrangle a summer job 's worked on an assembly line to build computers and was so fascinated that he tried to design his own wait Bill Hewlett gave him spare parts that's on a par with Bill Gates getting unlimited access to a timeshare terminal at age 13. it's as if you were interested in fashion and your neighbor growing up happened to be Giorgio Armani and when was Jobs born February 24th 1955. another of the pioneers of the soccer Revolution was Eric Schmidt he ran Naval one of silicon Valley's most important software firms and in 2001 he became the chief executive officer at Google Eric Schmidt April 27 1955. [Music] I don't mean to suggest of course that every software tycoon in Silicon Valley was born in 1955. some weren't just as not every business Titan in the United States was born in the mid-1830s but there are very clearly patterns here and what's striking is how little we seem to want to acknowledge them we pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual Merit but there's nothing in any of the histories you've looked at so far to suggest things are that simple these are stories instead about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society their success was not just of their own making it was a product of the world in which they grew up by the way let's not forget Bill Joy had he been just a little bit older and had to face the drudgery of programming with computer cards he says he would have studied science Bill Joy the computer Legend would have been Bill Joy the biologist and had he come along a few years later little window that gave him the chance to write the supporting code for the internet would have closed Bill Joy the computer Legend might well have been Bill Joy the biologist again by the way Bill Joy's birthday November 8 1954. Joy would go on after his stint of Berkeley to become one of four founders of sun Microsystems one of the oldest and most important of silicon Valley's software companies and if you still think that accidents of time and place and birth don't matter all that much here are the birthdays of the three other founders of sun Microsystems Scott McNeely November 13th 1954. the node kosla January 28 1955. Andy bechtelsheim September 30th 19. 55. Chapter 3 The Trouble with Geniuses part one knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you're faced with a form full of clever boys in the fifth episode of the 2008 season the American television quiz show 1 versus 100. had as its special guest a man named Christopher Langan One Versus One Hundred is one of the many television shows that sprang up in the wake of the phenomenal success of Who Wants to Be a Millionaire it features a permanent gallery of 100 ordinary people who serve as What's called the mob each week they match wits with a special invited guest at stake is a million dollars the guest has to be smart enough to answer more questions correctly than his or her 100 adversaries and by that standard few have ever seemed as superbly qualified as Christopher Langan tonight the mob takes on their fiercest competition yet the voiceover began meet Chris Langan who many call the smartest man in America the camera to the slow pan of a stocky muscular man in his 50s the average person has an IQ of 100 the voiceover continued Einstein 150 Chris has an IQ of 195. he's currently wrapping his big brain around the theory of the universe but will his king-sized Cranium be enough to take down the mob for one million dollars find out right now on one versus 100. outstrode Langan onto the stage amid while Applause you don't think you need to have a high intellect to do well on one versus 100 do you the show's host Bob Sagat asked him Saget looked at Langan oddly as if he was some kind of laboratory specimen actually I think it could be a hindrance Langan replied he hit a deep certain voice to have a high IQ you tend to specialize think Deep Thoughts you avoid trivia but now that I see these people he glanced at the mob the amusement in his eyes betraying just how ridiculous he found the proceedings I think I'll do okay over the past decade Chris Langan has achieved a strange kind of Fame he's become the public face of Genius in American Life a celebrity outlier he gets invited on new shows and profiled him magazines and he's been a subject of a documentary by the filmmaker Errol Morris all because of a brain that appears to defy description the television news show 2020 once hired a neuropsychologist to give Langan an IQ test and langan's score was literally off the charts too high to be accurately measured another time Langan took an IQ test specially designed for people too smart for ordinary IQ tests he got all the questions right except for one he was speaking at six months when he was three he would listen to the radio on Sundays as the announcer read the funny papers aloud and follow along on his own until he had taught himself to read at five he began questioning his grandfather about the existence of God and remembers being disappointed in the answers he got in school Langan could walk into a language test where he had not studied at all and if there were two or three minutes before the instructor arrived he could skim through the textbook and Ace the test in his early teenage years while working as a farmhand he started to read widely in theoretical physics at 16 he made his way through Burch and Russell and Alfred North whiteheads famously abstruse Masterpiece principia Mathematica he got a perfect score on his s.a.t even though he fell asleep at one point during the test he did math for an hour his brother Mark says a langan's summer routine in high school then he did French for an hour then he studied Russian then he would read philosophy he did that religiously every day another of his brothers Jeff says you know when Christopher was 14 or 15 he would draw things just as a joke and it would be like a photograph when he was 15 he could match Jimi Hendrix lick for lick on the guitar boom boom boom half the time Christopher didn't attend school at all he would just show up for tests and there was nothing they could do about it to us it was hilarious he could brief a semester's worth of textbooks in two days and take care of whatever he had to take care of and then get back to whatever he was doing in the first place on a set of One Versus 100 Langan was poised and confident his voice was deep his eyes were small and fiercely bright he did not Circle about topics searching for the right phrase or double back to restate a previous sentence for that matter he did not say am or ah or use any form of conversational mitigation his sentences came marching out one after another Polished in crisp like soldiers on a parade ground every question sagged through Adam he tossed aside as if it were a triviality when his winnings reached 250 000 he appeared to make a mental calculation at the risks of losing everything were at that point greater than the potential benefits of staying in abruptly he stopped I'll take the cash he said he shook saga's hand firmly and was finished exiting on top as we like to think Geniuses invariably do just after the first wilbore Lewis Turman a young Professor of psychology at Stanford University met a remarkable boy named Henry Cowell Cowell was raised in poverty and chaos because he did not get along with other children he'd been unschooled since the age of seven he worked as a janitor at a one-room schoolhouse not far from the Stanford campus and throughout the day Cal would sneak away from his work and play the school piano and the music he made was beautiful turman's specialty was intelligence testing the standard IQ test that millions of people around the world would take over the following 50 years the Stanford Binet was his creation so he decided to test Cowell's IQ the boy must be intelligent he reasoned and sure enough he was he had an IQ above 140 which is genius level chairman was fascinated how many other Diamonds in the Rough were there he wondered he began to look for others he found a girl who knew the alphabet at 19 months and another who was reading Dickens in Shakespeare by the time she was four he found a young man who had been kicked out of law school because his professors did not believe that it was possible for a human being to precisely reproduce long pastures of legal opinions from memory in 1921 terman decided to make the study of the gift at his life work armed with a large Grant from the Commonwealth Foundation he put together a team of field workers and sent them out into California's elementary schools teachers were asked to nominate the brightest students in their class those students were given an intelligence test the students who scored in the top 10 percent were then given a second IQ test and those who scored above 130 on that test were given a third IQ test and from that set of results Turman selected the best and the brightest by the time Turman was finished he had sorted through the records of some 250 000 Elementary and high school students and identified 1470 children whose IQs averaged over 140 and range as high as 200. that group of young Geniuses came to be known as the termites and they were the subjects of what would become one of the most famous psychological studies in history for the rest of his life Turman watched over his charges like a mother hen they were tracked and tested measured and analyzed their educational attainments noted marriages followed illnesses tabulated psychological Health charted and every promotion and job change dutifully recorded Turman wrote his recruits letters of recommendations for jobs in graduate school applications he doled out a constant stream of advice and counsel all the time recording his findings in thick red volumes entitled genetic studies of Genius there is nothing about an individual as important as his IQ except possibly his morals Turman once said and it was to those with a very high IQ he believed that we must look for production of leaders who Advance science art government education and social welfare generally as his subjects Grew Older German issued updates on their progress chronicling their extraordinary achievements it is almost impossible Turman wrote giddly when his charges were in high school to read a newspaper account of any sort of competition or activity in which California boys and girls participate without finding among the winners the names of one or more members of our gifted group he took writing samples from some of his most artistically minded subjects and had literary critics compare them to the early writings of famous authors they could find no difference all the signs pointed he said to a group with the potential for Heroic stature Turman believed that his termites were destined to be the future Elite of the United States today many of terman's ideas remain Central to the way we think about success schools have programs for the gifted Elite universities require that students take an intelligence test like say the American Scholastic aptitude test for admission high-tech companies like Google or Microsoft carefully measure the cognitive abilities of prospective employees out of the same belief they are convinced that those at the very top of the IQ scale have the greatest potential at Microsoft famously job applicants are asked a battery of questions designed to test their smarts including the classic why are manhole covers round if you don't know the answer that question you're not smart enough to work at Microsoft if I had magical powers and offered to raise your IQ by 30 points you'd say yes right you'd assume that would help you get further ahead in the world and when we hear about someone like Chris Langan our instinctive response is the same as turman's instinctive response when he met Henry Cowell almost a century ago we feel awe Geniuses are the ultimate outliers surely there is nothing that can hold someone like that back but is that true so far in outliers we've seen that extraordinary achievement is less about Talent than it is about opportunity in this chapter I want to try and dig deeper into why that's the case by looking at the outlier in its purest and most distilled form the genius for years we've taken our cues from people like Charmin when it comes to understanding the significance of high intelligence but as we shall see Turman made an error he was wrong about his termites and had he happened on The Young Chris Langan working his way through principia Mathematica at the age of 16 he would have been wrong about him for the same reason Turman didn't understand what a real outlier was and that's a mistake we continue to make to this day one of the most widely used intelligence tests is something called Raven's Progressive matrices it requires no language skills or specific body of acquired knowledge it's a measure of abstract reasoning skills a typical Ravens test consists of 48 items each one harder than the one before it and your IQ is calculated by how many items you get right if I gave you the hardest question on the Ravens I'm guessing you wouldn't get it correct nor would I Chris Lyon almost certainly could however when we say to people like Langan are really brilliant what we mean is that they have the kind of mind that can figure out puzzles like that last hardest Raven's question over the years an enormous amount of research has been done trying to figure out how a person's performance on an IQ test like the Ravens translates to real life success people at the bottom of the scale with IQs below 70 are considered mentally disabled a score of 100 is average you probably need to be just above that Mark to be able to handle College to get into and succeed in a reasonably competitive graduate program meanwhile you probably need an IQ of at least 115. in general the higher your score the more education you'll get the more money you'll make and believe it or not the longer you'll live but there's a catch this relationship between success and IQ Works only up to a point once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120 having additional IQ points doesn't seem to translate into any measurable real world advantage it is amply proved that someone with an IQ of 170 is more likely to think well than someone whose IQ is 70 the British psychologist Liam Hudson has written and this holds true where the comparison is much closer between IQs of say 100 and 130. but the relation seems to break down when one is making comparisons between two people both of whom have IQs which are relatively High a mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is as likely to win a Nobel Prize as one whose IQ is 180. what Hudson is saying is that IQ is a lot like height in basketball there's someone who is five foot six have a realistic chance of playing professional basketball not really you need to be at least six foot or six one to think of playing at that level and all things being equal it's probably better to be six two than six one and better to be six three than six two but pass a certain point height stops mattering so much a player who is six foot eight is not automatically better than someone two inches shorter Michael Jordan the greatest player ever was six foot six after all a basketball player only has to be tall enough and the same is true of intelligence intelligence has a threshold the introduction to the one versus 100 episode pointed out that Einstein had an IQ of 150 and Langan has an IQ of 195. Lions IQ is more than 30 percent higher than Einstein's but that doesn't mean Langan is 30 percent smarter than Einstein that's ridiculous all we can say is that when it comes to thinking about really hard things like physics they are both clearly smart enough this idea that IQ has a threshold I realize goes against our intuition we think that say Nobel Prize winners in science must have the highest IQ scores imaginable but they must be the kinds of people who got perfect scores on their entrance examination in college and who won every scholarship available and had such Stellar academic records in high school that they were scooped up by the top universities in the country if you were to look at a list of where the last 25 Americans to win the Nobel Prize in medicine got their undergraduate degree you'd be surprised at what you'd find some of them went to Yale and Colombian MIT but some of them also went to DePaul Holy Cross in Gettysburg College it's a list of good schools much the same thing holds true for the colleges of the Nobel Prize winners in chemistry Harvard's on the list but so are lots of schools that we don't think of as the best in the land to be a Nobel Prize winner apparently you have to be smart enough to get into a college that's at least as good as Notre Dame or the University of Illinois that's all this is a radical idea isn't it suppose that your teenage daughter found out that she had been accepted at two universities Harvard University and Georgetown University where would you want her to go I'm guessing Harvard because Harvard is a better school its students score a good 10 to 15 percent higher on their SATs the dressed up IQ test that virtually All American High School students have to take before applying to college but given what we are learning about intelligence the idea that students can be ranked like runners in a race makes no sense Georgetown students may not be as smart on an absolute scale as the students of Harvard but they are all clearly smart enough and future Nobel Prize winners come from schools like Georgetown as well as from schools like Harvard the psychologist Barry Schwartz recently proposed that Elite schools give up on their complex admissions process and simply hold a lottery for everyone above the threshold put people into two categories Schwartz says good enough and not good enough the ones who are good enough get put into a hat and those who are not good enough get rejected Schwartz concedes that his idea has virtually no chance of being accepted but he's absolutely right as Hudson writes and keep in mind that he did his research at Elite all-male English boarding schools in the 1950s and 1960s knowledge of a boy's IQ is of little help if you are faced with a form full of clever boys let me give you another perhaps more serious example of the threshold effect in action the University of Michigan law school like many elite U.S educational institutions uses a policy of affirmative action when it comes to applicants from disadvantaged backgrounds around 10 percent of the students Michigan enrolls each fall are members of racial minorities and if the school didn't significantly relax its entry requirement for those students letting them in with lower undergraduate grades and standardized test scores than everyone else it estimates that percentage would be less than 3 percent furthermore if you compare the grades that the minority and non-minority students get in law school the white students do better that's not surprising if one group has higher undergraduate grades and test scores than another it's almost certainly going to have higher grades in law school as well this is the reason why affirmative action programs are so controversial in fact an attack on the University of Michigan's affirmative action program recently went all the way to the U.S Supreme Court it seems troubling for an elite educational institution to let in students who are less qualified than their peers a few years ago however the University of Michigan decided to look closely at how the law school's minority students had fared after they graduated how much money did they make how far up in the profession did they go how satisfied were they with their careers what kind of Social and Community contributions did they make what kind of honors had they won they looked at everything that could conceivably be an indication of real world success and what they found surprised them we knew that our minority students a lot of them were doing well says Richard lempert one of the authors of the Michigan study I think our expectation was that we would find a half or two-thirds full glass they had not done as well as the white students but nonetheless Allah were quite successful but we were completely surprised we found out that they were doing every bit as well there was no place where we saw any serious discrepancy what leopard is saying is that by the only measure that a law school really ought to care about how well its graduates do in the real world minority students aren't less qualified they're just as successful as white students and Y because even though the academic credentials of minority students at Michigan aren't as good as those of white students the quality of students at the law school is high enough that they're still above the threshold they are smart enough knowledge of a lawsuit's test scores is a little help if you are faced with a classroom of clever law students let's take the threshold idea one step further if intelligence only matters up to a point then past that point other things things that have nothing to do with intelligence must start to matter more it's like basketball again once you're tall enough then we start to care about speed and Court sense and shooting touch so what might some of those other things be well suppose that instead of measuring your IQ I gave you a totally different kind of test write down as many different uses that you can think of for the following objects a brick a blanket this is what's called a Divergence test as opposed to a test like the Ravens which asks you to sort through a list of possibilities and Converge on the right answer it requires you to use your imagination and take your mind in as many different directions as possible with a Divergence test like this there obviously isn't a single right answer what the test Giver is looking for is the number and the uniqueness of your responses and what the test is measuring is an analytical intelligence but something profoundly different something much closer to creativity Divergence tests are every bit as challenging as convergence tests and if you don't believe that I encourage you to pause and try the brick and blanket test right now here for example our answers to the uses of objects test collected by Liam Hudson from a student named cool at a top British High School brick to use in Smash and grab raids to help hold a house together to use in a game of Russian Roulette if you want to keep fit at the same time bricks attend Paces turn and throw no evasive action allowed to hold the idler Down on a Bed tie a brick at Each corner as a breaker of empty Coca-Cola bottles blanket to use on a bed as a cover for illicit sex in the woods as a tent to make smoke signals with as a sale for a boat cart or sled as a substitute for a towel as a target for shooting practice for short-sighted people as a thing to catch people jumping out of burning skyscrapers it's not hard to read pool's answers and get some sense of how his mind works he's funny he's a little subversive in the business he has a flare for the dramatic his mind leaps from violent imagery to sex to people jumping on a burning skyscrapers to very practical issues like how to get a duvet to stay on a bed he gives the sense that if you gave him another 10 minutes he'd come up with another 20 uses now for the sake of comparison consider the answers of another student from Hudson's sample his name is Florence Hudson tells us that Florence is a prodigy with one of the highest IQs in the school brick building things throwing blanket keeping warm smothering fire tying to treason sleeping in as a hammock improvised stretcher where is Florence's imagination he identified the most common and most functional uses for bricks and blankets and simply stopped the fact that Florence's IQ is higher than pools tells us nothing since both students are above the threshold what matters is that pool's mind can leap from violent imagery to sex to people jumping out of buildings without missing a beat and Florence's mind can't now which of those two students do you think is better suited to do the kind of brilliant imaginative work that wins Nobel prizes that's the second reason Nobel Prize winners come from Holy Cross as well as Harvard because Harvard isn't selecting its students on the basis of how well they do on the uses of a brick test it's also the reason Michigan law school couldn't find a difference between its affirmative action graduates and the rest of its alumni being a successful lawyer is about more than IQ it involves having a kind of fertile mind the pool had and just because Michigan's minority students have lower scores on convergence tests doesn't mean they don't have that other critical trait in abundance this was turman's error he fell in love with the fact that his termites were the absolute Pinnacle of the intellectual scale at the 99th percentile of the 99th percentile without realizing how little that seemingly extraordinary fact meant by the time the termites reached adulthood turman's error was plain some of his child Geniuses had grown up to publish books and scholarly articles and thrive in business several ran for public office and there were two Superior Court Justices one Municipal Court Judge two members of a California state legislature and one prominent state official but few were nationally known figures they tended to earn good incomes but not that good the majority had careers that could only be considered ordinary and a surprising number ended up with careers that even Turman considered failures nor were there any Nobel Prize winners in his exhaustedly selected group of geniuses his field workers actually tested two future Nobel laureates as elementary students William Shockley and Luis Alvarez and rejected them both their IQs weren't High Enough in a devastating critique the sociologist pichem saroken once showed that if Turman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kind of family backgrounds as the termites and dispense with IQs altogether he would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly stuck the group of geniuses by no stretch of the imagination or of standards of Genius sirocin concluded is the gifted group as a whole gifted by the time Turman came out with his fourth volume of genetic studies of Genius the word genius had all been banished except for the title we have seen Charming concluded with more than a touch of disappointment that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated in other words what I told you at the beginning of this chapter about the extraordinary intelligence of Chris Langan is of little use if we want to understand his chances of being a success in the world yes he's a man with a one in a million mind and the ability to get through principia Mathematica at 16. yes his sentences come marching out one after another Polished in crisp-like soldiers on a parade ground so what if we want to understand his chances of succeeding in the world we have to know a lot more about him than that chapter 4. the trouble with Geniuses part two after protracted negotiations it was agreed Robert would be put on probation Chris langan's mother was from San Francisco and was estranged from her family she had four Sons each of the different father Chris was the eldest his father disappeared before Chris was born he was said to have died in Mexico his mother's second husband was murdered her third committed suicide her fourth was a failed journalist named Jack Lane to this day I haven't met anyone who is as poor when they were kids as our family was Chris Langan says we didn't have a pair of matched socks our shoes had holes in them our pants had holes in them we only had one set of clothes I remember my brothers and I going to the bathroom and using the bathtub to wash our only set of clothes and we were bare ass naked when we're doing that because we didn't have anything else to wear Jack Langan would go on drinking sprees and disappear he would lock the kitchen cabinets so the boys couldn't get to the food he used a bull whip to keep the boys in line he would get jobs and then lose them moving the family on to the next town One Summer the family lived an Indian reservation in a teepee subsisting on government surplus peanut butter and cornmeal for a time they lived in Virginia City Nevada there was only one law officer in town and when the Hell's Angels came to town he would Crouch down the back of his office Mark remembers there was a bar there Allah was a member it was called the bucket of blood Saloon when the boys were in grade school the family moved to Bozeman Montana one of Chris's Brothers spent time in a foster home another was sent to reform school I don't think the school ever understood just how gifted Christopher was his brother Jeff says he sure as hell didn't play it up this was Bozeman it wasn't like it is today it was a small hick town when we were growing up we weren't treated well there they just decided that my family was a bunch of Deadbeats to stick up for himself and his brothers Chris started to lift weights one day when Chris was 14 Jack Langan got rough with the boys as he sometimes did and Chris knocked him out cold Jack left never to return upon graduation from high school Chris was offered two full scholarships one to read college in Oregon and the other to the University of Chicago he chose Reed it was a huge mistake Chris recalls I had a real case of culture shock I was a crew-cut kid who'd been working as a ranch hand in the summers in Montana and there I was with a whole bunch of long-haired City kids most of them from New York and these kids had a whole different style that I was used to I couldn't get a word in edgewise in class they were very inquisitive asking questions all the time I was crammed into a dorm room there were four of us and the other three guys had a whole different lifestyle they were smoking pot they would bring their girlfriends into the room I'd never smoked pot before so I basically took to hiding in the library he continued then I lost that scholarship my mother was supposed to fill out a parent's financial statement for the renewal of that scholarship she neglected to do so she was confused by the requirements or whatever at some point it came to my attention that my scholarship had not been renewed so I went to the office to ask why and they told me well no one sent us the financial statement and we allocated all the scholarship money and it's all gone so I'm afraid that you don't have a scholarship here anymore that was the style of the place they simply didn't care they didn't give a about their students there was no counseling no mentoring nothing Chris left read before the final set of exams in the first semester he had earned A's in the second semester he had F's he went back to Bozeman and worked in construction as a forest Services firefighter for a year and a half then he enrolled at Montana State University I was taking math and philosophy courses he recalled and then in the winter quarter I was living 13 miles out of town out on Beach Hill Road and the transmission fell out of my car my brothers had used it when I was gone that summer they were working for the railroad and had driven it on the railway tracks I didn't have the money to repair it so I went to the dean and my advisor in sequence and I said I have a problem the transmission fell out of my car and you had me in a 7 30 am and 8 30 am class if you could please just transfer me to the afternoon sections of those classes I would appreciate it because of this car problem there was a neighbor who was a Rancher who was going to take me in at 11 o'clock my advisor was his cowboy-looking guy with a handlebar mustache dress in a tweed jacket he said well son after looking at your transcript at Reed College I can see you have yet to learn that everyone has to make sacrifices to get an education request denied so I went to the dean same treatment his voice grew tight he was describing things that had happened over 30 years ago but the memory still made him angry at that point I realized here I was knocking myself out to make the money to make my way back to school and it's the middle of the Montana winter I am willing to hitchhike into town every day do whatever I had to do just to get into school and back and they are unwilling to do anything for me so bananas now is the point I decided I could do without the higher education system even if I couldn't do without it it was sufficiently repugnant to me that I wouldn't do it anymore so I dropped out of college simple as that Chris Lyon's experiences at Rita Montana State represented a turning point in his life as a child he had dreamed of becoming an academic he should have gotten a PhD universities are institutions structured in large part for people with his kind of deep intellectual interests and curiosity once he got into the university environment I thought he would Prosper I really did his brother Mark says I thought he would somehow find a niche it made absolutely no sense to me when he left that without a degree Langan floundered he worked in construction one frigid winter he worked in a clam boat in Long Island he took factory jobs in minor civil service positions and eventually became a bouncer in a bar on Long Island which was his principal occupation through much of his adult years through it all he continued to read deeply in philosophy mathematics and physics as he worked on a sprawling Treatise he calls his ctmu the cognitive theoretical model of the universe but without academic credentials he despairs of Ever Getting published in a scholarly Journal I'm a guy who is a year and a half of college he says with a shrug and at some point this will come to the attention of the editor as he's going to take the paper and send it off to the referees and these referees are going to try and look me up and they're not going to find me and they're going to say this guy has a year and a half of college how can he know what he's talking about it is a heartbreaking story at one point I asked Langan whether he would take a job at Harvard University hypothetically were it offered to him well that's a difficult question he replied obviously as a full professor at Harvard I would count my ideas would have wait and I could use my position my affiliation Harvard to promote my ideas an institution like that is a great source of intellectual energy and if I were at a place like that I could absorb the vibration in the air it was suddenly clear how lonely his life had been here he was a man with an insatiable appetite for learning forced for much of his adult life to live in intellectual isolation I even noticed that kind of intellectual energy in the year and a half I was in college he said almost wistfully ideas are in the air constantly it's such a stimulating place to be on the other hand he went on Harvard is basically a glorified Corporation operating with a profit incentive that's what makes it tick it has an endowment in the billions of dollars the people running it are not necessarily searching for truth and knowledge they want to be big shots when you accept a paycheck from those people it is going to come down to what you want to do and what you feel is right versus what the man says you can do to receive another paycheck when you're there they got a thumb right on you they're out to make sure you don't step out of line what does the story of Chris Langan tell us his explanations as heartbreaking as they are are also a little strange his mother forgets to sign his financial aid form and just like that no scholarship he tries to move from a morning to an afternoon class something students do every day and get stopped cold and why Reliance teachers at Rita Montana State so indifferent to his plight teachers typically Delight in Minds as brilliant as his lion talks about dealing with the breed of Montana State as if they were some kind of vast and unyielding government bureaucracy but colleges particularly small liberal arts colleges like Reed tend not to be rigid bureaucracies making allowances in the name of helping someone stay in school is what professors do all the time even in his discussion of Harvard it's as if Langan has no concept of the culture and particulars of the institutions he's talking about when you accept a paycheck from these people it's going to come down to what you want to do and what you feel is right versus what the man says you can do to receive another paycheck what one of the main reasons College professors accept a lower paycheck than they could get in Private Industry is that University life gives them the freedom to do what they want to do and what they feel is right Langan has hovered backwards when Langan told me his life story I couldn't help but think of the life of Robert Oppenheimer the physicist who famously headed the American effort to develop the nuclear bomb during World War II Oppenheimer by all accounts was a child with a mind very much like Chris langans his parents considered him a genius one of his teachers recalled that he received every new idea as perfectly beautiful he was doing lab experiments by the third grade and studying physics in chemistry by the fifth grade when he was nine he once told one of his cousins ask me a question in Latin and I will answer you in Greek Oppenheimer went to Harvard and then onto Cambridge University to pursue a doctorate in physics there Oppenheimer who struggled with depression his entire life grew despondent his gift was for theoretical physics and his tutor a man named Patrick blackett who would win a Nobel Prize in 1948 was forcing him to attend to the minutia of experimental physics which he hated he grew more and more emotionally unstable and then in an act so strange that to this day no one has properly made sense of it Oppenheimer took some chemicals from the laboratory and tried to poison his tutor luckily found out that something was amiss the University was informed Oppenheimer was called on the carpet and what happened next is every bit as unbelievable as the crime itself here is how the instant is described in American Prometheus kyberd and Martin sherwin's biography of Oppenheimer after protracted negotiations it was agreed that Robert will be put on probation and have regular sessions with a prominent Harley Street psychiatrist in London probation here we have two very brilliant young students who run into a problem that imperils their college careers langan's mother has missed a deadline for his financial aid Oppenheimer has tried to poison his professor to continue on they are required to plead their case to Authority and what happens lion gets his scholarship taken away and Oppenheimer gets sent to a psychiatrist Oppenheimer and Langan might both be Geniuses but in other ways they could not be more different the story of oppenheimer's appointment to be scientific director of the Manhattan Project 20 years later is perhaps an even better example of this difference the general in charge of the Manhattan Project was Lusty Groves and he scoured the country trying to find the right person to lead the atomic bomb effort Oppenheimer by Rights was a long shot he was just 38 and Junior to many of the people who he would have to manage he was a theorist and this was a job that called for experimenters and Engineers his political affiliations were dodgy he had all kinds of friends who were communists perhaps more importantly he had never had any administrative experience he was a very impractical fellow one of oppenheimer's friends later said he walked about with scuffed shoes and a funny hat and more important he didn't know anything about equipment as one Berkeley scientist put it more succinctly he couldn't run a hamburger stand oh and by the way in graduate school he tried to kill his professor this was the resume of the man who was trying out for what might be said without exaggeration to be one of the most important jobs of the 20th century and what happened the same thing that happened 20 years earlier Cambridge he got the rest of the world to see things his way here are bird and Sherwin again Oppenheimer understood that Groves guarded the entrance to the Manhattan Project and he therefore turned on all his charm and Brilliance it was an irresistible performance gross was smitten he's a genius growth leader told a reporter a real genius Groves was an engineer by training with a graduate degree from MIT and oppenheimer's great Insight was to appeal to that side of groves Oppenheimer was the first scientist Groves had met on his tour of potential candidates who grasped at building an atomic bomb required finding practical solutions to a variety of cross-disciplinary problems Groves found himself nodding in agreement when opponara pitched the notion of a central laboratory devoted to this purpose where as he later testified we could come to grips with chemical metallurgical engineering and Ordnance problems that had so far received no consideration would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed would he have been unable to convince his professors to move his classes to the afternoon of course not and that's not because he was smarter than Chris Langan it's because he possessed the kind of Savvy that allowed him to get what he wanted from the world they required that everyone take introductory calculus Langan said of his brief stay at Montana State and I happened to get a guy who taught it in a very dry very trivial way I didn't understand why he was teaching it this way so I asked him questions I actually had to chase him down to his office I asked him why are you teaching this way why do you consider this practice to be relevant to calculus and this guy this tall lanky guy always had sweat stains under his arms he turned and looked at me and said you know there's something you should probably get straight some people just don't have the intellectual Firepower to be mathematicians there they are the professor and The Prodigy on what The Prodigy clearly wants is to be engaged at long last with a mind that loves mathematics as much as he does but he fails in fact and this is the most heartbreaking part of all he manages to have an entire conversation with his calculus professor without ever communicating the one fact most likely to appeal to a calculus professor the professor never realizes that Chris Langan is good at calculus the particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section is what the psychologist Robert Sternberg calls practical intelligence to Sternberg practical intelligence includes things like knowing what to say to whom knowing when to say it and knowing how to say it for maximum effect it is procedural it's about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it it practical in nature that is it's not knowledge for its own sake it's knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want and critically it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ to use the technical term general intelligence and practical intelligence are orthogonal the presence of one doesn't imply the presence of the other you could have lots of analytical intelligence and very little practical intelligence or lots of practical intelligence and not much analytical intelligence or as in the lucky case of someone like Robert Oppenheimer you could have lots of both so where does something like practical intelligence come from we know our analytical intelligence comes from it's something at least in part that's in your genes Chris Langan started talking at six months he taught himself to read at three he was born smart IQ is a measure to some degree of innate ability but social Savvy is knowledge it's a set of skills that have to be learned it has to come from somewhere and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families perhaps the best explanation we have of this process comes from the University of Maryland sociologist Annette laroe who a few years ago conducted a fascinating study of a group of third graders he picked both blacks and whites and children from both wealthy homes and poor homes zeroing in ultimately on 12 families Laurel and her team visited each family at least 20 times for hours at a stretch she and her assistants told their subjects just treat us like the family dog and they followed them to church into soccer games and doctor's appointments with a tape recorder in one hand and a notepad in the other you might expect that if you spend such an extended period in 12 different households what you would gather is 12 different ideas about how to raise children that would be the strict parents and The Lax parents and the hyper-involved parents and the male appearance and on and on what Laurel found whoever is something much different there seemed to be only two parenting philosophies and they divided almost perfectly along class lines the wealthier parents raised their kids one way and the poor parents raise their kids another way the wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children's free time shuttling them from one activity to the next quizzing them about their coaches and teammates one of the well-off children lero followed played on a baseball team two soccer teams a swim team and a basketball team in the summer played in an orchestra and took piano lessons that kind of intensive scheduling was almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children play for them wasn't soccer practice twice a week it was making up games outside with their siblings and other kids in the neighborhood what a child did was considered by his or her parents as something separate from the adult world and not particularly consequential one girl from a working-class family Katie brindle sang in a choir after school but she signed up for it herself and walked the choir practice on her own Laurel writes what Mrs brindle doesn't do that is routine for middle class mothers is view her daughter's interest in singing as a signal to look for other ways to help her develop that interest into a formal Talent similarly Mrs grindel does not discuss Katie's interest in drama or Express regret that she cannot afford to cultivate her daughter's talent instead she frames Katie's skills and interests as character traits singing and acting are part of what makes Katie Katie she sees the shows her daughter puts on as cute as a way for Katie to get attention the middle class parents would talk things through with their children reasoning with them they didn't just issue commands they expected their children to talk back to them to negotiate to question adults in positions of authority if their children are doing poorly the wealthy appearance challenge teachers they intervene on behalf of their kids one child Laurel follows just misses qualifying for a gifted program her mother arranges for her to be retested privately petitions in school and gets her daughter admitted the poor parents by contrast are intimidated by Authority they react passively and stay in the background neural rights of one low-income parent at a parent-teacher conference for example Mrs McAllister who is a high school graduate seems subdued the gregarious and outgoing nature she displays at home is hidden in this setting she sits hunched over in the chair and she keeps her jacket zipped up she's very quiet when the teacher reports that Harold has not been turning in his homework Mrs McAllister clearly is flabbergasted but all she says is he did it at home she does not follow up with a teacher or attempt to intervene on Harold's behalf in her view it is up to the teachers to manage her son's education that is their job not hers laroe calls the middle class parenting style concerted cultivation it's an attempt to actively Foster and assess a child's talents opinions and skills poor parents tend to follow by contrast a strategy of accomplishment of natural growth they see their responsibility to care for their children but to let them grow and develop on their own the rose dresses the one style isn't morally better than the other in fact the poor children were to her mind often better behaved thus whiny more created in making use of their own time and had a well-developed sense of Independence but in Practical terms concerted cultivation has enormous advantages the heavily scheduled middle-class child is exposed to a constantly shifting set of experiences she learns teamwork and how to cope in highly structured settings she's taught how to interact comfortably with adults and to speak up when she needs to in a rose words the middle class children learn a sense of entitlement that word of course has negative connotations these days but Laurel means it in the best sense of the term they acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings they appeared comfortable in those settings they were open to sharing information and asking for attention it was common practice among middle-class children to shift interactions to suit their preferences they knew the rules even in fourth grade bro goes on middle-class children appeared to be acting on their own behalf to gain advantages they made special requests of teachers and doctors to adjust procedures to accommodate their desires by contrast the working class and poor children were characterized by what LaRue calls an emerging sense of distance distrust and constraint they didn't know how to get their way or how to customize in the Rose wonderful phrase whatever environment they were in for their best purposes in one telling scene bro describes a visit to the doctor by Alex Williams a nine-year-old boy and his mother Christina the Williams is our wealthy professionals Alex you should be thinking of questions you might want to ask the doctor Christina says in a car on the way to the doctor's office you can ask him anything you want don't be shy you can ask anything Alex thinks for a moment then says I have some bumps under my arms from my deodorant Christina really you mean from your new deodorant Alex yes Christina well you should ask the doctor Alex's mother Laura writes is teaching that he has the right to speak up that even though he's going to be in a room with an older person of authority it's perfectly alright for him to assert himself they meet the doctor a genial man in his early 40s he tells Alex that he's in the 95th percentile in height Alex then interrupts Alex I'm in the what doctor it means that you're taller than more than 95 out of 100 young men when there are 10 years old Alex I'm not 10. doctor well they graphed you at 10 you're 9 years and 10 months they they usually take the closest year to that graph look at how easily Alex interrupts the doctor I'm not 10. that's entitlement his mother permits that casual incivility because she wants him to learn to assert himself with people in positions of authority the doctor turns to Alex well now the most important question do you have any questions you want to ask me before I do your physical Alex um only one I've been getting some bumps on my arms right around here indicates his underarms doctor underneath Alex yeah doctor okay I'll have to take a look at those when I come in closer to do the checkup and I'll see what they are and what I can do do they hurt or itch Alex no they're just there doctor okay I'll take a look at those bumps for you this kind of interaction simply doesn't happen with lower class children Larose says they would be quiet and submissive with eyes turned away Alex takes charge of the moment in Remembering to raise the question he prepared in advance he gains the doctor's full attention and focuses it on an issue of his choosing Bureau rights in doing so he successfully shifts the balance of power away from the adults and towards himself the transition goes smoothly Alex is used to being treated with respect he is seen as special as a person worthy of adult attention and interest these are key characteristics of the strategy of concerted cultivation Alex is not showing off during his checkup he is behaving much as he does with his parents he reasons negotiates and jokes with equal ease it is important to understand where the particular Mastery of that moment comes from it's not genetic Alex Williams didn't inherit the skills to interact with authority figures from his parents and grandparents the way he inherited the color of his eyes nor is it racial it's not a practice specific to either black or white people as it turns out Alex Williams is black and Katie brindle is white Alex has those skills because over the course of his young life his mother and father in a manner of educated families have painstakingly taught them to him nudging and prodding and encouraging and showing him the rules of the game write down that little rehearsal in the car on the way to the doctor's office when we talk about the advantages of class Laura argues this is in large part what we mean Alex Williams is better off than Katie brindle because he's wealthier and because he goes to a better school but also and perhaps even more critically because the sense of entitlement that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world this is the advantage that Oppenheimer had over Chris Langan he was raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan the son of an artist and a successful garment manufacturer his childhood was the embodiment of concerted cultivation on weekends the oppenheimers would go driving in the countryside in a chauffeur-driven Packard Summers he would be taken to Europe to see his grandfather he attended the ethical culture school on Central Park West perhaps the most Progressive School in the nation where his biographers write students were infused with the notion that they are being groomed to reform the world when his math teacher realized he was bored she sent him off to do independent work as a child oppenheimer's great passion was rock collecting at the age of 12 he began corresponding with local geologists about rock formations he had seen in Central Park and he so impressed them they invited him to give a lecture before the New York mineralogical club as Sherwin and bird write oppenheimer's parents responded to their son's Hobby in an almost textbook example of concerted cultivation dreading the thought of having to talk to an audience of adults Robert begged his father to explain that they had invited a 12 year old greatly amused Julius encouraged his son to accept this honor on the designated evening Robert showed up at the club with his parents who proudly introduced their son as J Robert Oppenheimer the startled audience of geologists in amateur rock collectors burst out laughing when he stepped up to the podium a wooden box had to be found for him to stand on so the audience could see more than the shock of his wiry black hair sticking up above the lectern shy and awkward Robert nonetheless read his prepared remarks and was given a hearty Round of Applause is it any Wonder Oppenheimer handled the challenges of his life so brilliantly if you are someone whose father has made his way up in the business world then you've seen firsthand what it means to negotiate your way out of a tight spot if you're someone who was sent to the ethical culture school then you aren't going to be intimidated by a row of Cambridge Dawns arrayed in judgment against you if you studied physics at Harvard then you know how to talk to an army General who did engineering just down the road at MIT Chris Langan by contrast had only the bleakness of Bozeman and a home dominated by an angry drunken stepfather langen did this to all of us said Mark we all have a true resentment of authority that was the lesson Langan learned from his childhood distrust Authority be independent he never had a parent teach him on the way to the doctor how to speak up for himself and reason and negotiate with those in positions of authority he didn't learn entitlement he learned distrust distance and constraint it may seem like a small thing but it's a crippling handicap in navigating the world Beyond Bozeman I couldn't get any financial aid either Mark minoan we had just zero knowledge less than zero knowledge of the process how to apply the forms checkbooks it was not our environment if Christopher had been born into a wealthy family if he was the son of a doctor who was well connected in some major Market I guarantee you he would have been one of those guys you read about knocking back phds at 17. his brother Jeff says if the culture you find yourself in that determines that the issue with Chris is that he was always too bored to actually sit there and listen to his teachers if someone recognize his intelligence and if he was from a family where there was some kind of value on education they would have made sure he wasn't bored when the termites were into their adulthood Sherman looked at the records of 730 of the men and divided them into three groups 150 the top 20 percent fell into what Turman called the a group these were the true success stories the Stars the lawyers and positions and engineers and academics ninety percent of the years graduated from college and between them had earned 98 graduate degrees the middle 60 percent were the B group those who were doing satisfactorily the bottom 150 with the Seas the one who term and judged to have done the least with their Superior mental ability they were the postal workers and the struggling bookkeepers and the men lying on their couch at home without any job at all one-third of the Seas were College dropouts a quarter had only a high school diploma and all 150 of the Seas each of whom at one point in their life had been dubbed a genius had together earned a grand total of eight graduate degrees what was the difference between the A's and the Seas Sherman ran through every conceivable explanation he looked at their physical and mental health their masculinity femininity scores and their hobbies and Vocational interests he compared what ages they started walking and talking and what their precise IQ scores were in Elementary and high school in the end only one thing mattered family background the A's overwhelmingly came from the middle and the upper class their homes were filled with books half of the fathers of the a group had a college degree or Beyond at a time when a university education was a rarity the Seas on the other hand were from the other side of the tracks almost a third of them had a parent who had dropped out of school before the eighth grade at one point Turman had his field workers go and visit everyone from the A and C group and rate their personalities and manner what they found is everything you would expect to find if you were comparing children raised in an atmosphere of concerted cultivation with children raised in an atmosphere of natural growth the A's were judged to be much more alert poised attractive and well-dressed in fact the scores on those four dimensions were so different as to make you think you were looking at two different species of humans you are of course you're simply seeing a difference between those school by their families to present their best face to the world and those denied that experience determined results are deeply distressing let's not forget how highly gifted the C group was if you had met them at five or six years of age you would have been overwhelmed by their curiosity and mental agility and Sparkle they were true outliers the plain truth of the German study however is that in the end almost none of the genius children from the lowest social and economic class ended up making a name for themselves what did the Seas lack though not something expensive or impossible to find not something encoded in DNA or hardwired into the circuits of their brains they lack something that we could have given them if we'd only known they'd needed it a community around them that prepared them properly for the world the Seas were squandered talent but they didn't need to be today Chris Langan lives in rural Missouri on a horse farm he moved there a few years ago after he got married he's in his 50s but looks many years younger is the build of a linebacker thick through the chest with enormous biceps his hair has come straight back from his forehead his innate graying mustache and Aviator style glasses if you look into his eyes you can see the intelligence burning behind them a typical day is I get up and make coffee I go in and sit in front of the computer and begin working whatever I was working on the night before he said not long ago I found if I go to bed with a question on my mind all I have to do is concentrate on the question before I go to sleep and I virtually always have the answer in the morning sometimes I realize what the answer is because I dreamed the answer and I can remember it other times I just feel the answer and I start typing in the answer emerges on the page he had just been reading the work of the linguist gnome Chomsky there are piles of books in his study he ordered books from the library all the time I always feel the closer you get to the original sources the better off you are he said Langan seen content he had farm animals to take care of and books to read and a wife he loved it was a much better life than being a bouncer I don't think there's anyone smarter than me out there he went on I have never met anyone like me or never seen even indication that there is someone who actually has better powers of comprehension never seen it and I don't think I'm going to I could my mind is open to the possibility but if anyone should challenge me oh I think I'm smarter than you are I think I could have them what he said sounded boastful but it wasn't really it was the opposite a touch defensive he'd been working for decades now but almost none of what he had done had ever been published much less even read by the physicists and philosophers and mathematicians who might be able to judge its value here he was a man with a one in a million mind and he yet to make any impact on the world he wasn't holding forth at academic conferences he wasn't leading a graduate seminar at some prestigious University he was living in a slightly tumbled Down horse farm in Northern Missouri sitting on the back porch in jeans and a cut off t-shirt he knew how it looked it was a great Paradox of Chris langan's genius I have not pursued mainstream Publishers as hard as I should have he conceded going around querying Publishers trying to find an agent I haven't done it and I'm not interested in doing it it was an admission of defeat every experience he had had outside of his own mind had ended in frustration he knew he needed to do a better job of navigating the world but he didn't know how he couldn't even talk to his cockless teacher for goodness sake these were things that others with lesser Minds could Master easily but that's because those others had had help along the way and Chris smanga never had it wasn't an excuse it was a fact it had to make his way alone and no one not rock stars not professional athletes not software billionaires and not even Geniuses ever makes it alone chapter 5. three lessons of Joe Flom Mary got a quarter Joe Flom is the last living named partner of the law firm Skadden Arps slate Mar and phloem here's a corner office high above the continent Tower in Manhattan he is short and slightly hunched his head is large framed by long prominent ears and his narrow blue eyes are hidden by oversized Aviator style glasses he is Slender now but during his Heyday Flom was extremely overweight he Waddles when he walks he Doodles when he thinks he mumbles when he talks and when he makes his way down the halls of Skadden Arps conversations dropped to a hush flam grew up in the depression in Brooklyn's Borough Park neighborhood his parents were Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe his father Isidore was a union organizer in the Garmin industry who later went to work selling shoulder pads for women's dresses his mother worked at what was called peace work doing applique at home they were desperately poor his family moved nearly every year when he was growing up because the custom in those days was for landlords to give new tenants A month's free rent and without that his family could not get by in junior high school Flom took the entrance exam for the elite towns in Harris public high school on Lexington Avenue in Manhattan a school that in just 40 years of existence produced three Nobel Prize winners six Pulitzer Prize winners and one supreme court justice not to mention George Gershwin and Jonas Salk the inventor of the polio vaccine he got in his mother would give him a dime in the morning for breakfast three Donuts orange juice and coffee at needix after school he pushed a hand truck in the Garment District he did two years of night school at city college in Upper Manhattan working during the days to make ends meet signed up for the Army served his time and applied to Harvard Law School I wanted to get into the law since I was six years old Plum says he didn't have a degree in college Harvard took him anyway why I wrote them a letter on why I was the answer to slice bread is how Flom explains it at Harvard in the late 1940s he never took notes all of us were going through this first-year idiocy of writing notes carefully in the classroom and doing an outline of that then a condensation of that and then doing it again on onion skin paper on top of other paper remembers Charles Harr who's a classman of flums it was a routinized way of trying to learn the cases not Joe he wouldn't have any of that but he had that quality which we always vaguely subsumed under thinking like a lawyer he had the great capacity for judgment Flom was law review the honor reserved for the very top students in the class during hiring season the Christmas break of his second year he went down to New York to interview with the big corporate law firms of the day I was ungainly awkward a fat kid I didn't feel comfortable Plum remembers I was one of two kids in my class at the end of hiring season who didn't have a job then one day one of my professors said that there are these guys starting a firm I had a visit with them and the entire time I met with them they were telling me what the risks were of going with a friend that didn't have a client the more they talked the more I liked them so I said what the hell I'll take a chance they had to scrape together the 3600 a year which was the starting salary in the beginning it was just Marshall Skadden and Leslie Arps both of whom had just been turned down for partner at a major Wall Street law firm and John slate who'd work for Pan Am airlines Flom was their associate they had a tiny Suite of offices on the top floor of the Lehman Brothers building on Wall Street what kind of law did we do Flom says laughing whatever came in the door in 1954 Flom took over as skadden's managing partner and the firm began to grow by Leaps and Bounds soon it had a hundred lawyers then 200. when it hit 300 one of flom's Partners Morris Cramer came to him and said he felt guilty about bringing in young law school graduates Skadden was so big Kramer said that it was hard to imagine the firm growing beyond that and being able to promote any of those new hires Flom told him ah we'll go to one thousand Flom never lacked for ambition today Skadden has nearly 2 000 attorneys in 23 offices around the world and earns well over one billion dollars a year making it one of the largest and most powerful law firms in the world in his office Flom has pictures of himself with George Bush Senior and Bill Clinton he lives in a sprawling apartment in a luxurious building on Manhattan's Upper East Side for a period of almost 30 years if you were a Fortune 500 company about to be taken over or trying to take someone else over or merely a big shot in some kind of fix Joseph Flom has been your attorney and Skadden has been your law firm and if they weren't you probably wish they were I hope by now that you are skeptical of this kind of story brilliant immigrant kid overcomes poverty in the depression can't get a job at the stuffy downtown Law Firm makes it on his own to sheer hustle and ability it's a rags to riches story and everything we've learned so far from hockey players and software billionaires and the termites suggest that success doesn't happen that way successful people don't do it alone where they come from matters the products of particular places and environments just as we did then with Bill Joy and Chris Langan let's start over with Joseph Flom this time put into use everything we've learned from the first half of this book no more talk of Joe flom's intelligence or personality or ambition although he obviously has these three things in abundance no glowing quotations from his clients testifying to his genius no more colorful Tales from the meteoric rise of Skadden Arps slate Mar and Flom instead I'm going to tell a series of stories from the New York immigrant world that job Flom grew up in a fellow law student a father and a son named Maurice and mortgenklow and an extraordinary couple by the name of Lewis and Regina borgenect in the hopes of answering a critical question what were Joe flom's opportunities since we know that outliers always have help along the way can we sort through the Ecology of Joe Flom and identify the conditions that helped create him we tell Rags to Riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a Lone Hero battling overwhelming odds with the true story of Joe flom's life turns out to be much more intriguing than the mythological version because all the things that seem in his life to have been disadvantages that he was a poor child of garment workers that he was Jewish at a time when Jews were heavily discriminated against that he grew up in the depression turn out unexpectedly to have been advantages Joe Flom is an outlier but he's not an outlier for the reasons you might think by the end of the chapter in fact we'll see that it is possible to take the lessons of Joe Flom apply them to the legal world of New York City and predict the family background age and origins of the city's most powerful attorneys without knowing a single additional fact about them but we're getting ahead of ourselves lesson number one The Importance of Being Jewish one of Joe flom's classmates at Harvard Law School was a man named Alexander Bickel like Flom Bickle was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants from Brooklyn to public school in New York City and then City College like Flom Bickle was a star in his law school class in fact before his career was cut short by cancer Rico would become perhaps the finest constitutional scholar of his generation and like Flom and the rest of their law school classmates Bickle went to Manhattan during hiring season over Christmas of 1947 to find himself a job his first stop was at Mudge Rose down on Wall Street as traditional and stuff he is any firm of that era mudros was founded in 1869. it was where Richard Nixon practiced in the years before he won the presidency in 1968. we're like the lady who only wants her name the newspaper twice when she's born and when she dies one of the senior Partners famously said Bickle was taken around the firm and interviewed by one partner after another until he was led into the library to meet with the firm's senior partner you can imagine a scene a dark paddled room an artfully frayed Persian carpet Rose upon rows of leather-bound legal volumes oil paintings of Mr Mudge and Mr rose on the wall after they put me through the whole interview and everything Bickel would say many years later I was brought to the senior partner who took it upon himself to tell me that for a boy of my antecedents and you can imagine how Bickle must have paused before giving that euphemism for his immigrant background I certainly had come far but I ought to understand how limited the possibilities of a firm like his were to hire a boy of my antecedents and while he congratulated me on my progress I should understand he certainly couldn't offer me a job but they all enjoyed seeing me and all that it is clear from the transcript of Bickel's reminiscences that his interviewer does not quite know what to do with that information was by the time of the interview at the height of his reputation he had argued cases before The Supreme Court he had written brilliant books mudros saying no to Bickle because of his antecedents was like the Chicago Bulls turning down Michael Jordan because they were uncomfortable with black kids from North Carolina it didn't make any sense but for Stars the interviewer asked meaning wouldn't they have made an exception for you pickle Stars schmars in the 1940s and 1950s the old line law firms of New York operated like a private club they were all headquartered in downtown Manhattan in and around Wall Street in somber Granite faced buildings the partners at the top firms graduated from the same Ivy League schools attended the same churches and summer in the same Oceanside villages on Long Island they wore conservative gray suits their Partnerships were those white shoe firms in apparent reference to the white box favorite of the country club or a cocktail party and they were very particular in whom they hired as Erwin Smiggle wrote In The Wall Street lawyer his study of the Old Line New York Legal establishment they were looking for lawyers who are Nordic have pleasing personalities and clean-cut appearances our graduates of the right schools have the right social background and experience in Affairs the world and are endowed with tremendous stamina a former law school dean in discussing the quality students needed to obtain a job offers a somewhat more realistic picture to get a job the students should be long enough on family connections long enough onability or long enough on personality or a combination of these something called acceptability is made up of the sum of its parts if a man has any of these things he could get a job if he has two of them he can have a choice of jobs if he has three he could go anywhere Pickle's hair was not fair his eyes were not blue he spoke with an accent and his family connections consisted principally of being the son of Solomon and yet a Bickle of Bucharest Romania by way most recently of Brooklyn 's credentials were no better he says he felt uncomfortable when he went for his interviews downtown and of course he did he was short and ungainly and Jewish and talked with the flat nasal tones of his native Brooklyn and you can imagine how he would have been perceived by some silver hair Patrician in the library if you are not of the right background and religion and social class and you came out of Law School in that era you joined some smaller second-rate upstart Law Firm on a rung below the big names downtown or you simply went into business for yourself and took whatever came in the door that is whatever legal work the big downtown law firms did not want for themselves that seems horribly unfair and it was but as is so often the case with outliers buried in that setback was a golden opportunity the old line Wall Street law firms had a very specific idea about what it was that they did they were corporate lawyers they represented the country's largest and most prestigious companies and represented meant that they handled the taxes and the legal work behind the issuing of stocks and bonds and made sure their clients did not run afoul of federal Regulators they did not do litigation that is they rarely had a division dedicated to defending and filing lawsuits as Paul krabath one of the founders of kravath Swain and more one of the very whitest of the white shoe firms once put it the lawyer's job was to settle disputes in the conference room not the courtroom among my classmates at Harvard the thing that bright young guys did was Security's law or tax another white shoe partner remembers those with the distinguished Fields litigation was for hams not for serious people corporations just didn't sue each other in those days what the outline firms also did not do was involve themselves in hostile corporate takeovers it's hard to imagine today when corporate Raiders or private Equity firms are constantly swallowing up one company after another but until the 1970s it was considered scandalous for one company to buy another company without the target agreeing to be bought places like mud Rose and the other establishment firms on Wall Street would not touch those kinds of deals the problem with hostile takeovers is that they were hostile says Stephen Brill who founded the trade magazine American lawyer he wasn't gentlemanly if your best buddy from Princeton is CEO of company X and he's been coasting for a long time and some corporate Raiders shows up and says this company sucks it makes you uncomfortable you think if he goes then maybe I go too it's this whole notion of not upsetting the basic calm and stable Order of Things the work that came in the door the generation of Jewish lawyers coming out of the Bronx in Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s then was the work the white shoe firms disdained litigation and more importantly proxy fights which were the legal maneuver at the center of any hostile takeover bid an investor would take an interest in a company he would denounce the management as incompetent and send letters to shareholders trying to get them to give him their proxy so he could vote out the firm's Executives and to run the proxy fight the only lawyer the investor could get was someone like Joe Flom in Skatin the legal historian Lincoln Kaplan describes that early world of takeovers the winner of a proxy contest was determined in the snake pit officially it was called The Counting Room lawyers for each side met with inspectors of Elections whose job it was to approve or eliminate questionable proxies the event was often informal contentious and unruly adversaries were sometimes in t-shirts eating watermelon or sharing a bottle of Scotch in rare cases the results of the snake pit could swing the outcome of a contest and turn on a single ballot lawyers occasionally tried to fix an election by engineering the appointment of inspectors who were beholden to them inspectors commonly smoke cigars provided by each side Management's lawyer would contest the proxies of the insurgents I challenge this and vice versa lawyers who prevailed in the snake pit excelled up winning it there were lawyers who knew more about the rules of proxy contests but no one was better in a fight than Joe Flom Kaplan goes on Flom was fat 100 pounds overweight then one lawyer said physically unattractive to a partner he resembled a frog and indifferent to social niceties he would fart in public or jab a sakar close to the face of someone he was talking to without apology but in the Judgment of colleagues and of some adversaries his will to win was unsurpassed and he was often masterful the white shoe law firms would call inflam as well when some corporate Raider made a run at one of their establishment clients they wouldn't touch the case but they were happy to Outsource it to Skadden Arps flom's early specialty was proxy fights and that was not what we did just like we don't do matrimonial work said Robert Rifkin A longtime partner of crevasse Swain and more and therefore we purported not to know about it I remember once we had an issue involving a proxy fight and one of my senior corporate Partners said well let's get Joe in and he came to a conference room and we all sat around and described the problem and he told us what to do when he left and I said we can do that too you know and the partner said no no no you can't we're not going to do that it was just that we didn't do it then came the 1970s the old aversion to lawsuits fell by the wayside it became easier to borrow money Federal Regulations were relaxed markets became internationalized investors became more aggressive and the result was a boom in the number and size of corporate takeovers in 1980 if you went to the Business Roundtable and took surveys about whether hostile takeover should be allowed two-thirds would have said no Plum remembers now the vote would be almost unanimous to yes companies needed to be defended against lawsuits from Rivals hostile suitors needed to be beaten back investors who wanted to devour unwilling targets did help with their legal strategy and shareholders needed formal representation the dollar figures involved were enormous from the mid-1970s to the end of the 1980s the amount of money involved in mergers and Acquisitions every year on Wall Street increased 2 000 peaking at almost a quarter of a trillion dollars all of a sudden the things that the old line law firms didn't want to do hostile takeovers and litigation were the things that every Law Firm wanted to do and who was the expert in these two suddenly critical areas of law the once marginal second-tier Law Firm started by the people who couldn't get jobs the downtown law firms 10 and 15 years earlier they the white shoe firms thought hostile takeovers were beneath contempt until relatively late in the game until they decided that hey maybe we ought to be in that business they left me alone mom said once you get the reputation for doing that kind of work the business comes to you first think of how similar this is to the stories of Bill Joy and Bill Gates both of them toiled away in relatively obscure Fields without any Great Hopes for worldly success but then boom the personal computer Revolution happened and they had their 10 000 hours in they were ready flam had the same experience for 20 years he perfected his craft at Skadden Arps then the world changed and he was ready he didn't triumph over adversity instead what started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity it's not that those guys were smarter lawyers than anyone else Rifkin says is that they had a skill that they've been working on for years that was suddenly very valuable lesson number two demographic luck Maurice janklow enrolled in Brooklyn Law School in 1919. he was the eldest son of Jewish immigrants from Romania his seven brothers and sisters one ended up running a small department store in Brooklyn two others were in the Haberdashery business one had a graphic design studio another made feather hats another worked in the finance department at tishman Realty Maurice however was the family intellectual the only one to go to college he got his law degree and set up a practice on Court Street in downtown Brooklyn he was an elegant man who dressed in a Hamburg and Brooks Brothers suits in the summer he wore a straw boater he married the very beautiful Lillian labanton who was a daughter of a prominent talmudist he drove a big car he moved to Queens in a partner then took over a writing paper business that gave every indication of making a fortune here was a man who looked for all the world like the kind of person who should Thrive as a lawyer in New York City he was intelligent and educated he came from a family well schooled in the rules of the system he was living in the most economically vibrant city in the world but here is the strange thing it never happened Maurice jancla's career did not take off the way that it hoped in his mind he never really made it be on Court Street in Brooklyn he struggled and floundered Maurice janklow had a son named Mort however who became a lawyer as well and his son's story is very different from that of the father built a law firm from scratch in the 1960s then he put together one of the very earliest cable television franchises and sold it for a fortune to Cox Broadcasting he started a literary agency in the 1970s and it is today one of the most prestigious in the world he has his own plane every dream that eluded the father was fulfilled by the Sun why did Mark janklow succeed where Maurice janklow did not there are of course a hundred potential answers to that question but let's take a page from the analysis of the robber barons of the 1830s and the software programmers of 1955 and look at the differences between the two jackals in terms of their generation is there a perfect time for a New York Jewish lawyer to be born it turns out that there is and this same fact that helps explain more genklow's success is the second key to Joe flom's success as well Louis turman's genius study as you will recall from the Chris Langan chapter was an analysis of how children with really high IQs who were born between 1903 and 1917 turned out as adults and the study found that there was a group of real successes and a group of real failures and the successes were far more likely to come from wealthier families in that sense the German study underscores the argument Annette laroe makes that what your parents do for a living and the assumptions that accompany the class your parents belong to matters there's another way to break down the term and results though and that's by when the termites were born if you divide the termites into two groups with those born between 1903 and 1911 on one side and those born between 1912 and 1917 on the other it turns out that the termite failures are far more likely to have been born in the earlier group the explanation has to do with two of the great cataclysmic events of the 20th century the Great Depression and World War II if you were born after 1912 say in 1915 you got out of college after the worst of the Depression was over and you were drafted at a young enough age the going away to war for three or four years was as much an opportunity as it was a disruption provided you weren't killed in combat of course the termites born before 1911 though graduated from college at the heart of the depression when job opportunities were scarce and they were already in their late 30s when a second world war hit meaning that when they were drafted they had to disrupt career and families and adult lives that were already well underway to have been born before 1911 is to have been demographically unlucky the most devastating event of the 20th century hits you at exactly the wrong time the same demographic logic applies to Jewish lawyers in New York like Maurice janclow the doors were closed to them at the big downtown law firms so they were overwhelmingly solo practitioners handling wills and divorces and contracts and minor disputes and in the depression the work of the solo practitioner Alba disappeared nearly half of the members of the Metropolitan bar earned less than the minimum subsistence level for American families Gerald arabach writes of the Depression years in New York one year later 1500 lawyers were prepared to take the pauper's oath to qualify for work relief Jewish lawyers approximately half of the Metropolitan bar discovered that their practice had become a dignified road to starvation regardless of the number of years they spent in practice their income was strikingly less than that of their Christian colleagues Maurice janclow was born in 1902 when the Depression started he was newly married and had just bought his big car moved to Queens and made his great gamble on the writing paper business his timing could not have been worse he was going to make a fortune Mark janklow says of his father but the depression killed him economically he didn't have any reserves and he had no family to fall back on and from then on he became very much a scrivner type lawyer he didn't have the courage to take risks after that it was too much for him my father used to close titles for 25 dollars he had a friend who worked at the Jamaica Savings Bank who would throw him some business he would kill himself for 25 bucks doing the whole closing title reports for 25 bucks I can remember my father and mother in the morning Janko continued he would say to her I got a dollar 75. I need 10 cents for the bus 10 cents for the subway a quarter for a sandwich and he would give her the rest they were that close to the edge now contrast that experience with the experience of someone like Mark Janko who was born in the 1930s if he were to look at the birth rates in the United States for the first half of the 20th century you'd see that in 1915 there were almost 3 million babies born by 1935 that number drops by almost 600 000 and then within a decade and a half that number is back over 3 million again to put it in more precise terms for every one thousand Americans there were 29.5 babies born in 1915. 18.7 babies born in 1935 and 24.1 babies born in 1950. the decade of the 1930s is what is called a demographic trough in response to the economic hardship of the depression families simply stopped having children and as a result the generation born during that decade was markedly smaller than both the generation that preceded it and the generation that immediately followed it here is what the economist H Scott Gordon once wrote about the particular benefits of being one of those children born in a small generation when he opens his eyes for the first time it is in a spacious Hospital well appointed to serve the wave that preceded him the staff is generous with their time since they have little to do while they ride out the brief period of calm until the next wave hits when he comes to school age the Magnificent buildings are already there to receive him the ample staff of teachers welcomes him with open arms in high school the basketball team is not as good as it was but there is no problem getting time on the gymnasium floor University is a delightful Place lots of room in the classes and Residences no crowding in the cafeteria and the professors are solicitous then he hits the job market the supply of new entrance is low and the demand is high because there's a large wave coming behind him providing a strong demand for the goods and services of his potential employers in New York City the early 1930s cohort were so small that their class sizes were at least half of what they had been 25 years earlier the schools were new built for the big generation that had come before and the teachers had what in the Depression was considered a high status job the New York City public schools of the 1940s were considered the best schools in the country says Diane ravich professor at New York University who was written widely on the city's educational history there was this generation of Educators in the 30s and 40s who would have been in another time and place College professors they were brilliant but they couldn't get jobs they wanted and public teaching was what they did because it was security and it had a pension and you didn't get laid off that same Dynamic benefited the members of that generation when they went off to college here is Ted Friedman one of the top litigators in New York the 1970s and 1980s like Flom he grew up poor the child of struggling Jewish immigrants my options were City College and the University of Michigan Friedman says City College was free and Michigan then is now one of the top universities in the United States was 450 a year and the thing was after the first year you could get a scholarship if your grades were high Friedman said so it was only the first year I had to pay that if I did well Freeman's first inclination was to stay in New York well I went to City College for one day I didn't like it I thought this is going to be four more years of Bronx Science the high school he had attended and I came home and packed my bags and hitchhiked to Ann Arbor I had a couple of hundred dollars in my pocket from the summer he went on I was working at Catskills to make enough money to pay the 450 tuition and I had some left over then there was this fancy restaurant in Ann Arbor where I got a job waiting tables I also worked the night shift at River Rouge the big Ford plant that was real money it wasn't so hard to get that job the factories were looking for people I had another job too which paid me the best pay I ever had before I became a lawyer which is working in construction during the summer in Ann Arbor we built the Chrysler Proving Grounds I worked there a few Summers during Law School those jobs were really high paying probably because you work so much overtime think about this story for a moment the first lesson is that Friedman was willing to work hard take responsibility for himself and put himself through school with a second perhaps more important lesson is that he happened to come along at a Time in America where if he were willing to work hard you could take responsibility for yourself and put yourself through school Friedman was at the time what we would today call economically disadvantaged he was an inner city kid from the Bronx neither of whose parents went to college but look at how easy it was for him to get a good education he graduated from his public high school in New York at a time when they were the Envy of the world and his first option City College was free and his second option Michigan was just four hundred and fifty dollars and the admissions process was casual enough apparently that you could try one school one day and the other the next and how did you get there you hitchhiked with the money that you made in the summer in your pocket and when you arrived you immediately got a series of really good jobs to help pay you away because the factories were looking for people and of course they were they had to feed the needs of the big generation just ahead of those born in the demographic trough of the 1930s and the big generation of baby boomers coming up behind them the sense of possibility so necessary for Success comes not just from inside of us or from our parents it comes from our time from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history present us with for a young would-be lawyer being born in the early 1930s was a magic time just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur today Mark janklow has an office high above Park Avenue filled with Gorgeous Brooks of Modern Art a du Buffet an ansem Kiefer he tells hilarious stories my mother had two sisters one lived to be 99 the other died at 90. the 99 year old was a smart woman she married my Uncle Al who was the chief of sales for Maidenform once I said to him what's the rest of the country like Uncle Al and he said Kiddo when you leave New York every place is Bridgeport jenko gives a sense that the world is his for the taking I've always been a big risk taker he says when I built the cable company in the early stages I was making deals where I would have been bankrupt if I hadn't pulled it off I had confidence that I could make it work more chancla went to New York City Public Schools when they were at their best Maurice chanclow went to New York City Public Schools when they were at their most crowded went to Columbia University law school because demographic trough babies have their pickup selective schools Maurice chanclow went to Brooklyn law school which is as good as an immigrant child could do in 1919. more chanclow sold his Cable business for tens of millions of dollars Maurice jenko closed titles for 25 dollars the story of the Jan close tells us that the meteoric rise of Joe Flom could not have happened anytime even the most gifted of lawyers equipped with the best of Family lessons cannot escape the limitations of their generation my mother was coherent until the last five or six months of her life Mark Janko said and in her delirium she talked about things she'd never talked about before she shed tears over her friends dying in the 1918 flu epidemic that generation my parents generation lived through a lot they lived through that epidemic which took what 10 percent of the world's population panic in the streets friends dying and then the first world war then the depression then the second world war it didn't have much of a chance that was a very tough period my father would have been much more successful in a different kind of world lesson number three the Garment industry and meaningful work in 1889 Lewis and Regina burgenict boarded an ocean liner in Hamburg Bound for America Lewis was from galatia in what was then Poland Regina was from a small town in Hungary they had been married only a few years and had one small child and a second on the way for the 13-day journey they slept on straw mattresses on a deck above the engine room hanging tight to their bunk beds as the ship pitched and rolled they knew one person in New York organic's sister Sally who had immigrated 10 years before they had enough money to last a few weeks at best like so many other immigrants to America in those years theirs is a leap of faith Lewis and Regina found a tiny apartment on Eldridge Street in Manhattan's Lower East Side for eight dollars a month Lewis then took to the streets looking for work he sought Peddlers and fruit Sellers and sidewalks crammed with push carts he saw noise and activity and energy that dwarfed what he had come from in the old world he was first overwhelmed then invigorated he went to his sister's fish store on Londo Street and convinced her to give him a consignment of Herring on credit he set up shop on the sidewalk with two barrels of fish hopping back and forth between them chanting in German for frying for baking for cooking could also for eating Herring will do for every meal and for every class by the end of the week he'd cleared eight dollars for the second week 13 dollars those were considerable sums but Lewis and Regina could not see how selling Herring on the street would lead to a constructive business Lewis then decided to try being a push cart Peddler he sold towels and tablecloths without much luck he switched to notebooks then bananas and socks and stockings was there really a future in push carts Regina gave birth to a second child a daughter and Lewis's urgency grew he now had four mouths to feed the answer came to him after five long days of walking up and down the streets of the Lower East Side just as he was about to give up hope he was sitting on an overturned box eating a late lunch of the sandwiches Regina had made for him it was close everywhere around him stores were opening suits dresses overalls shirts skirts blouses trousers all ready to be bought and worn coming from a world where clothing was made by hand or made to order by tailors this was a revelation to me the greatest Wonder in this was not the mere quantity of garments although that was a miracle in itself organic would write years later after he became a prosperous manufacturer of women in children's clothing but the fact that in America even poor people could save all the dreary time-consuming labor of making their own clothes simply by going into a store and walking out with what they needed there was a field to go into a field to Thrill to Organics took out a small notebook everywhere he went he wrote down what people were wearing and what was for sale menswear women's wear children's wear he wanted to find a novel item something that people would wear that was not being sold in the stores for four more days he walked the streets on the evening of the final day as he walked towards home he saw a half dozen girls playing hopscotch one of the girls caught his eye she was wearing a tiny embroidered apron over her dress cut low in the front with a tie in the back and it struck him suddenly that in his previous days of relentlessly inventorying the clothing shops of the Lower East Side he had never seen one of those aprons for sale he came home and told Regina she had an ancient sewing machine that they had bought upon their arrival in America the next morning he went to a dry goods store on Esther Street and bought a hundred yards of gingham and 50 yards of white crossbar he came back to their tiny apartment and laid the goods out on the dining room table Regina began to cut The Gingham small sizes for toddlers larger for small children until she had 40 aprons she began to sew at midnight she went to bed and Lewis took up where she had left off at dawn she Rose and began cutting buttonholes and adding buttons by 10 in the morning the apons were finished Lewis gathered them up over his arm and ventured out onto Hester Street children's aprons little girls aprons colored ones 10 cents white ones 15 cents little girl's aprons by one o'clock all 40 were gone ma we've got our business he shouted out to Regina after running all the way home from Hester Street we made two dollars and sixty cents in three hours of selling he grabbed her by the waist and began swinging her around and around you've got to help me he cried out we'll work together ma this is our business Jewish immigrants like the flans and the borgonex and the janklers were not like the other immigrants who came to America in the 19th and early 20th centuries the Irish and the Italians were peasants tenant Farmers from the impoverished Countryside of Europe not so the Jews for centuries in Europe they had been forbidden from owning land and so they had clustered in cities and towns taking up Urban trades and professions 70 percent of the Eastern European Jews who came through Ellis Island in the 30 years or so before the first world war had some kind of Occupational skill they had owned small groceries or jewelry stores they had been bookbinders or watchmakers overwhelmingly though their experience lay in the clothing trade they were Tailors and dressmakers hat and cap makers and furriers and tanners Louis burgenict for example left the impoverished home of his parents at age 12 to work as a sales clerk in a general store in the Polish town of breshco when the opportunity came to work in schneidbaran handle literally the handling of cloth and fabrics or peace Goods as they were known he jumped at it in those days the peace Goods man was closier to the world he writes another three fundamentals required for life in that simple Society food and shelter were humble clothing was the aristocrat practitioners of the clothing art dealers in Wonderful class from every corner of Europe traders who visited the centers of Industry on their annual buying tours these were the merchant princes of my youth their voices were heard their weight felt borgonet worked in peace goods for a man named Epstein then moved on to a store in neighboring yashwaf called branstatters it was there that the young Bogan learned the ins and outs of all the dozens of different varieties of cloth to the point where he could run his hand over a fabric and tell you the thread count the name of the manufacturer and the place of its origin a few years later bogonix moved to Hungary and met Regina she had been running a dressmaking business since the age of 16. together they open a series of small piece goods stores painstakingly learning the ins and outs of small business entrepreneurship bergenic's great brainstormed that day on the upturn Box on Hester Street then did not come from nowhere he was a veteran of bar in handland and his wife was a seasoned dressmaker this was their field and at the same time as the borgonix set up shop inside their tiny apartment thousands of other Jewish immigrants were doing the same thing putting their sewing and dressmaking and tailoring skills to use to the point where by 1900 control of the Garmin industry had passed almost entirely into the hands of the Eastern European newcomers as bergenic puts it the Jews bit deep into the welcoming land and worked like Mad Men at what they knew today at a time when New York is the center of an enormous and diversified metropolitan area it is easy to forget the significance of the set of skills that immigrants like the borgonix brought to the new world from the late 19th century to the middle of the 20th century the Garment trade was the largest and most economically vibrant industry in the city more people worked making clothes in New York than worked at anything else and more clothes were manufactured in New York than in any other city in the world to this day the distinctive buildings that you see when you walk down the lower half of Broadway in Manhattan from the Big 10 and 15-story industrial warehouses that run for 20 blocks below Times Square to the cast iron lofts of Soho and Tribeca were almost all built to house cope makers and hat makers and lingerie manufacturers and huge rooms of men and women hunched over sewing machines to come to New York City in the 1890s with a background in dressmaking or sewing or schnitzfar in hondlong was a stroke of extraordinary Good Fortune it was like showing up in Silicon Valley in 1986 with 10 000 hours of computer programming already under your belt there is no doubt that those Jewish immigrants arrived at the perfect time with the perfect skills says the sociologist Stephen Steinberg to exploit that opportunity you had to have certain virtues and those immigrants worked hard they sacrificed they scrimped and saved and invested wisely but still you have to remember that the Garment industry in those years was growing by Leaps and Bounds the economy was desperate for the skills that they possessed Lewis and Regina borgonit and the thousands of others who came over on the boats with them were given a golden opportunity and so were their children and grandchildren because the lessons those garment workers brought home with them in the evenings turn out to be critical for getting ahead in the world the day after Lewis and Regina burgenict sold out their first lot of 40 aprons Lewis made his way to H.B cloughlin and Company Claflin was a dry goods commission house the equivalent of brandstatters back in Poland there bognit asked for a Salesman who spoke German since his English was almost non-existent he had in his hand his and Regina's life savings 125 and with that money he bought enough cloth to make ten dozen aprons day and night he and Regina cut and sewed he sold all 10 dozen in two days back he went to Claflin for another round they sold those two before long he and Regina hired another immigrant just off the boat to help with the children so Regina could sew full-time and another to serve as an apprentice Lewis ventured Uptown as far as Harlem selling to the mothers in the tenements he rented a storefront on Sheriff street with living quarters in the back he hired three more girls and bought sewing machines for all of them he became known as the apron man he and Regina were selling aprons as fast as they could make them before long the borgonix decided to Branch out they started making adult aprons then petticoats then women's dresses by January of 1892 the borgonix had 20 people working for them mostly immigrant Jews Like themselves they had their own Factory in the Lower East Side of Manhattan and a growing list of customers including a store Uptown owned by another Jewish American Family the Bloomingdale Brothers keep in mind the borgonix had only been in the country for three years at this point they barely spoke English and they weren't Rich yet by any stretch of the imagination whatever profit they made got plowed back into their business and bergenic says he only had 200 in the bank but already he was in charge of his own destiny this was the Second Great advantage of the Garment industry it wasn't just that it was growing by Leaps and Bounds it was also explicitly entrepreneurial clothes weren't made in a single big Factory instead a number of established firms designed patterns and prepared the fabric and then the complicated stitching and pressing and button attaching was all sent out to small contractors and if a contractor got big enough or ambitious enough he started designing his own patterns and preparing his own fabric by 1913 there was something like 16 000 separate companies in the city's Garnet business many just like the borgonix shop on Sheriff Street the threshold for getting involved in the business was very low it was basically a business built on the sewing machine and sewing machines don't cost that much says Daniel Sawyer a historian who was written widely on the garban industry so you didn't need a lot of capital and at the turn of the 20th century it was probably fifty dollars to buy a machine or two all you had to do to be a contractor was to have a couple sewing machines some irons and a couple of workers the profit margins were very low but you could make some money listen to how borgnik describes his decision to expand Beyond aprons from my study of the market I knew that only three men were making children's dresses in 1890. one was an East Side tailor near me who made only to order while the other two turned out an expensive product with which I had no desire at all to compete I wanted to make popular price stuff wash dresses silks and woolens it was my goal to produce dresses that the great mass of the people could afford dresses that wood from the business angle sell equally well to both large and small City and Country Stores with Regina's help she always had excellent taste and judgment I made up a line of samples displaying them to all my old customers and friends I hammered home every point my dresses would save mother's endless work the materials and sewing were as good and probably better than anything that could be done at home the price was right for quick disposal on one occasion borgnik realized that his only chance to undercut bigger firms was to convince the wholesalers to sell cloth to him directly cutting out the middlemen he went to see a Mr Bingham at Lawrence and Company a tall gaunt white bearded Yankee with steel blue eyes there the two of them were the Immigrant from rural Poland his eyes ringed with fatigue facing off in his halting English against the imperious Yankee organic said he wanted to buy 40 cases of Cashmere Bingham had never before sold to an individual company let alone a shoestring operation on Sheriff Street you have a hell of a cheat coming here and asking for favors Bingham thundered but he ended up saying yes what boganik was getting in his 18-hour days was a lesson in the modern economy he was learning market research he was learning manufacturing he was learning how to negotiate with imperious Yankees he was learning how to plug himself into popular culture in order to understand new fashion trends the Irish and Italian immigrants who came to New York in the same period didn't have that same advantage they didn't have a skill specific to the urban economy they went to work as day laborers and domestics and construction workers jobs where you could show up for work every day for 30 years and never learn market research and Manufacturing and how to navigate the popular culture and how to negotiate with the Yankees who ran the world or consider the fate of the Mexicans who immigrated to California between 1900 and the end of the 1920s to work in the fields of the big fruit and vegetable Growers they simply exchanged the life of a feudal peasant in Mexico for the life of a feudal peasant in California the conditions in the Garment industry were every bit as Bad Sawyer goes on but as a garment worker you were closer to the center of the industry if you are working in a field in California you have no clue what's happened to the produce when it gets on the truck if you're working in a small garment shop your wages are low and your conditions are terrible and your hours are long but you can see exactly what the successful people are doing and you can see how you can set up your own job when boganites came home at night to his children he may have been tired and poor and overwhelmed but he was alive he was his own boss he was responsible for his own decisions and direction his work was complex it engaged his mind and Imagination and in his work there was a relationship between effort and reward the longer he and Regina stood up at night sewing aprons the more money they made the next day on the streets those three things autonomy complexity and a connection between effort and reward are the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying it's not how much money we make that ultimately makes us happy between nine and five it's whether our work fulfills us if I offered you a choice between being an architect for fifty thousand dollars a year and working in a toll booth every day for the rest of your life for a hundred thousand dollars a year which would you take I'm guessing the former because there is complexity autonomy and the relationship between effort and reward in doing creative work and that's worth more to most of us than money work that fulfills those three criteria is Meaningful being a teacher is Meaningful being a physician is Meaningful so is being an entrepreneur and the Miracle of the Garmin industry has cut throat and Grim as it was was that it allowed people like the borgonix just off the boat to find something meaningful to do as well when Louis bognit came home after first seeing that child's apron he danced a jig he hadn't sold anything yet he was still penniless and desperate and he knew that to make something of his idea was going to require years of back-breaking labor but he was ecstatic because the prospect of those endless years of hard labor did not seem like a burden to him Bill Gates had that same feeling when he first sat down at the keyboard at Lakeside and the Beatles didn't recoil in horror when they were told they had to play eight hours a night seven days a week they jumped at the chance hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning once it does it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig the most important consequence of the miracle of the Garmin industry though was what happened to the children growing up in those homes where meaningful work was practiced can you imagine what it must have been like to watch the meteoric rise of Regina and Louis burgnict Through The Eyes of one of their children you would learn the same lesson that little Alex Williams would learn nearly a century later a lesson crucial to those who wanted to tackle the upper reaches of a profession like law or medicine if you work hard enough and assert yourself and use your mind and Imagination you can shape the world to your desires in 1982 a sociology graduate student named Louise farpus went to visit a series of nursing homes and residential hotels in New York City and Miami Beach she was looking for people like the borgonix more precisely the children of people like the boganix who had come to New York in The Great Wave of Jewish immigration at the turn of the last century and for each of the people she interviewed she constructed a family tree showing what a line of parents and children and grandchildren and in some cases great-grandchildren did for a living here is her account of subject number 18. a Russian Taylor Artisan comes to America takes to the naval trade Works in a sweatshop for a small salary later takes garments to finish at home with the help of his wife and older children in order to increase his salary he works through the night later he makes a garment and sells it on New York streets he accumulates some capital and goes into a business venture with his sons they open a shop to create men's garments their garments are a better quality than what is available in the new world and they soon discover a great demand for the garments the Russian tailor and his sons become men's suit manufacturers supplying several Men's Stores the sons and the father become prosperous the sun's children become educated professionals the Russian Taylor's family tree looks something like this the first generation was a tailor he had three sons all of whom were garment makers he had two grandsons both of whom were lawyers here's another of farkas's family trees it's a Tanner who immigrates from Poland in the late 19th century he has three sons all of whom were bad manufacturers he has seven grandsons first as a doctor second is a doctor the third is a doctor the fourth is a doctor the fifth is a lawyer the sixth is a lawyer and the seventh is a lawyer farkas's Jewish family trees go on for pages each virtually identical to the last until the conclusion becomes inescapable Jewish doctors and lawyers did not become Professionals in spite of their Origins they became professionals because of their Origins Ted Friedman The prominent litigator in 1970s and 1980s remembers as a child going to concerts with his mother a Carnegie Hall they were poor and living in the furthest corners of the Bronx how did they afford tickets Mary got a quarter Friedman says there was a Mary who was a ticket taker and if you gave Mary a quarter she would let you stand in the second balcony without a ticket Carnegie Hall didn't know about it it was just between you and Mary it was a bit of a journey but we would go back once or twice a month Freeman's mother was a Russian immigrant she barely spoke English but she'd gone to work as a seamstress at the age of 15 and had become a prominent garment Union organizer and what you learn in that world is it to your own powers of persuasion and initiative you can take your kids to Carnegie Hall there is no better lesson for a budding lawyer than that the Garmin industry was boot camp for the professions what did Joe flom's father do he sewed shoulder pads for women's dresses what did Robert oppenheimer's father do he was a garment manufacturer like Louis burgenict one flight up from flom's corner opposite Skadden is the opposite Barry garfinkel who has been at scadden nearly as long as Flom and for many years headed the firm's litigation Department what did garfinkel's mother do she was a milliner she made hats at home what did two of Lewis and Regina boganik's Sons do they went to law school and no less than nine of their grandchildren ended up as doctors and lawyers as well the most remarkable of farkas's family trees is about a Jewish Family from Romania who had a small grocery store in the old country and then came to New York and opened another on the Lower East Side of Manhattan it is the most elegant answer to the question of where all the Joe floms come from the grandfather is a small grocer he has five sons all of whom go into the supermarket business and his grandsons doctor Dr psychologist doctor doctor lawyer lawyer lawyer doctor 10 blocks north of the Skadden Arps headquarters in Midtown Manhattan are the offices of Joe flom's great rival the law firm generally regarded as one of the finest in the world it is headquartered in the prestigious office building known as BlackRock to get hired there takes a small miracle unlike New York's other major law firms all of which have hundreds of attorneys scattered around the major capitals of the world it operates only out of that single Manhattan building it turns down much more business than it accepts it does not bill by the hour like every one of its competitors it simply names a fee once while defending Kmart against a takeover The Firm billed 20 million dollars for two weeks work Kmart paid happily if its attorneys do not outsmart you they will outwork you and if they can't outwork you they will win through sheer intimidation there is no firm in the world that has made more money lawyer for lawyer over the last two decades on Joe flum's wall next to pictures of flum with George Bush and Flom with Bill Clinton there's a picture of him with the Rival firm's managing partner no one Rises to the top of the New York Legal profession unless he or she is smart and ambitious and hardworking and clearly the four men who founded the BlackRock firm fit that description but we know far more than that don't we success is not a random act it arises out of a predictable and Powerful set of circumstances and opportunities and at this point after examining the lives of Bill Joy and Bill Gates pro hockey players and Geniuses and Joe flam djangles and the borgonix it shouldn't be hard to figure out where the perfect lawyer comes from they will have been born in a demographic trough so they had the best of New York City's public schools and the easiest time in the job market they will be Jewish of course so they have the great Fortune to have been locked out of the old line downtown law firms on account of their antecedents they will have had parents who did meaningful work in the Garment business so they could have learned autonomy and complexity and the connection between effort and reward they will have gone to a good school although it doesn't have to be a great School they don't have to have been the smartest in their class only smart enough in fact we can be even more precise just as there is a perfect birth date for a 19th century Robber Baron and a perfect birth date for a software Tycoon there is a perfect birth date for a New York Jewish lawyer as well it's 1930 or thereabouts because that would give the lawyer the benefit of a blessedly small generation it would also make him 40 years of age in 1970 when the revolution in the legal world first began which translates to a healthy 15-year Hamburg period in a takeover business while the white shoe lawyers lingered obliviously over their two Martini lunches at the Princeton Club if you want to be a great New York lawyer it is an advantage to be an outsider and it is an advantage to have Parenthood at meaningful work and better still to have been born in the early 1930s but if you have all three advantages on top of a good dose of Ingenuity and drive then that's an Unstoppable combination that's like being a hockey player born on January 1st the BlackRock firm is walk tell Lipton Rosen and Katz the firm's first partner was Herbert Wachtel he was born in 1931. he grew up in The Amalgamated clothing Workers Union housing across from Van Cortland Park in the Bronx his parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine his father was in the ladies undergarment business with his brothers on the sixth floor of what is now a fancy Loft at Broadway and Spring Street in SoHo he went to New York City public schools in the 1940s then City College in Upper Manhattan and then on to New York University Law School the second partner was Martin Lipton he was born in 1931. his father was a manager at a factory in Hoboken his grandfather was a Jewish immigrant from Europe he attended public schools in Jersey City then the University of Pennsylvania then New York University Law School the third partner was Leonard Rosen he was born in 1930. he grew up poor in the Bronx near Yankee Stadium his parents were Jewish immigrants from the Ukraine his father worked in the Garment district in Manhattan as a Presser he went to New York City public schools in the 1940s then City College in Upper Manhattan then New York University Law School the fourth partner was George Katz he was born in 1931. he grew up in a one-bedroom first floor apartment in the Bronx his parents were the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe his father sold Insurance his grandfather who lived a few blocks away was a sewer in the Garment trades doing peace work out of his house he went to New York City public schools in the 1940s then City College in Upper Manhattan then New York University Law School imagine that we had met any one of these four fresh out of law school sitting in the elegant waiting room at Mudge Rose next to them the blue-eyed Nordic type in the right background we'd all had bet on the Nordic type to be the most successful and we would have been wrong because the cat says and the rosens and the liptons and the wachtels and the floms had something that the Nordic type did not their world their culture and generation and family history gave them the greatest of opportunities part two Legacy chapter 6. Harlan Kentucky die like a man like your brother did in the Southeastern corner of Kentucky in the stretch of the Appalachian Mountains known as the Cumberland plateau lies a small town called Harlan the Cumberland Plateau is a wild and mountainous region of flat topped ridges Mountain walls 500 to a thousand feet high and narrow valleys somewhat enough only for a one-lane road and a creek when the area was first settled the mountainsides and valleys were covered with a dense primeval Forest giant tulip poppers grew in the coves and at the foot of the hills some with trunks as wide as seven or eight feet in diameter alongside them were White Oaks beaches Maples walnuts sycamores Birches Willows Cedars Pines and hemlocks all a national lattice of wild Grapevine comprising one of the greatest assortment of forest trees in the northern hemisphere on the ground were bears and mountain lions and rattlesnakes in the Treetops an astonishing array of squirrels and beneath the soil one thick seam after another of coal Harlan County was founded in 1819 by eight immigrant families from the northern regions of the British Isles they had come to Virginia in the 18th century and then moved West into the Appalachians in search of land the county was never wealthy for its first hundred years it was thinly populated rarely numbering more than 10 000 people the first settlers kept pigs and herded sheep on the hillsides scratching out a living on small farms in the valleys they made whiskey in backyard Stills and felled trees floating them down the Cumberland River in the spring when the water was high until well into the 20th century getting to the nearest train station was a two-day wagon trip the only way out of town was up Pine Mountain which was nine steep miles from bottom to top on a road that turned on occasion into no more than a muddy Rocky Trail Harlan was a remote and strange Place Unknown by the larger society around it and may well have remained so but for the fact that two of the town's founding families the Howards and the Turners did not get along the patriarch of the Howard plan was Samuel Howard he built the town courthouse and the jail his counterpart was William Turner who owned a Tavern and two General stores Once A storm blew down the fence to the Turner property and a neighbor's cow wandered onto their land William Turner's grandson devil Jim shot the cow dead the neighbor was too terrified to press charges and fled the county another time a man tried to open a competitor to the Turner's General Store the Turners had a ward with him he closed the store and moved to Indiana one night Wix Howard and little Bob Turner the grandsons of Samuel and William respectively played against each other in a game of poker each accused theater of cheating they fought the following day they met in the street and after a flurry of gunshots little Bob Turner lay Dead with a shotgun blast to the chest a group of Turners went to the Howard's General Store and spoke roughly to Mrs Howard shoes insulted and told her son will Soward who the following week exchanged gunfire with another of Turner's grandsons Young Will Turner on the road to Hagen Virginia that night one of the Turners and a friend attacked the Howard home the two families then clashed outside the Harlem courthouse in the gunfire Will Turner was shot and killed a contingent of Howards then went to see Mrs Turner the mother of Will Turner and little Bob to ask for a truce she declined you can't wipe out that blood she said pointing to the dirt where her son had died things went from bad to worse Wills Howard ran into little George Turner near Sulfur Springs and shot him dead the Howards ambushed three friends of the Turners The carwoods Killing all of them a posse was sent out in search of the Howards in the resulting gunfight six more were killed or wounded will Howard heard the tournaments were after him and he and a friend rode into Harlan and attacked the Turner home riding back the Howards were ambushed in the fighting another person died Wills Howard rode to little George Turner's house and fired at him but missed and killed another man a posse surrounded the Howard home it was not a gunfight more dead the county was in an uproar I think you get the picture there were places in 19th century America where people lived in harmony Harlan Kentucky was not one of them stop that will Turner's mother snapped at him when he staggered home howling in pain after being shot in the courthouse gun battle with the Howards die like a man like your brother did she belonged to a world so well acquainted with fatal gunshots that she had certain expectations about how they ought to be endured will shut his mouth and he died suppose you were sent to Harlan in the late 19th century to investigate the causes of the Howard Turner Feud you lined up every surviving participant and interviewed them as carefully as you could use subpoenaed documents and took depositions and poured over court records until you had put together a detailed and precise accounting of each stage in a deadly quarrel how much would you know the answer is not much you'd learned that there were some people in Harlan who did much like each other and you'd confirm that will Soward who was responsible for an awful lot of the violence probably belonged Behind Bars but what happened in Harlan wouldn't become clear until you looked at the violence from a much broader perspective the first critical fact about Harlan is that at the same time that the Howards and the Turners were killing each other they were almost identical clashes in other small towns up and down the Appalachians in the famous hapfield McCoy Feud on the West Virginia Kentucky border not far from Harlan several dozen people were killed in a cycle of violence that stretched over 20 years in the French eversolute in Perry County Kentucky 12 died six of them killed by bad Tom Smith a man John Ed Pierce writes in Days of Darkness who was just dominant to be Fearless just bright enough to be dangerous and a dead shot the Martin taller refute in Rowan County Kentucky in the mid-1880s featured three gunfights three ambushes and two house attacks and ended in a two-hour gun battle involving a hundred armed men the baker Howard feuding Clay County began in 1806 with an elk hunting party gone bad and didn't end until the 1930s when a couple of Howards killed three Bakers in an ambush and these were just the well-known feuds the Kentucky legislator Harry Cottle once looked in a circuit court clerk's office in one Cumberland Plateau town and found one thousand murder indictments stretching from the end of the Civil War in the 1860s to the beginning of the 20th century and this fur region that never numbered more than 15 000 people and where many violent acts never even made it to the indictment stage Carter writes of a murder trial in breathit county or bloody breath it as it came to be known that ended abruptly when the defendant's father a man of about 50 with huge handlebar whiskers and two immense pistols walked up to the judge and grabbed his gavel the feudists wrapped the bench and announced courts over and everybody can go we ain't gonna have any Court here this term folks the red face judge hastily acquiesced in this extraordinary order and promptly left town when court convened at the next term the court and Sheriff were bolstered by 60 militiamen but by then the defendant was not available for trial he had been slain from ambush when one family fights with another it's a feud when lots of families fight with one another in identical little towns up and down the same mountain range it's a pattern what was the cause of the appellation pattern over the years many potential causes had been examined and debated and the consensus appears to be that the region was plagued by a particularly virulent strain of what sociologists call the culture of Honor cultures of Honor tend to take root in Highlands and other marginally fertile areas like Sicily or the mountainous Basque regions of Spain if you live on some rocky Mountainside the explanation goes you can't Farm you probably raise goats or sheep and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops the survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community but a herdsman is off by himself Farmers also don't have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night because crops can't easily be stolen unless of course a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field all on his own but a herdsman does he's under constant threat of Ruin through the loss of his animals so he has to be aggressive he has to make it clear through his words and deeds that he's not weak he has to be willing to fight in response to even a slightest challenge to his reputation and that's what the culture of Honor means it's a world where a man's reputation is at the center of his livelihood and self-worth the critical moment in the development of the young Shepherd's reputation is his first quarrel the ethnographer J.K Campbell writes of one hurting culture in Greece quarrels are necessarily public they may occur in the coffee shop The Village Square or most frequently on a grazing boundary where a curse or a stone aimed at one of his straying Sheep by another Shepherd is an insult which inevitably requires a violent response so why was Appalachia the way it was because of where the original inhabitants of the region came from the so-called American Backcountry States stretching from the Pennsylvania border south and west through Virginia and West Virginia Kentucky and Tennessee North Carolina and South Carolina and the Northern end of Alabama and Georgia were settled overwhelmingly by immigrants from one of the world's most ferocious cultures of Honor they were Scotch Irish that is from the lowlands of Scotland the northern counties of England and Ulster in Northern Ireland these regions were known as the Borderlands and they were remote and Lawless territories that have been fought over for hundreds of years the people of the region were steeped in violence they were herdsmen scraping at a living on Rocky and infertile land they were clannish responding to the harshness and turmoil of their environment by forming tight family bonds and placing loyalty to blood Above All Else and when they emigrated to North America they moved into the American Interior to remote Lawless Rocky and marginally fertile places like Harlan that allowed them to reproduce in the new world the culture of Honor that they had created in the old world to the first settlers the American back country was a dangerous environment just as the British Borderlands had been the historian David Hackett Fisher writes in Albion seed much of the Southern Highlands were debatable lands in the Border sense of a contested territory without established government or the rule of law the borderers were more at home than others in this anarchic environment which was well suited to their family system their Warrior ethic their farming and herding economy their attitudes towards land and wealth and their ideas of work and Power so well adapted was the Border culture to this environment that other ethnic groups tended to copy it the ethos of the north British borders came to dominate this Dark and Bloody ground partly by force of numbers but mainly because it was a means of survival in a raw and dangerous world the Triumph of the culture of Honor helps to explain why the pattern of criminality in the American South has always been so distinctive murder rates are higher there than the rest of the country but crimes of property and stranger crimes like muggings are lower as the sociologist John Shelton read has written the homicides in which the South seems to specialize are those in which someone is being killed by someone he or often she knows for reasons both the Killer and victim understand Reed adds the statistics show that the Southerner who can avoid arguments and adultery is as safe as any other American and probably safer in the back country violence wasn't for economic gain it was personal you fought over your honor many years ago the southern newspaperman hot and Carter told the story of how as a young man he had served on a jury as Reed describes it the case before the jury involved an irascible gentleman who lived next door to a filling station for several months he had been the butt of various jokes played by the attendance and the miscellaneous loafers who hung around the station despite his warnings and his notorious short temper one morning he emptied both barrels of his shotgun at his tormentors killing one maiming another permanently and wounding a third when the jury was polled by the incredulous judge Carter was the only juror who recorded his vote as guilty as one of the others put it he wouldn't have been much of a man if he hadn't shot them fellows only in a culture of Honor would it have occurred to the irascible gentleman that shooting someone was an appropriate response to a personal insult and only in a culture of Honor would it have occurred to a jury that murder under those circumstances is not a crime I realize that we are often wary at making these kinds of broad generalizations about different cultural groups and with good reason this is the form that racial and ethnic stereotypes take we want to believe that we are not prisoners of our ethnic histories but the simple truth is if you want to understand what happened in those small towns in Kentucky in the 19th century you have to go back into the past and not just one or two generations you have to go back two or three or four hundred years to a country on the other side of the ocean and look closely at what exactly the people in a very specific geographic area of that country did for a living the culture of Honor hypothesis says that it matters where you're from not just in terms of where you grow up or where your parents grew up but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grow up and even your great-great-great-grandparents grew up that is a strange and Powerful fact it's just the beginning though because upon closer examination cultural Legacy turn out to be even stranger and more powerful than that in the early 1990s two psychologists at the University of Michigan Dove Cohen and Richard Nesbitt decided to conduct an experiment on the culture of Honor they knew that what happened in places like Harlan in the 19th century was in all likelihood a product of patterns laid down in the English Borderlands centuries before but their interest was in the present day was it possible to find remnants of the culture of Honor in the modern era so they decided to gather together group of young men and insult them we sat down and tried to figure out what is the insult that would go to the heart of an 18 to 20 year old's brain Cohen says it didn't take too long to come up with the experiment went like this the social science building at the University of Michigan has a long narrow hallway in the basement lined with filing cabinets the young men were called into a classroom one by one and asked to fill out a questionnaire then they were told to drop off the questionnaire at the end of the hallway and return to the classroom a simple seemingly innocent academic exercise for half the young men that was it they were the control group for the other half there was a catch as they walked down the hallway with their questionnaire another man a Confederate of the experimenters walked past them and pulled out a drawer in one of the filing cabinets the already narrow hallway became even narrower as a young man tried to squeeze by the Confederate looked up annoyed he slammed the filing cabinet drawership jostled the young man with his shoulder and in a low but Audible Voice he said the trigger word Cohen and Nisbet wanted to measure as precisely as possible what being called that word meant they looked at the faces of his subjects and rated how much anger they saw they shook the young men's hands to see if their grip was firmer than usual they took saliva samples from the students both before and after the insult to see if being called an caused their levels of testosterone and cortisol the hormones that drive arousal and aggression to go up finally they asked the students to read the following story and Supply a conclusion it had only been about 20 minutes since they arrived at the party when Jill pulled Steve aside obviously bothered about something what's wrong Asti it's Larry I mean he knows that you and I are engaged but he's already made two passes at me tonight he'll walk back into the crowd and Steve decided to keep his eye on Larry sure enough within five minutes Larry was reaching over and trying to kiss Jill if you've been insulted are you more lucky to imagine Steve doing something violent to Larry the results were unequivocal there were clear differences in how the young man responded to being called a bad name for some it didn't but the deciding factor wasn't how emotion secure they were whether they were an intellectual or a jock or whether they were physically imposing or not What mattered and I think you can guess where this is headed is where they were from the young men from the northern part of the United States for the most part treated the incident with Amusement they laughed it off their handshakes were unchanged the levels of cortisol actually went down as if they were unconsciously trying to defuse their own anger only a few of them had Steve get violent with Larry but the southerners oh my they were angry their cortisol and testosterone jumped their handshakes got firm Steve was all over Larry we even played this game of chicken Cohen said we sent the students back down the hallway and around the corner comes another Confederate the hallway is blocked so there's only room for one of them to pass the guy we used was 6'3 250 pounds he used to play college football he was now working as a bouncer in a college bar he was walking down the hall in business mode the way you walked through a bar when you're trying to break up a fight the question was how close do they get to the bouncer before they get out of the way and believe me they always get out of the way for the Northerners it was almost no effect they get out of the way five or six feet beforehand whether they had been insulted or not the southerners by contrast were downright deferential in normal circumstances stepping aside with more than nine feet to go but if they had just been insulted less than two feet call a southerner an and he's itching for a fight what Cohen and Nesbitt were seeing in that long haul was the culture of Honor in action the southerners were reacting like Wix Howard did when little Bob Turner accused him of cheating a poker that study is strange isn't it it's one thing to conclude that groups of people living in circumstances pretty similar to their ancestors act a lot like their ancestors but those Southerners in the hallway study weren't living in circumstances similar to their British ancestors they didn't even necessarily have British ancestors they just happened to have grown up in the south none of them were herdsmen no other parents herdsmen they were living in the late 20th century not the late 19th century they were students at the University of Michigan in one of the northernmost states in America which meant that they were sufficiently Cosmopolitan to travel hundreds of miles in the South to go to college and none of that mattered they still acted like they were living in 19th century Harlan Kentucky the median student in these studies comes from a family making over a hundred thousand dollars and that's in nineteen ninety dollars Cohen says the southerners we see this effect with aren't kids who come from the hills of Appalachia they're more likely to be the sons of upper middle management Coca-Cola Executives in Atlanta and that's the big question why should we get this effect with them why should one get it hundreds of years later why are these Suburban Atlanta kids acting out the ethos of the frontier cultural legacies are powerful forces they have deep roots and long lives they persist generation after generation virtually intact even as the economic and social and demographic conditions that spawn them have vanished and they Place such a role in directing attitudes and behavior that we cannot make sense of our world without them so far in outliers we've seen that success arises out of the steady accumulation of advantages when and where you were born and what your parents did for a living and what the circumstances of your upbringing were like all make a significant difference in how well you do in the world the question for the second part of outliers is whether the traditions and attitudes we inherit from our forebearers can play the same role can we learn something about how people succeed and how to make people better at what they do by taking cultural legacies seriously I think we can chapter seven the ethnic theory of plane crashes Captain the weather radar has helped us a lot on the morning of August 5th 1997 the captain of Korean Air flight 801 woke at 6am his family would later tell investigators that he went to the gym for an hour then came home and started the flight plan for that evening's journey to Guam he napped and ate lunch at three in the afternoon he left for Seoul departing early enough his wife said to continue his preparations at kimpo International Airport he had been a pilot with Korean Air for almost four years after coming over from the Korean Air Force he had 8 900 hours of flight time including 3 200 hours of experience in jumbo Jets a few months earlier he'd been given a flight safety award by his airline for successfully handling a jumbo jet engine failure at low altitude he was 42 years old and in excellent health at 7 pm the captain his first officer and the flight engineer met and collected the trips paperwork they'll be flying a Boeing 747 a model known in the aviation world as the classic the aircraft was in perfect working order it had once been the Korean presidential plane flight 801 Departed the gate at 10 30 in the evening and was Airborne 20 minutes later takeoff was without incident just before 1 30 in the morning the plane broke out of the clouds and the flight crew Glimpse lights off in the distance is it Guam the flight engineer asked then after pause he said it's Guam Guam the captain chuckled good the first officer reported to air traffic control that the airplane was clear of Charlie Bravo cumulonimbus clouds and requested radar vectors for Runway six left the plane begins to send towards Guam Airport they would make a visual approach the captain said he had flown into Guam Airport from Kempo eight times previously most recently a month ago and he knew the airport and the surrounding terrain well the landing gear went down the flaps were extended 10 degrees at 141 and 48 seconds the captain said wipe her on and the flight engineer turned them on it was raining the first officer then said not in sight he was looking for the runway he couldn't see it one second later the ground proximity warning system called out in his electronic voice 500 feet plane was 500 feet off the ground but how could that be if they couldn't see the runway two seconds passed the flight engineers said eh in an astonished tone of voice at 1 42 and 19 seconds the first officer said let's make a missed approach meaning let's pull up and make a large Circle and try the landing again one second later the flight engineer said not in sight the first officer added not in sight missed approach at 142 and 22 seconds the flight engineer said again go around at 142 and 23 seconds the captain repeated go around but he was slow to pull a plane out of its descent at 142 and 26 seconds the plane hit the side of Nimitz Hill a densely vegetated Mountain three miles Southwest of the airport 60 million dollars and 212 000 kilograms of Steel slamming into Rocky ground at 100 miles an hour the plane skidded for two thousand feet severing an oil Pipeline and snapping pine trees before falling into a Ravine and bursting into flames by the time rescue workers reached the crash site 228 of the 254 people on board were dead 20 years before the crash of kl-801 a Korean Air Boeing 707 wandered into Russian airspace and was shot down by a military jet over the barren sea it was an accident meaning the kind of rare and catastrophic event that for the grace of God could happen to any Airline it was investigated and analyzed lessons were learned reports were filed then two years later a Korean Air Boeing 747 crashed in Seoul two accidents in two years is not a good sign three years after that the airline lost another 747 near sakolan Island in Russia followed by a Boeing 707 that went down over the Andaman sea in 1987 two more crashes in 1989 in Tripoli and Seoul and then another in 1994 in Jeju South Korea to put that record in perspective the loss rate for an airline like the American Carrier United Airlines in the period 1988 to 1998 was .27 per million departures which means that they lost a plane in an accident about once in every 4 million flights the loss rate for Korean Air in the same period was 4.79 per million departures 17 times higher planes were crashing so often that when the national Transportation safety board NTSB the U.S agency responsible for investigating plane crashes within American jurisdiction did its report on the Guam crash it was forced to include an addendum listing all the new Korean Air accents that had happened just since its investigation began the Korean Air 747 the crash landed a Kenpo in Seoul almost a year the day after Guam the jetliner that overran a Runway at Korea's ulsan airport eight weeks after that the Korean Air McDonald Douglas that ran into an embankment at pohang airport the following March and then a month after that the Korean Air passenger jet the crashed in a residential area of Shanghai had the NTSB waited just a few more months it could have added another the Korean Air Cargo Plane the crash just after takeoff from London's Stansted Airport despite the fact that a warning bell went off in a cockpit no fewer than 14 times in April 1999 Delta Airlines and Air France suspended their flying partnership with Korean Air in short order the US Army which maintains thousands of troops in South Korea forbid its Personnel from flying with the airline South Korea's safety rating was downgraded by the U.S Federal Aviation Authority and Canadian officials informed Korean airs management that they were considering revoking the company's overfight and Landing privileges in Canadian airspace in the midst of the controversy an outside audit of Korean Air's operations was leaked to the public the 40-page report was quickly denounced by Korean Air officials as sensationalized and unrepresentative but by that point it was too late to save the company's reputation the audit detailed instances of flight Crews smoking cigarettes on the tarmac during refueling and in the freight hold while the plane was in the air crew read newspapers throughout the flight the audit stated often with newspapers held up in such a way that if a warning light came on it would not be noticed the report detailed bad morale numerous procedural violations and the alarming conclusion that training standards for the 747 classic were so poor that there is some concern as to whether first officers on the classic Fleet could land the aircraft if the captain became totally incapacitated with normal abnormal conditions by the time of the Shanghai crash the Korean president Kim daejong felt compelled to speak up the issue of Korean Air is not a matter of an individual company but a matter of the whole country he said our country's credibility is at stake DeJean then switched to presidential plane from Korean Air to its new arrival Asiana but then a small miracle happened Korean Air turned itself around today the airline is a member in good standing of the prestigious SkyTeam Alliance its safety record since 1999 is spotless in 2006 queen air was given the Phoenix award by Air transport World in recognition of its transformation today Aviation experts will tell you that Korean Air is as safe as any airline in the world in this chapter we're going to conduct a crash investigation listen to the Black Box Copic recorder examine the flight records look at the weather in the terrain and the Airport conditions and compare the Guam crash to another very similar plane crash all in an attempt to understand precisely how the company transformed itself from the worst kind of outlier into one of the world's best Airlines it is a complex and sometimes strange story but it turns on a very simple fact the same fact that runs the Tangled history of Harlan and the Michigan students Korean Air did not succeed it did not write itself until it acknowledged the importance of its cultural Legacy plane crashes rarely happen in real life the way they happen in the movies some engine part does not explode in a fiery Bang The Rudder doesn't suddenly snap unto voice a takeoff the captain doesn't gasp dear God as he's thrown back against his seat the typical commercial jetliner at this point in its stage of development is about as Dependable as a toaster plane crashes are much more likely to be the result of an accumulation of minor malfunctions extenuating circumstances in a typical crash for example the weather is poor not terrible necessarily but bad enough that the pilot is under a little more stress than usual in an overwhelming number of crashes the plane is behind schedule so the pilots are hurrying in 52 percent of crashes the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for 12 hours or more meaning that he's tired and not thinking straight and 44 of the time the two pilots have never flown together before so they're not comfortable with each other then the errors start and not just one error the typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors one of the pilots does something wrong that by itself would not have been a problem then one of them makes another error on top of that which combined with the first error still does not amount to catastrophe but then they make a third error on top of that and then another and another and another and another and it's the combination of all those errors that leads to disaster these seven errors furthermore are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill it's not that the pilot has to negotiate some critical technical maneuver and fails the kinds of errors that cause plane crashes are invariably errors of teamwork and communication One Pilot knows something important and somehow doesn't tell the other pilot One Pilot does something wrong and the other pilot doesn't catch the error a tricky situation needs to be resolved through a complex series of steps and somehow the pilots failed to coordinate and miss one of them the whole flight deck design is intended to be operated by two people and that operation works best when you have one person checking the other or both people willing to participate says Earl weiner who for many years was chief engineer for safety at Boeing airplanes are very unforgiving if you don't do things right and for a long time it's been clear that if you have two people operating the plane cooperatively you will have a safer operation than if you have a single pilot flying a plane and another person who simply there to take over if the pilot is incapacitated consider for example the famous in aviation circles anyway crash of the Colombian airliner Avianca 052 in January of 1990. the Avianca accent so perfectly illustrates the characteristics of the modern plane crash that it is studied in flight schools in fact what happened to that flight is so similar to what would happen seven years later in Guam but it's a good place to start our investigation into the mystery of Korean Air's plane crash problem the captain of the plane was lauriano caveaters his first officer was Maurizio klotz they were enroute from Medellin Colombia to New York City's Kennedy Airport the weather that evening was poor it was a nor'easter up and down the East Coast bringing with a dense fog and high winds 203 flights were delayed at Newark Airport 200 flights were delayed at LaGuardia Airport 161 in Philadelphia 53 at Boston's Logan airport and 99 at Kennedy because of the weather Avianca was held up by air traffic control three times on its way to New York the plane circled over Norfolk Virginia for 19 minutes above Atlantic City for 29 minutes and 40 miles south of Canada airport for another 29 minutes after an hour and a quarter of delay Avianca was cleared for landing as the plane came in on its Final Approach to Landing the pilots encountered severe wind shear one moment they were flying into a strong headwind forcing them to add extra power to maintain their momentum on the Glide down the next moment without warning the headwind dropped dramatically and they were traveling much too fast to make the runway typically the plane would have been flying on autopilot in that situation which reacts immediately and appropriately to wind shear but the autopilot on the plane was malfunctioning and it had been switched off at the last moment the pilot pulled up and executed a go around plane did a Wide Circle over Long Island and reapproached Candy Airport suddenly one of the plane's engines failed seconds later a second engine failed show me the runway the pilot cried out hoping desperately that he was close enough to Kennedy to somehow Glide his crippled plane to a safe landing the Kennedy was 60 miles away the 707 slammed into the estate owned by the father of the tennis champion John Mcenroe in the Posh Long Island town of Oyster Bay 73 of the 158 passengers aboard died it took less a day for the cause of the crash to be determined fuel exhaustion there was nothing wrong with the aircraft there was nothing wrong with the airport the pilots weren't drunk or high the plane had run out of gas it's a classic case said sir and ratwadi a veteran pilot with Emirates Airlines who's been involved for years in human factors research which is the analysis of how human beings interact with complex systems like airplanes rawati is Sri Lankan a lively man in his 40s who has been flying commercial Jets his entire adult life we were sitting in the lobby of the Sheridan Hotel in Manhattan he just landed an Emirates jumbo jet a candy airport after a long flight from Dubai radwati knew the Avianca case well he began to tick off a typical crash preconditions the Nor'easter the delayed flight the minor technical malfunction with the autopilot the three long holding patterns when air traffic control required the plane to Circle round and round which meant not only 80 minutes of extra flying time but extra flying at low altitudes where a plane Burns far more fuel than it does in the Thin Air High Above the Clouds they were flying a 707 which is an older airplane and is very challenging to fly about what he said that thing is a lot of work the flight controls are not hydraulically powered they are connected by a series of pulleys and pull rods to the physical metal surfaces of the airplane you have to be quite strong to fly that airplane you heave it around the sky it's as much physical effort as rolling a boat my current airplane I fly with my fingertips I use a joystick my instruments are huge those are the size of coffee cups and his autopilot was gone so the captain had to keep looking around these nine instruments each the size of a coffee cup while his right hand was controlling the speed and his left hand was flying the airplane he was maxed out he had no resources left to do anything else that's what happens when you're tired your decision-making skills erode you start missing things things that you would pick up on any other day in the Black Box recover from the crash site captain caveatis in the final hour of the flight is heard to repeatedly ask for directions from ATC to be translated into Spanish as if he no longer had the energy to make use of his English on nine occasions he also asked for directions to be repeated tell me things louder he said right near the end I'm not hearing them when the plane was circling for 40 minutes just southeast of Kennedy when everyone on the flight deck clearly knew they were running out of fuel the pilot could easily have asked to land at Philadelphia which was just 65 miles away but he didn't it was as if he had locked in on New York on the aborted Landing the plane's ground proximity warning system went off no less than 15 times telling the captain that he was bringing in the plane too low he seemed oblivious when he aborted The Landing he should have circled back around immediately and didn't he was exhausted through it all the cockpit was filled with a heavy silence sitting next to caveatis was his first officer Maurizio klotz and the flight recorder there are long stretches of nothing but rustling and engine noise it was klontz's responsibility to conduct all communication with ATC which meant that his role that night was absolutely critical but his behavior was oddly passive it wasn't until the third holding pattern Southwest of candy airport the clots told ATC that he didn't think the plane had enough fuel to reach an alternate Airport the next thing the crew heard from ATC was just stand by and following that clear to the Kennedy Airport investigators later surmised that the Avianca Pilots must have assumed that ATC was jumping them to the head of the queue in front of the dozens of other planes circling Kennedy in fact they weren't they were just being added to the end of the line it was a crucial misunderstanding upon which the fate of the plane would ultimately rest but did the pilots raise the issue again looking for clarification no nor did they bring up the issue of fuel again for another 38 minutes to rawati the silence in the cockpit made no sense and as a way of explaining why rat Wadi began to talk about what had happened to him that morning on the way over from Dubai we had this lady in the back he said we reckon she was having a stroke seizing vomiting in bad shape she was an Indian lady whose daughter lives in the states her husband spoke no English no Hindi only Punjabi no one could communicate with him he looked like he had just walked off a village in the Punjab and they had absolutely no money I was actually over Moscow when it happened but I knew he couldn't go to Moscow I didn't know what would happen to these people if we did I said to the first officer you fly the plane we have to go to Helsinki the immediate problem rawati faced is that they were less than halfway through a very long flight which meant that they had far more fuel in their tanks than they usually do when it comes time to land we were 60 tons over Maximum Landing weight he said so now I had to make a choice I could dump the fuel but countries hate it when you dump fuel it's messy stuff and they would have rather be somewhere over the Baltic Sea and it would have taken me 40 minutes and the lady probably would have died so I decided to land anyway my choice that meant the plane was Landing heavy they couldn't use the automated Landing system because it wasn't set up to handle playing with that much weight at that stage I took over the controls not what he went on I had to ensure that the airplane touched down very softly otherwise there would have been a risk of structural damage it could have been a real mess there are also performance issues with Landing heavy if you clear the runway and have to go around you may not have enough thrust to climb back up it was a lot of work you're juggling a lot of balls you've got to get it right because it was a long flight there were two other Pilots so I got them up and they got involved in doing everything as well we had four people up there which really helped in coordinating everything I've never been to Helsinki before I had no idea how the airport was no idea whether the runways were long enough I had to find an approach figure out if he could land there figure out the performance parameters and tell the company what we were doing at one point I was talking to three different people talking to Dubai talking to medlink which is a service in Arizona where they put a doctor on call and I was talking to two doctors who were attending to the lady in the back it was non-stop for 40 minutes we were lucky the weather was very good in Helsinki he continued trying to do an approach in bad weather plus a heavy plane plus an unfamiliar airport that's not good because it was Finland a first world country they were very well set up very flexible I said to them I'm heavy I would like to land into the wind you want to slow yourself down in that situation they said no problem they landed Us in the opposite direction than they normally use we came in over the city which they usually avoid for noise reasons think about what was required of ratwadi he had to be a good pilot that much goes without saying he had to have a technical skill to land heavy but almost everything else that rawati did that made that emergency landing a success fell outside the strict definition of piloting skills he had to weigh the risk of damaging his plane against a risk the woman's life and then once that choice was made he had to Think Through the implications for the sick passenger in the back of Helsinki versus Moscow he had to educate himself quickly on the parameters of an airport he had never seen before could it handle one of the biggest jets in the sky at 60 tons over its normal Landing weight but most of all he had to talk to the passengers to the doctors to his co-pilot to the second crew he woke up from their nap to his superiors back home in Dubai to ATC at Helsinki it's safe to say that in the 40 minutes that passed between the passenger stroke and The Landing in Helsinki there was no more than a handful of seconds of Silence in the cockpit what was required of rawati was that he communicate and not just communicate in the sense of issuing commands but communicate in the sense of encouraging and cajoling and calming and negotiating and sharing information in the clearest and most transparent manner possible here by contrast is a transcript from avianca052 as the plane is going in for its abortive First Landing the issue is the weather the fog is so thick the clots and caveaters cannot figure out where they are pay close attention though not to the content of their conversation but to the form in particular note the length of the silences between utterances and the tone of klotz's remarks caveatis the runway where is it I don't see it I don't see it they take up the landing gear the captain tells clots to ask for another traffic pattern ten seconds pass caveatis seemingly to himself we don't have fuel 17 seconds pass as the pilots give technical instructions to each other caveatus I don't know what happened with the runway I didn't see it clots I didn't see it Air Traffic Control comes in and tells them to make a left turn caveatis tell them we are in an emergency clots to air traffic control that's right to 180 on the heading and ah we'll try once again we're running out of fuel imagine a scene in the cockpit the plane is dangerously low on fuel they have just blown their first shot at a landing they have no idea how much longer the players capable of flying the captain is desperate tell them we are in an emergency and what does clot say that's right to 180 on the heading and I will try once again we're running out of fuel to begin with the phrase running out of fuel has no meaning in air traffic control terminology all planes as they approach their destination are by definition running out of fuel the clots mean that 052 no longer had enough fuel to make it to another alternative Airport did he mean they were beginning to get worried about their fuel next consider the structure of the critical sentence plots begins with a routine acknowledgment of the instructions from Air Traffic Control and doesn't mention his concern about fuel until the second half of the sentence it's as if he were to say in a restaurant yes I'll have some more coffee and uh I'm choking on a chicken bone how seriously would the waiter take him the air traffic controller who klotz was speaking with testified later that I just took it as a passing comment on stormy nights air traffic controllers hear Pilots talking about running out of fuel all the time even the ah the clots inserts between the two halves of his sentence serves to undercut the importance of what he's saying klotz spoke according to another of the controllers who handled 052 that night in a very nonchalant manner there was no urgency in The Voice the term used by linguists to describe what klotz was engaging in in that moment is mitigated speech which refers to any attempt to modify or sugarcoat the meaning of what's being said we mitigate when we're being polite or when we're ashamed or embarrassed or when we're being deferential to Authority if you want your boss to do you a favor you don't say I'll need this by Monday you mitigate you say don't bother if it's too much trouble but if you have a chance to look at this over the weekend that would be wonderful in a situation like that mitigation is entirely appropriate in other situations however like a cockpit on a stormy night it's a problem the linguists utta Fisher and Judith arasno for example once gave the following hypothetical scenario to a group of captains and first officers and asked them how they would respond you notice on the weather radar an area of heavy precipitation 25 miles ahead the pilot is maintaining his present course at Mach .73 even though embedded thunderstorms have been reported in your area and you encounter moderate turbulence you want to ensure that your aircraft will not penetrate this area question what do you say to the pilot in Fisher and erasana's mind there are at least six ways to try and persuade the pilot to change course and avoid the bad weather each with different levels of mitigation number one command turn 30 degrees right that's the most direct and explicit way of making a point imaginable it's zero mitigation number two crew obligation statement I think we need to deviate right around now notice the use of we and the fact that the request is now much less specific that's a little softer number three crew suggestion let's go around the weather implicit in that statement is we're in this together number four query which direction would you like to deviate that's even softer than a crew suggestion because the speaker is conceding that he's not in charge number five preference I think it would be wise to turn left or right number six hint that return at 25 miles looks mean that's the most mitigated statement of all Fisher and aresnew found that captains OVO Emily said they would issue a command in that situation turn 30 degrees right they were talking to a subordinate they had no fear being blood the first officers on the other hand were talking to their boss and so they overwhelmingly chose the most mitigated alternative they hinted it's hard to read Fisher in a rossino study and not be just a little bit alarmed because a hint is the hardest kind of request to decode and the easiest to refuse in the 1982 air Florida crash outside Washington DC the first officer tried three times to tell a captain that the plane had a dangerous amount of ice on its wings but listen to how he says it it's all hints first officer look at how the ice is just hanging on his uh back back there see that then first officer tries again see all those icicles on the back there and everything and then boy this is a this is a losing battle here on trying to de-ice those things it gives you a false feeling of security that's all that does finally as they get clearance for takeoff the first officer upgrades two notches to a crew suggestion let's check those Wing tops again since we've been sitting here a while captain I think we get to go here in a minute the last thing the first Officer says to the captain just before the plane plunges into the Potomac River is not a hint a suggestion or a command it's a simple statement of fact and this time the captain agrees with them first Officer Larry we're going down Larry Captain I know it mitigation explains one of the great anomalies of plane crashes in commercial airlines captains and first officers split the flying duties equally but historically crashes have been far more likely to happen when the captain is in the flying seat at first that seems to make no sense since the captain is almost always the pilot with the most experience but think about the air Florida crash if the first officer had been the captain would he have hinted three times no he would have commanded and the plane wouldn't have crashed planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying because it means the second pilot isn't going to be afraid to speak up combating mitigation has become one of the great Crusades in commercial Aviation over the past 15 years every major airline now has what is called crew Resource Management training which is designed to teach Junior crew members how to communicate clearly and assertively for example many airlines teach a standardized procedure for co-pilots to challenge the pilot if he or she thinks something has gone terribly awry Captain I'm concerned about then Captain I'm uncomfortable with and as a captain still doesn't respond Captain I believe the situation is unsafe and if that fails the first officer is required to take over the airplane Aviation experts will tell you that it is the success of this war on mitigation as much as anything else that accounts for the extraordinary decline in Airline accidents in recent years on a very simple level one of the things we insist upon at Emirates is that the first officer and the captain call each other by their first names rawati said we think that helps it's just harder to say captain you're doing something wrong than to use a name Brad Wadi took mitigation very seriously you couldn't be a student of the Avianca crash and not feel that way he went on one thing I personally try to do is I try to put myself a little down I say to my co-pilots I don't fly very often three or four times a month you fly a lot more if you see me doing something stupid it's because I don't fly very often so tell me help me out hopefully that helps him speak up back to the cockpit of Avianca 052 the plane is now turning away from Kennedy after the aborted first attempt at Landing clots has just been on the radio with air traffic control trying to figure out when they can land again caveatus turns to him caveatis what did he say clots I already advise him that we are going to attempt again because now we can't for seconds of Silence pass caveatis advise him we are in emergency four more seconds of sounds pass the captain tries again did you tell him clots yes sir I already advise him klotz starts talking to air traffic control going over routine details 150 maintaining two thousand Avianca zero five too heavy the captain is clearly at the edge of panic caveatis advise him we don't have fuel klotz gets back on the radio their traffic control plyman maintained three thousand and uh were running out of fuel sir there is again no mention of the magic word emergency which is what air traffic controllers are trained to listen for just running at a fuel at the end of a sentence preceded by the mitigating ah if you're counting errors the Avianca crew is now in double digits caveatis did you already advise that we don't have fuel clots yes sir I already advise him Bueno if it were not the Prelude to a tragedy their back and forth would resemble and Abbott and Costello comedy routine a little over a minute passes Air Traffic Control and avianca052 heavy uh I'm gonna bring you about 50 miles Northeast and then turn you back onto the approach is that okay with you and your fuel clots I guess so thank you very much I guess so thank you very much they're about to crash one of the flight attendants enters the cockpit to find out how serious the situation is the flight engineer points to the empty fuel gauge and makes a throat cutting gesture with his finger but he says nothing nor does anyone else for the next five minutes is radio chatter and routine business and then the flight engineer Cries Out flame out on Engine Number Four caveatis says show me the runway but the runway is 60 miles away 36 seconds of Silence pass the plane's air traffic controller calls out one last time you have ah you have enough fuel to make it to the airport the transcript ends the thing you have to understand about that crash rawati said is that New York air traffic controllers are famous for being rude aggressive and bullying they are also very good they handle a phenomenal amount of traffic in a very constrained environment there's a famous story about a pilot who got lost trafficking around JFK you have no idea how easy it is to do that at JFK once you're on the ground it's a maze anyway a female controller got mad at him and said stop don't do anything do not talk to me until I talk to you and she just left him there finally the pilot picks up the microphone and says Madam was I married to you in a former life they are unbelievable the way they look at it it's I'm in control shut up and do what I say they will snap at you and if you don't like what they tell you to do you have to snap back and then they'll say all right then but if you don't go railroad you I remember a British Airways flight was going into New York they were being stuffed around by New York air traffic control the British pilot said you people should go to Heathrow and learn how to control an airplane it's all in the spirit if you're not used to that sort of give and take New York Air Traffic Control can be very very intimidating and those Avianca guys were just intimidated by the rapid fire it was impossible to imagine rawati not making his case to Kennedy Air Traffic Control not because he was obnoxious or pushy or had an enormous ego but because he saw the world differently if he needed help in the cockpit he would wake up the second crew if he thought Moscow was wrong well he would just go to Helsinki and if Helsinki was going to bring him in with the wind well he was going to talk them into bringing him in Against the Wind that morning when they were leaving Helsinki he had lined up the plane on the wrong Runway and his first officer had quickly pointed out the error the memory made rawati laugh Moss is Swiss he was very happy to correct me he was giving me the whole way back rawati continued all the guy had to do was tell the controller we don't have the fuel to comply with what you are trying to do all they had to do was say we can't do that we have to land in the next 10 minutes they weren't able to put that across to the controller it was clear that route Wadi was speaking carefully because he was making a kind of cultural generalization that often leaves us uncomfortable but what happened with Avianca was just so strange so inexplicable that it demanded a more complete explanation than simply that cloths was incompetent and the captain was tired there was something more profound more structural going on in that cockpit what if there was something about the pilots being Colombian that led to that crash look no American pilot would put up with that that's the thing about what he said they would just say listen buddy I have to land in the 1960s and 1970s the Dutch psychologist Gert huffstiti was working for the human resources department of IBM's European headquarters a city's job was to travel the globe interviewing employees asking questions about things like how people solve problems and how they work together and what their attitudes were to Authority the questionnaires were long and involved and over time husseini was able to develop an enormous database for analyzing the ways in which cultures differ from one another today host cities dimensions are one of the most widely used paradigms in cross-cultural psychology haftidi argued for example that cultures can be usefully distinguished according to how much they expect individuals to look after themselves he called that the individualism collectivism scale the country that scores the highest on the individualism end of that scale is the United States not surprisingly the United States is also the only industrialized country in the world that does not provide its citizens with Universal Health Care at the opposite end of that scale is Guatemala another of cities Dimensions is uncertainty avoidance how well does a culture tolerate ambiguity here are the top five uncertainty avoidance countries according to hofstades database that is the country's most reliant on rules and plans and most likely to stick to procedure regardless of circumstances number one Greece number two Portugal number three Guatemala number four Uruguay number five Belgium the bottom five that is the culture is best able to tolerate ambiguity are number 49 Hong Kong number 50 Sweden number 51 Denmark number 52 Jamaica number 53 Singapore it is important to note that half City wasn't suggesting that there was a right place or a wrong place to be on any one of those scales nor was he saying that a culture's position on one of his Dimensions was an iron-clad predictor of how someone from that country behaves possible for example for someone from Guatemala to be highly individualistic what he was saying instead was something very similar to what Nisbet and Cohen argued after their hallway studies at the University of Michigan each of us has his or her own distinctive personality but overlaid on top of that are Tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in and these differences are extraordinarily specific Belgium and Denmark are only an hour or so apart by airplane for example Danes look a lot like belgians and if I dropped you on a street corner in Copenhagen it wouldn't look all that different from a street corner in Brussels but when it comes to uncertainty avoidance they could not be farther apart in fact Danes have more in common with Jamaicans when it comes to tolerating ambiguity than they do with some of their European peers Denmark and Belgium may share in a kind of broad European liberal democratic tradition but they have different histories different political structures different religious Traditions different languages and food and architecture and literature going back hundreds and hundreds of years and the sum total of all those differences is that in certain kinds of situations that require dealing with risk and uncertainty Danes tend to react in a very different way from belton's of all of Huff's TV's Dimensions though perhaps the most interesting is what he called the power distance index PDI power distance is concerned with attitudes towards hierarchy specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects Authority to measure it of CD asks questions like how frequently in your experience does the following problem occur employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers in other words to what extent do the less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally how much are older people respected and feared are power holders entitled to special privileges in low power distance index countries huffstiti wrote in his classic text culture's consequences there is something of which power holders are almost ashamed and they will try to underplay I once heard a Swedish low PDI University official state that in order to exercise power he tried not to look powerful readers May enhance their informal status by renouncing formal symbols in low PDI Austria prime minister Bruno krezky was known to sometimes take the streetcar to work in 1974 I actually saw the Dutch low PDI prime minister zupp Daniel on vacation with his motor home at a camping site in Portugal such behavior of the powerful would be very unlikely in high PDI Belgium or France it's hard to imagine the prime minister of either country in A Streetcar or a motorhome you could imagine the effect that huffstiti's findings had on people in the aviation industry what was their great battle over mitigated speech and teamwork all about after all it was an attempt to reduce power distance in the cockpit has these questions about power distance how frequently in your experience does the following problem occur employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers was the very question Aviation experts were asking of first officers in their dealings with captains and hostitis Greg suggested something that had not occurred to anyone in the aviation world that the task of convincing first officers to assert themselves was going to depend an awful lot on their culture's power distance rating that's what rawati meant when he said that no American would have been so fatally intimidated by the controllers at Kennedy Airport America is a classic low power distance culture when push comes to shove Americans fall back on their american-ness and that americanness means that you think of the air traffic controller as you're equal but what country do you find at the other end of the power distance scale Colombia in the wake of the Avianca crash the psychologist Robert helmreich who has done more than anyone to argue for the role of culture in explaining pilot Behavior wrote a brilliant analysis of the accident in which he argued that you couldn't understand klutz's Behavior without first taking into account his nationality that his predicament that day was uniquely the predicament of someone who had a deep and abiding respect for authority elmrich wrote the high power distance of Colombians could have created frustration on the part of the first officer because the captain failed to show the kind of clear if not autocratic decision making expected in high power distance cultures the first and second officers may have been waiting for the captain to make decisions but still may have been unwilling to pose alternatives klotz sees himself as a subordinate it's not his job to solve the crisis it's the captains and the captain is exhausted and isn't saying anything then there's a domineering Kennedy Airport air traffic controllers ordering the planes around klotz is trying to tell him that he's in trouble but he's using his own cultural language speaking as a subordinate would to a superior the controllers though aren't Colombian their low power distance New Yorkers they don't see any hierarchical gap between themselves and the pilots in the air and to them mitigated speech from a pilot doesn't mean the speaker is being appropriately deferentialed to a superior it means that the pilot doesn't have a problem there's a point in the transcript where the cultural miscommunication between the controllers and clots becomes so evident that it is almost painful to read it's the last exchange between Avianca and the control tower just minutes before the crash klotz has just said I guess so thank you very much in response to the controller's question about their fuel state Captain caveatis then turns to clots what did he say clots the guy is angry angry plots his feelings are heard his plane is moments from disaster but he cannot escape the dynamic dictated to him by his culture in which subordinates must respect the dictates of their superiors in his mind he has tried and failed to communicate his plight and his only conclusion is that he must have somehow offended his superiors in the control tower in the aftermath of the Kennedy crash the management of Avianca Airlines held a post-mortem Avianca had just had four accidents in quick succession and all four cases the airline concluded had to do with airplanes in perfect flight condition aircrew without physical limitations and considered of average or above average fight ability and still the accidents happened in the company's Madrid crash the report went on the co-pilot tried to warn the captain about how dangerous the situation was the co-pilot was right but they died because when the co-pilot asked questions his implied suggestions were very weak the captain's reply was to ignore him totally perhaps the co-pilot did not want to appear rebellious questioning the Judgment of the captain or he did not want to play the fool because he knew the pilot had a great deal of experience flying in that area the co-pilot should have advocated for his own opinions in a stronger way our ability to succeed at what we do is powerfully bound up in where we're from and being a good pilot and coming from a high power distance culture is a difficult mix Colombia by no means has the highest PDI of all by the way elmrich and a colleague Ashley Merritt once measured the PDI of pilots from around the world number one was Brazil number two South Korea the national Transportation safety board the U.S agency responsible for investigating plane crashes is headquartered in a squat 70-0 office building on the banks of the Potomac River in Washington DC off the agency's long hallways our Laboratories filled with airplane wreckage a mangled piece of an engine turbine a problematic piece of a helicopter rotor on a shelf in one of the Laboratories is the cockpit voice and data recorder the so-called black box from the devastating Value Jet crash in Florida in 1996 where 110 people were killed the recorder is encased in a shoebox-sized housing made out of thick hardened steel and on one end of the Box there's a jagged hole as if someone or rather something had driven a stake into it with tremendous Force some of the ntsp investigators are Engineers who reconstruct crashes from the material evidence others are pilots a surprising number of them though are psychologists whose job it is to listen to the cockpit recorder and reconstruct what was said and done by the flight crew in the final minutes before a crash one of the ntsb's leading Black Box Specialists is a gangly 50-ish PHD psychologist named Malcolm Brenner and Brenner was one of the investigators on the Korean Air crash in Guam normally that approach into Guam is not difficult Renner began Guam Airport had what is called a Glide scope which is like a giant beam of light stretching up into the sky from the airport and the pilot simply follows the beam all the way down to the runway but on this particular night the Glide scope was down it was out of service Brenner said it had been sent to another Island to be repaired so there was a notice to Airmen that the Glide scope was not operating in the grand scheme of things this should not have been a big problem in the month the Glide scope had been under repair there had been something like 1500 safe Landings at Guam Airport it was a small thing an inconvenience really that made the task of Landing a plane just a little bit more difficult the second complication was the weather Renner continued normally in the South Pacific you've got these brief wetter situations but they go by quickly you don't have storms it's a Tropical Paradise but that night there were some little cells and it just happens that that evening they were going to be flying into one of those little cells a few miles from the airport so the captain has to decide what exactly is my procedure for landing well they were cleared for what's called a vordme approach it's complicated it's a pain in the ass it takes a lot of coordination to set it up you have to calm down in steps but then as it happens from miles out the captain sees the lights of Guam so he relaxes and he says we're doing a visual approach the VOR is a beacon it sends out a signal that allows the pilots to calculate their altitude as they approach an airport it's what pilots would rely on before the invention of the Glide scope the captain's strategy was to use the VOR to get the plane close and then once he could see the lights of the runway to land the plane visually Pilots do visual Landings all the time it seemed to make sense but every time a pilot chooses a plan he's supposed to prepare a backup in case things go awry and this Captain didn't they should have been coordinating he should have been briefing for the dma step Downs better went on but he doesn't talk about that the storm cells are all around them and what the captain seems to be doing is assuming that at some point he's going to break out of the clouds and see the airport and if he doesn't see it by 560 feet he'll just go around now that would work except for one thing the VOR on which he's basing his strategy is not at the airport it's two and a half miles away on Nimitz Hill there are a number of airports in the world where this is true sometimes you can follow the VOR down and it takes you straight to the airport here if you follow the VOR down it takes you straight to Nimitz Hill the pilot knew about the VOR he was clearly stated in the airport's navigational charts he'd flown into Guam eight times before and in fact he had specifically mentioned it in the briefing he gave before takeoff but then again it was one in the morning and he'd been up since 6am the previous day we believe that fatigue was involved Brenner went on it's a back of the clock flight you fly in and arrive at one in the morning Korea time then you spend a few hours on the ground and you fly back as the sun is coming up the captain has flown it a month before in that case he slept on a first-class seat now he's flying in and says he's really tired so there they are the classic preconditions of a plane crash the same three that set the stage for Avianca 052 by themselves none of these would be sufficient for an accident together they require the combined efforts of everyone in the cockpit and that's where Korean Air 801 ran into trouble here is the flight recorded transcript of the final 30 minutes of Kal flight 801 it begins with the captain complaining of exhaustion 120 and 1 second if this round trip is more than a nine hour trip we might get little something with eight hours we get nothing eight hours do not help us at all they make us work to maximum up to maximum probably this way Hotel expenses will be saved for cabin Crews and maximize the flight hours anyway they make us work to the maximum there's the sound of a man shifting in his seat a minute passes 121 and 13 seconds eh really sleepy first officer of course then comes one of the most critical moments in the flight the first officer decides to speak up first officer don't you think it rains more in this area here the first officer must have thought long and hard before making that comment he was not flying in the easy collegiality of siren rawati's cockpit among Korean Air flight Crews the expectation on layovers was that the junior officers would attend the captain to the point of making him dinner or purchasing him gifts as one Korean Air pilot puts it the sensibility in many of the airline's cockpits was that the captain is in charge and does what he wants when he likes how he likes and everyone else sits quietly and does nothing in the Delta report on Korean Air that was posted anonymously on the internet one of the Auditors tells a story of sitting in on a Korean Air flight with a first officer got confused while listening to air traffic control and mistakenly put the plane on the course intended for another plane the flight engineer picked up something was wrong but said nothing first officer was also not happy but said nothing despite good visual conditions crew did not look out and see that current heading would not bring them to the Airfield finally the planes radar picks up the mistake and then comes the key sentence Captain hit first officer with the back of his hand for making the error hit him with the back of his hand when the three Pilots all met that evening at Kenpo for their pre-flight preparation the first officer and the engineer would have bowed to the captain they would all have then shaken hands it is first time to meet you the co-pilot might have said respectfully the Korean language has no less than six different levels of conversational address depending on the relationship between the addressee and the address or formal deference informal deference blunt familiar intimate and plain the first officer would not have dared to use one of the more intimate or familiar forms when he addressed the captain this is a culture in which enormous attention is paid to the relative standing of any two people in a conversation the Korean linguist home and selling rights at a dinner table a lower ranking person must wait until a higher ranking person sits down and starts eating while the reverse does not hold true one does not smoke in the presence of a social Superior when drinking with a social Superior the subordinate hides his glass and turns away from the superior in greeting a social Superior though not an inferior a Korean must bow a Korean must rise with an obvious social Superior appears on a scene and he cannot pass in front of an obvious social Superior all social behavior and actions are conducted in the order of seniority or ranking as the saying goes there is order even to drink in cold water so when the first Officer says don't you think it rains more in this area here we know what he means by that he means Captain you have committed us to a visual approach with no backup plan and the weather outside is terrible you think that we will break out of the clouds in time to see the runway but what if we don't it's pitch black outside and pouring rain and the Glide scope is down but he can't say that he hints and in his mind he said as much as he can to a superior the first officer will not mention the weather again it is just after that moment that the plane briefly breaks out of the clouds and often the distance the pilots see lights is it Guam the flight engineer ass then after a pause he says it's Guam Guam the captain Chuckles good but it isn't good it's an illusion they've come out of the clouds for a moment but they're still 20 miles from the airport and there's an enormous amount of bad weather still ahead of them the flight engineer knows this because it is his responsibility to track the weather so now he decides to speak up today weather radar has helped us a lot he says weather radar has helped us a lot a second hint from the flight deck what the engineer means is just what the first officer meant this isn't a night where you can rely on just your eyes to land the plane look at what the weather radar is telling us there's trouble ahead to Western ears it seems strange the flight engineer would bring this subject up just once Western communication has what linguists call a transmitter orientation that is it is considered the responsibility of the speaker to communicate ideas clearly and unambiguously even in the tragic case of the air Florida crash where the first officer never does more than hint about the danger posed by the ice he still hints four times phrasing his comments four separate ways in an attempt to make his meaning clear he may have been constrained by the power distance between himself and the captain but he was still operating within a western cultural context which holds that if there is confusion it is the fault of the speaker but Korea like many Asian countries is receiver oriented it's up to the listener to make sense of what is being said in the engineer's mind he said a lot homan's own gives the following conversation as an illustration an exchange between an employee Mr Kim and his boss a division chief division chief it's called and I'm kind of hungry what that means son says is why don't you buy a drink or something to eat Mr Kim how about a glass of liquor meaning I will buy liquor for you division Chief it's okay don't bother meaning I will accept your offer if you repeat it Mr Kim you must be hungry how about going out meaning I insist on treating you division Chief shall I do so meaning I accept there is something beautiful in the subtly of that Exchange in the intention that each party must pay to the motivations and desires of the other it's symbolized in the truest sense of that word it does not permit insensitivity or indifference but high power distance communication only works when The Listener is capable of paying close attention and it only works if the two parties in a conversation have the luxury of time in order to unwind each other's meanings it doesn't work in a cockpit on a stormy night with an exhausted pilot trying to land at an airport with a broken Glide scope in 2000 Korean Air finally acted bringing in an outsider from Delta Airlines David Greenberg to run their flight operations Greenberg's First Step was something that would make no sense if you did not understand the true roots of Korean Air's problems he evaluated the English language skills of all the Airlines flight Crews some of them were fine and some of them weren't he remembers so we set up a program to assist and improve the proficiency of Aviation English his second step was to bring in a western firm a subsidiary Boeing called alteon to take over the company's training and instruction programs alteon conducted their training in English Greenberg said they didn't speak Korean Greenberg's rule was simple the new language of Korean Air was English if you wanted to remain a pilot at the company you had to be fluent this was not a purge he said everyone had the same opportunity and those who found the language issue challenging were allowed to go out and study on their own nickel but language was the filter I can't recall that anyone was fired for flying proficiency shortcomings Greenberg's rationale was that English was the language of the aviation world when the pilots sat in the cockpit and worked their way through the written checklist that flight Crews follow on every significant point of procedure those checklists were in English when they talked to air traffic control anywhere in the world those conversations would be in English if you are trying to land at JFK at rush hour there is no non-verbal communication Greenberg says it's people talking to people so you need to be darn sure you understand what's going on you can say that two Koreans side by side don't need to speak English but if they are arguing about what the guy's outside said in English then language is important Greenberg wanted to give his Pilots an alternate identity their problem was that they were trapped in roles dictated by the heavy weight of their country's cultural Legacy they needed an opportunity to step outside those roles when they sat in a cockpit and language was the key to that transformation in English they would be free of the sharply defined gradients of Korean hierarchy formal deference informal deference blunt familiar intimate and plain instead the pilots could participate in a culture and language with a very different Legacy the critical part of Greenberg's reform however is what he didn't do he didn't throw up his hands in despair he didn't fire all of his Korean pilots and start again with pilots from a low power distance culture he knew that cultural legacies matter that they are powerful and pervasive and that they persist long after their original usefulness has passed but he didn't assume the legacies are an indelible part of how we are he believed that if the Koreans were honest about where they came from and were willing to confront those aspects of their Heritage that did not suit the aviation World they could change he offered his Pilots what everyone from hockey players to software tycoons to take over lawyers has been offered on the way to success which is an opportunity to transform their relationship to their work after leaving Korean Air Greenberg helped start up a freight Airline called cargo 360 and he took a number of Korean Pilots with him they were all flight Engineers who had been number three after the captain and first officer in the strict hierarchy of the original Korean Air these were guys who had performed in the old environment at Korean Air for as much as 15 to 18 years they had accepted that subservient role Greenberg said they had been at the bottom of the ladder we retrain them and put them with Western crew and they've been a great success they all changed their style they take initiative they pull their share of the load they don't wait for someone to direct them these are senior people in their 50s with a long history in one context who have been retrained and are now successful doing their job in a western cockpit we took them out of their culture and renormed them that is an extraordinarily liberating example when we understand what it means to be a good pilot when we understand how much culture and history and the world outside of the individual matter to professional success then we don't have to throw up our hands in despair at an airline where Pilots crash planes into the side of mountains we have a way to make successes out of the unsuccessful first we have to be frank about a subject that we would all too often rather ignore in 1994 when Boeing first published safety data showing a clear correlation between a country's plane crashes and its score on hostiti's Dimensions the company's researchers practically tied themselves in knots try not to draw a fence we're not saying there's anything here but we think there's something there is how Boeing's chief engineer for airplane safety put it why are we so squeamish why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses Tendencies and predispositions so difficult to acknowledge we cannot pretend that each of us is a product simply of our own lives and experiences when we ignore culture planes crash back to the cockpit today weather radar has helped us a lot no pilot would say that now but this was 1997 before Korean Air took its power distance issues seriously the captain was tired and the engineer's true meaning sailed over his head yes the captains has in response they are very useful he isn't listening the plane is flying towards the VOR Beacon and the VOR is on a side of a mountain the weather hasn't broken so the pilots can't see anything the captain puts the landing gear down and extends the flaps at 141 and 48 seconds the captain says wiper on and the flight engineer turns them on it's raining now at 141 and 59 seconds the first officer asks not in sight he's looking for the runway he can't see it he's had a sinking feeling in his stomach for some time now one second later the ground proximity warning system calls out in its toneless electronic voice 500 feet the plane is 500 feet off the ground the ground in this case is the side of nematil but the crew is confused because they think that the ground means the runway and how can that be if they can't see the runway the flight engineer says eh in an astonished tone of voice you can imagine them all thinking furiously trying to square their Assumption of where the plane is with what their instruments are telling them at 142 and 19 seconds the first Officer says let's make a missed approach he is finally upgraded from a hint to a crew obligation he wants to abort the landing later in the crash investigation it was determined that if he had seized control of the plane in that moment there would have been enough time to pull up the nose and clear Nimitz Hill this is what first officers are trained to do when they believe a captain is clearly in the wrong but it is one thing to learn that in a classroom and quite another to actually do it in the air with someone who might wrap you the back of his hand if you make a mistake 142 and 20 seconds flight engineer not in sight finally With Disaster staring them in the face the first officer and the engineers speak up they want the captain to go around to pull up and start the landing over again but it's too late 142 and 21 seconds first officer not in sight missed approach 142 and 22 seconds flight engineer go around 142 and 23 seconds Captain go around 142 and 24 seconds ground proximity warning gpw 100 feet 142 at 24 seconds and 84 one hundredths gpw 50. tpw 40. tpw 30. tpw 20. 142 25 seconds and 78 100s sound of initial impact 142 28 seconds and 65 100s sound of tone 142 28 seconds and 91 100ths sound of groans 142 and 30 seconds and 54 one hundredths sound of tone end of recording chapter 8. rice paddies and math tests no one who can rise Before Dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich the gateway to the industrial Heartland of southern China runs up through the wide burdened swath of the Pearl River delta the land is covered by a thick smoggy Haze the freeways are crammed with tractor-trailers power lines crisscross the landscape factories making cameras computers watches and umbrellas and t-shirts stand cheek by jowl with densely packed blocks of apartment buildings and Fields of banana and mango trees sugar cane papaya and pineapple destined for the export Market a generation ago the skies would have been clear and a robe would have been a two-lane Highway and a generation before that all you would have seen would have been rice paddies two hours in at the headwaters the Pearl River lies the city of Guangzhou and pass Guangzhou remnants of the old China are easier to find the countryside becomes breathtakingly beautiful Rolling Hills dotted without croppings of limestone rock against the backdrop of the nandling mountains here and there are the traditional khaki-colored mud brick Huts of the Chinese peasantry in the small towns there are open-air markets chicken and geese in elaborate bamboo baskets vegetables laid out in rows on the ground slabs of pork on tables tobacco being sold in big clumps and everywhere there's rice miles upon miles of it in the winter season the patties are dry and dotted with the stubble of the previous year's crop after planting an early spring as the humid winds begin to blow they turn a magical green and by the time of the first harvest as the grains emerge on the ends of the rice shoots the land becomes an unending sea of yellow rice has been cultivated in China for thousands of years it was from China the techniques of rice cultivation spread throughout East Asia Japan Korea Singapore and Taiwan year in year out as far back as history is recorded Farmers from across Asia have engaged in the same Relentless intricate pattern of agriculture rice paddies are built not opened up in the way a wheat field is you don't just clear the trees under brush and stones and then plow rice fields are carved into mountainsides in an elaborate series of terraces or painstakingly constructed from Marshland and River Plains a rice Patty has to be irrigated so an elaborate series of dikes had to be built around the field channels must be dug from the nearest water source and Gates built into the dikes so the water flow can be adjusted precisely to cover the right amount of the plant the Patty itself meanwhile has to have a hard clay floor otherwise the water will simply seep into the ground but of course you can't plant rice seedlings in hard clay so on top of the clay there has to be a thick soft layer of mud and the clay pan as it's called has to be carefully engineered so that it will drain properly and also keep the plants submerged at the optimal level rice has to be fertilized repeatedly which is another art traditionally Farmers used night soil human manure and a combination of burned compost River mud bean cake and hemp used carefully because too much fertilizer or the right amount applied at the wrong time can be as bad as too little when the time came to plant a Chinese farmer would have hundreds of different varieties to choose from each of which offered a slightly different trade-off between yield and say how quickly it grew or how well it did in times of drought or how it fared in poor soils a farmer might plant a dozen or more different varieties at one time adjusting the mix from season to season in order to manage the risk of a crop failure he or she or more accurately the whole family since rice agriculture was a family affair would plant the seed in a specially prepared seed bed after a few weeks the seedlings will be transplanted into the field in carefully spaced rows six inches apart and then painstakingly nurtured weeding was done by hand diligently and unceasingly because the seedlings could easily be choked by other plant life sometimes each rice shoot would be individually groomed with a bamboo comb to clear away insects all the while Farmers had to check and recheck water levels and make sure the water didn't get too hot in the Summer sun and when the rice ripened Farmers gathered all of their friends and relatives and in one coordinated burst harvested it as quickly as possible so they could get the second crop in and harvest it before the winter dry season began breakfast in South China at least for those who could afford it is kanji white rice porridge with lettuce and days paste and bamboo shoots lunch is more kanji dinner is rice with toppings rice was what you sold at the market to buy the other necessities of life it was how wealth and Status were measured it dictated almost every working moment of every day rice is life says the Anthropologist Gonzalo Santos who has studied a traditional South Chinese village without rice you don't survive if you want to be anyone in this part of China you would have had to have rice it made the world go round take the following list of numbers four eight five three nine seven six spend 20 seconds memorizing that sequence before saying them out loud again if you speak English you have about a 50 chance of remembering that sequence perfectly if you're Chinese though you're almost certain to get it right every time why is that because as human beings we store digits in a memory Loop that runs for about two seconds we most easily memorize whatever we can say or read within that two seconds span and Chinese speakers get that list of numbers four eight five three nine seven six right every time because unlike in your speakers their language allows them to fit all those seven numbers into two seconds that example comes from Stanislaus dehana's book the number sense anastahana explains Chinese number words are remarkably brief most of them can be uttered in less than one quarter of a second for instance 4 is C and seven Ki their English equivalents 4 7 are longer pronouncing them takes about one third of a second the memory gap between English and Chinese apparently is entirely due to this difference in length in languages as diverse as Welsh Arabic Chinese English and Hebrew there is a reproducible correlation between the time required to pronounce numbers in a given language and the memory span of its speakers in this domain the prize for efficacy goes to the Cantonese dialect of Chinese whose brevity grants residents of Hong Kong are rocketing memory span of about 10 digits it turns out that there is also a big difference in how number naming systems in Western and Asian languages are constructed in English we say 14 16 17 18 and 19. so one might think that we would also say one teen two teen and three teen but we don't they make of a different form 11 12 13 and 15. similarly we have 40 and 60 which sound like what they are but we also say 50 and 30 and 20 which sort of sound what they are but not really and for that matter for numbers above 20 we put the decade first and the unit number second 2122 for the teens though we do it the other way around we put the decade second and the unit number first 14 17 18. the number system in English is highly irregular not so in China Japan and Korea they have a logical counting system 11 is 10 1 12 is 10 2 24 is 2 10 4 and so on that difference means that Asian children learn to count much faster than their American counterparts four-year-old Chinese children can count on average up to 40. American children at that age can only count to 15 and most don't reach 40 until they're 5. by the age of five in other words American children are already a year behind their Asian counterparts in the most fundamental of math skills the regularity of their number system also means that Asian children can perform basic functions like addition far more easily ask an English seven-year-old to add 37 plus 22 in her head and she has to convert the words to numbers 37 plus 22 only then can she do the math 2 plus 7 is 9 and 30 and 20 is 50 which makes 59. ask an Asian child to add 3 10 7 and 2 tens two and then the necessary equation is right there embedded in a sentence no number translation is necessary it's five tens nine the Asian system is transparent says Karen Fusion a Northwestern University psychologist who has done much of the research on Asian Western differences I think that it makes the whole attitude towards math different instead of being a rote learning thing there's a pattern I can figure out there's an expectation that I can do this there is an expectation that it's sensible for fractions we say three-fifths the Chinese is literally out of five parts take three that's telling you conceptually what a fraction is is differentiating the denominator and the numerator the much story disenchantment with mathematics among Western children starts in the third and fourth grade and fuson argues that perhaps a part of that disenchantment is due to the fact that math doesn't seem to make sense it's linguistic structure is Clumsy its basic rules seem arbitrary and complicated Asian children by contrast don't face nearly that same sense of bafflement they can hold more numbers in their head and do calculations faster and the way fractions are expressed in their language corresponds exactly to the way a fraction really is and maybe that makes them a little bit more likely to enjoy math and maybe because they enjoy math a little more they try a little harder and take more math classes and are more willing to do their homework and on and on in a kind of virtuous circle when it comes to math in other words Asians have a built-in Advantage but it's an unusual kind of advantage for years students from China South Korea and Japan and children of recent immigrants from those countries have substantially outperformed their Western counterparts at mathematics and the Assumption has always been that that must have something to do with some kind of innate Asian proclivity for math psychologist Richard Lynn has even gone so far as to propose an elaborate evolutionary theory involving the Himalayas really cold weather pre-modern hunting practices brain size and specialized vowel sounds to explain why he believes Asians have higher IQs that's how we think about math we assume that being good at things like calculus and algebra is a simple function of how smart you are but looking at the differences in number systems between East and West suggests something very different that being good at math may also be something rooted in a group's culture in the case of the Koreans one kind of deeply rooted Legacy stood in the way of the very modern task of flying an airplane here we have another kind of Legacy one that turns out to be perfectly suited for 21st century tasks cultural legacies matter and once you've seen the surprising effect of things like power distance and numbers that can be said in a quarter as opposed to a third of a second it's hard not to wonder how many other cultural legacies are there that have an impact on 21st century intellectual tasks what if coming from a culture shaped by the demands of growing rice also makes you better at math could the rice paddy make a difference in the classroom the most striking fact about a rice paddy which you never quite grasp until you actually stand in the middle of one is its size it's tiny a moo which roughly corresponds to the size of a typical rice paddy is 1 15 of a hectare that's about as big as a hotel room a typical Asian Rice Farm is two or three moo a village in China of 1500 people might support itself entirely with 450 acres of land which in the American Midwest would be the size of a typical family farm at that scale with families of five and six people living off a farm the size of two hotel rooms agriculture changes dramatically historically Western agriculture has been mechanically oriented in the west if a farmer wanted to become more efficient or increase his yield he introduced more and more sophisticated equipment which allowed him to replace human labor with mechanical labor threshing machine a hay baler a combine harvester a tractor he cleared another field and increased his acreage because now his Machinery allowed him to work more land with the same amount of effort but in Japan or China Farmers didn't have the money to buy equipment and in any case there certainly wasn't any extra land that could easily be converted into new fields so rice Farmers improved their yields by becoming smarter by becoming better managers of their own time and by making better choices as the Anthropologist Francesca Bray puts it rice agriculture is skill oriented if you're willing to weed a bit more diligently and become more Adept at fertilizing and spend a bit more time monitoring water levels and do a better job keeping the clay pan absolutely level and make use of every square inch of your move you'll Harvest a bigger crop throughout history not surprisingly the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer that last statement may seem a little odd because we have a sense that everyone in the pre-modern world worked really hard but that simply isn't true all of us for example are descended at some point from hunter-gatherers and many hunter-gatherers by all accounts had a pretty leisurely life the Cong Bushman of the Kalahari Desert in Botswana who are one of the last remaining practitioners of that way of life subsist in large part on the mangongo nut an incredibly plentiful and protein-rich source of food that lies thick on the ground they don't grow anything and it's growing things preparing planting weeding harvesting storing that takes time nor do they raise any animals occasionally the male Kong hunt but chiefly for sport all told Kong men and women work no more than 12 to 19 hours a week with a balance of the time spent dancing entertaining and visiting family and friends that's at most a thousand hours a year of work when a cone Bushman was asked once why his people hadn't taken to agriculture he looked puzzled and said why should we plant when there are so many mangongo nuts in the world or consider the life of a peasant in 18th century Europe men and women in those days probably worked from dawn to noon 200 days a year which works out to about 1200 hours of work annually during Harvest or spring planting the day might be longer in the winter much less in the discovery of France the historian Graham Rob writes that peasant life in a country like France even well into the 19th century was essentially brief episodes of work followed by long periods of idleness 99 of all human activity described in this and other accounts of French country life he writes took place between late spring and Early Autumn in the Pyrenees and the Alps entire Villages would essentially hibernate from the time of the first snow in November until March or April in more temperate regions of France where temperatures in the winter rarely fell below freezing the same pattern held Rob continues the fields of Flanders were deserted for much of the year an official report on the nieve in 1844 described the strange mutation of The Burgundian day laborer once the Harvest was in and the vine stocks had been burned after making the necessary repairs to their tools these vigorous men will now spend their days in bed packing their bodies tightly together in order to stay warm and eat less food they weaken themselves deliberately human hibernation was a physical and economic necessity lowering the metabolic rate prevented hunger from exhausting supplies people trudged and dawdled even in summer After the revolution in Alsace and the particle a officials complained that wine Growers and independent Farmers instead of undertaking some peaceful and sedentary industry in the quieter season abandoned themselves to dumb idleness if you were a peasant farmer in southern China by contrast you didn't sleep through the winter in the short break marked by the dry season from November through February you busied yourself with side tasks you made bamboo baskets or hats and sold them in the market he repaired the dikes in your rice paddy and rebuilt your mud hut you sent one of your sons to work in a nearby Village for a relative you made tofu and dried bean curd and caught snakes iridelicacy and trapped insects at a time the Turning of the spring came you were back in the fields at dawn working in a rice field is 10 to 20 times more labor-intensive than working on an equivalently sized corn or wheat field some estimates put the annual workload of a wet rice farmer in Asia at 3 000 hours a year think for a moment about what the life of a rice Farmer in the Pearl River delta must have been like 3 000 hours a year is a staggering amount of time to spend working particularly if many of those hours involve being bent over in the hot sun planting and weeding in a rice paddy what redeemed the life of a rice farmer however was the nature of that work it was a lot like the Garment work done by the Jewish immigrants to New York it was meaningful first of all there is a clear relationship in rice farming between effort and reward the harder you work a rice field the more it yields second it's complex the rice farmer isn't simply planting in the spring and harvesting in the fall he or she is effectively a small businessman juggling a family Workforce hedging uncertainty through seed selection building and managing a sophisticated irrigation system coordinating the complex process of harvesting the first crop well simultaneously preparing the second crop and most of all it's autonomous The Peasants of Europe worked essentially as low-paid slaves of an aristocratic landlord with little control over their own destinies but China and Japan never developed that kind of oppressive feudal system because feudalism simply can't work in a rice economy growing rice is too complicated and intricate for a system that requires Farmers to be coerced and bullied into going under the fields each morning by the 14th and 15th centuries landlords in Central and Southern China had an almost completely hands-off relationship with their tenants they would collect a fixed rent and let Farmers go about their business the thing about wet rice farming is not only that you need phenomenal amounts of labor but it's very exacting says the historian Kenneth pomeritz you have to care it really matters that the field is perfectly leveled before you flood it getting it close to level but not quite right makes a big difference in terms of your yield it really matters the water is in the fields for just the right amount of time there's a big difference between lining up the seedlings at exactly the right distance and doing it sloppily it's not like you put the corn in the ground in mid-march and as long as the rain comes by the end of the month you're okay you're controlling all the inputs in a very direct way and when you have something that requires that much care the overlord has to have a system that gives the actual laborer some set an incentives where if the Harvest comes out well the farmer gets a bigger share that's why you get fixed rents where the landlord says I get 20 bushels regardless of the Harvest and if it's really good you get the extra it's a crop that doesn't do very well with something like slavery or wage labor it would just be too easy to leave the gate that controls the irrigation water open a few seconds too long and there goes your field the historian David arkash once compared Russian and Chinese peasant Proverbs and the differences are striking if God does not bring it the Earth will not give it is a typical Russian proverb that's the kind of fatalism and pessimism typical of a repressive feudal system where peasants had no reason to believe in the efficacy of their own work on the other hand arkash writes Chinese Proverbs are striking in their belief that hard work shrewd planning and self-reliance or cooperation with a small group will in time bring recompense here are some of the things that Penny this peasants would say to one another as they worked three thousand hours a year in the baking heat and humidity of Chinese rice paddies which by the way are filled with leeches no food without blood and sweat farmers are busy farmers are busy if Farmers weren't busy where would grain to get through the winter come from in the winter the lazy man freezes to death don't depend on having for food but on your own two hands carrying the load useless to ask about the crops it all depends on hard work and fertilizer if a man works hard the land will not be lazy and then most telling of all no one who can rise Before Dawn 360 days fails to make his family rich rise Before Dawn 360 days a year for the Kong leisurely Gathering mangongo nuts or the French peasant sleeping away the winter or anyone else living in something other than the world of rice cultivation that proverb would be unthinkable this is not of course an unfamiliar observation about Asian culture go to a college campus and students will say that the Asian students are overwhelmingly the ones selling at the library long after everyone else has left some people of Asian background understandably get offended when people talk about their culture this way because they sense that the stereotype is being used as a form of disparagement but a belief in work is in fact a thing of beauty virtually every success story we've seen in this book so far involves someone or some group working harder than their peers Bill Gates was addicted to his work screen as a child so was Bill Joy The Beatles put in thousands of hours of practice in Hamburg Joe Flom ground away for years perfect in the art of takeovers before he got his chance working really hard is what successful people do and the genius of the culture formed in the rice paddies is that hard work gave those in the fields a way to find meaning in the midst of great hardship and poverty that lesson has served Asians well in many Endeavors but rarely so perfectly as in the case of mathematics a few years ago Alan schoenfeld a math professor at Berkeley made a videotape of a woman named Renee as she was trying to solve a math problem Renee was in her mid-20s with long black hair and round glasses in a tape she's playing with a software program designed to teach algebra on the screen is an X and A y-axis the program asks you to punch in a set of coordinates and then it draws a line for you on the screen at this point I'm sure some vague memory of your middle school algebra is coming back to you but rest assured you don't need to remember any of it to understand the significance of Renee's example in fact as you listen to Renee talking don't focus on what she's saying but rather on why and how she's talking the way she is the point of the computer program which schoenfeld had created was to teach students about how to calculate the slope of a line slope as I'm sure you remember or more accurately as I'll bet you don't remember I certainly didn't is Rise overrun so if you typed in 5 on the y-axis and 5 on the x-axis the slope would be 1 5 over 5. so there is Renee she's sitting at the keyboard and she's trying to figure out what numbers to enter in order to get the computer to draw a line that is absolutely vertical that is directly superimposed over the y-axis now those of you who remember your high school math will know that this is in fact impossible a vertical line has an undefined slope its rise is infinite any number on the y-axis starting at zero and going on forever it's run on the x-axis meanwhile is zero Infinity divided by zero is not a number but Renee doesn't realize that what she's trying to do can't be done she is rather in the grip of what schoenfeld calls a glorious misconception and the reason why seanfield likes to show this particular tape is that it is a perfect demonstration of how Renee came to resolve this misconception Renee was a nurse she wasn't someone who had been particularly interested in mathematics in the past but she had somehow gotten hold of the software and was hooked now what I want to do is make a straight line with this formula parallel to the y-axis she begins schoenfeld is sitting next to her she looks over at him anxiously it's been five years since I did any of this she starts to fiddle with the program typing in different numbers now if I change the slope that way minus one now what I mean to do is make the line go straight As She types in numbers the line on the screen changes oops that's not going to do it she looks puzzled what are you trying to do schoenfeld asks what I'm trying to do is make a straight line parallel to the y-axis what do I need to do here I think what I need to do is change this a little bit she points at the place where the number for the y-axis is that was something I discovered that when you go from one to two there was a rather big change but now if you get away up there you have to keep changing this is Renee's glorious misconception she's noticed the higher she makes the y-axis coordinate the steeper the line gets so she thinks the key to making a vertical line is just making the y-axis coordinate large enough I guess 12 or even 13 could do it maybe even as much as 15 she says she frowns she and Sean Paul go back and forth she asks him questions he prods her gently in the right direction she keeps trying and trying one approach after another one point she types in 20. the line gets a little steeper she types in 40. the line gets steeper still I see that there is a relationship there but as to why it doesn't seem to make sense to me what if I do 80. if 40 gets me halfway then then Eddie should get me all the way to the y-axis so let's just see what happens she types in 80. the line is steeper still but it's not totally vertical ooh it's Infinity isn't it it's never going to get there Renee is close but then she reverts to her original misconception so what do I need a hundred every time you double the number you get halfway to the y-axis but it never gets there she types in a hundred it's closer but not quite there yet she starts to think out loud it's obvious she's on the verge of figuring something out well I knew this though but I knew that for each one up it goes that many over I'm still somewhat confused as to why she pauses squinting at the screen I'm getting confused is a tenth of the way to the one but I don't want it to be and then she sees it oh it's any number up and zero over it's any number divided by zero her face lights up a vertical line is anything divided by zero and that's an undefined number oh okay now I see the slope of a vertical line is undefined ah that means something now I won't forget that over the course of his career schoenfeld has videotaped countless students as they worked on math problems but the RNA tape is one of his favorites because of how beautifully it illustrates what he considers to be the secret to learning mathematics 22 minutes pass from the moment Renee begins playing with the computer to the moment she says Ah that means something now that's a long time this is 8th grade mathematics schoenfeld said if I put the average 8th grader in the same position as Renee I'm guessing that after the first few attempts they would have said I don't get it I need you to explain it schoenfeld once asked a group of high school students how long they would work on a homework question before they concluded it was too hard for them ever to solve their answers ranged from 30 seconds to 5 minutes with the average answer two minutes but Renee persists she experiments she goes back over the same issues time and time again she thinks out loud she keeps going and going she simply won't give up she knows on some vague level that there is something wrong with her theory about how to draw a vertical line and she won't stop until she's absolutely sure she has it right Renee wasn't a math natural abstract Concepts like slope and undefined clearly didn't come easily to her but schoenfeld could not have found her more impressive there's a will to make sense that drives what she does schoenfeld says she wouldn't accept a superficial yeah you're right and walk away that's not who she is and that's really unusual he rewounded the tape and pointed to a moment when Renee reacted with genuine surprise to something on the screen look he said she does a double take many students would just let that fly by instead she thought that doesn't jibe with whatever I'm thinking I don't get it that's important I want an explanation and when she finally gets the explanation she says yeah that fits at Berkeley schoenfeld teaches a course on problem solving the entire point of which he says is to get his students to unlearn the mathematical habits they picked up on the way to University I pick a problem that I don't know how to solve he says I tell my students you're going to have a two-week take-home exam I know your habits you're going to do nothing for the first week and start it the next week and I want to warn you now if you only spend one week on this you're not going to solve it if on the other hand you start working the day I give you the midterm you'll be frustrated you'll come to me and say it's impossible I'll tell you to keep working and by week two you'll find you'll make significant progress we sometimes think of being good at mathematics as an innate ability you either have it or you don't but to schoenfeld is not so much ability as attitude you master mathematics if you are willing to try that's what schoenfeld attempts to teach his students success is a function of persistence and doggedness and the willingness to work hard for 22 minutes to make sense of something that most people would give up on after 30 seconds put a bunch of renays in a classroom and give them the space and time to explore mathematics for themselves and you could go a long way or imagine a country where Renee's doggedness is not the exception but a cultural trait embedded as deeply as the culture of Honor in the Cumberland plateau now that would be a country good at math every four years an international group of Educators administers a comprehensive mathematics and science test to Elementary and Junior High School students around the world called the Tims the same test we discussed earlier when looking at differences between fourth graders born near the beginning of a school cut-off date and those born near the end of the date and the point of the Tims is to allow us to compare the educational achievement of one country with another when students sit down to take the Thames exam they also have to fill out a questionnaire it asks them all kinds of things such as what their parents level of education is or what their views about math are or what their friends are like it's not a trivial exercise it's about 120 questions long in fact it is so tedious and demanding that many students leave as many as 10 or 20 Questions blank now here's the interesting part as it turns out the average number of items answered on the Tim's questionnaire varies from country to Country it is possible in fact to rank all the participating countries according to how many items their students answer on the questionnaire now what do you think happens if you compare the questionnaire rankings with the math rankings they're almost exactly the same in other words countries whose students are willing to concentrate and sit still long enough and focus on answering every single question in an endless questionnaire are the same countries whose students do the best job of solving math problems the person who discovered this fact is an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania named erlingbo and he stumbled across it by accident it came out of the blue he says Beau hasn't even been able to publish his findings in a scientific journal because he says it's just a bit too weird remember he's not saying that the ability to finish the questionnaire and to Excel on the math test is related he's saying that they're the same that if you compare the two rankings they are identical think about this another way imagine that every year there was a math Olympics in some fabulous city in the world and every country in the world sent its own team of one thousand eighth graders Bo's point is that we could predict precisely the order in which every country would finish in the math Olympics without asking a single math question all you'd have to do is to give them some task measuring how hard they were willing to work in fact we wouldn't even have to give them a task we should be able to predict which countries are best at math simply by looking at which national cultures place the highest emphasis on effort and hard work so which places are at the top of both lists the answer shouldn't surprise you Singapore South Korea China Taiwan Hong Kong and Japan what those five have in common of course is that they are all cultures shaped by the tradition of wet rice Agriculture and meaningful work they are the kinds of places where for hundreds of years pennimus peasants slaving away in the rice paddies three thousand hours a year would say things to each other like no one who can rise Before Dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich chapter 9 Marita's bargain all my friends are from Kip in the mid-1990s an experimental public school called the Kipp Academy opened on the fourth floor of Lou Gehrig Junior High School in New York City Lou Gehrig is in a seventh School District otherwise known as the South Bronx one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York City it's a squat gray 1960s era building across the street from a bleak collection of high-rises a few blocks over is Grand Concourse the borough's main thoroughfare these are not streets that should happily walk down alone after Dark Kip is a middle school classes are large the fifth grade has two sections of 35 students each there are no entrance exams or admissions requirements students are chosen by Lottery with any fourth grader living in the Bronx eligible to apply roughly half of the students are African-American the rest Hispanic three-quarters of the students come from single parent homes ninety percent qualify for free or reduced lunch which is to say that their families earn so little that the federal government chips in so they can eat properly at lunchtime hip seems like the kind of school in the kind of neighborhood with the kind of student that would make Educators despair except that the minute you walk through the door it's clear that something is different the students walk quietly down the hallways in single file in the classroom they are taught to turn and address anyone talking to them in a protocol known as the slant smile sit up listen ask questions and Nod when being spoken to and track with your eyes on the walls of the school's corridors are hundreds of penance from the colleges that kipped graduates have gone on to attend last year hundreds of families from across the Bronx entered the lottery for Kips 48 fifth grade slots it is no exaggeration to say that just over 10 years into its existence Kip has become one of the most desirable public schools in New York City what Kip is most famous for is mathematics in the South Bronx only something like 16 of all middle school students are performing at or above their grade level in math but at Kip are the end of the fifth grade many of the students call Matt their favorite subject in seventh grade hip students start high school algebra by the end of eighth grade 84 percent of the students are performing at or above their grade level which is to say that this Motley group of randomly chosen lower-income kids from dingy apartments in one of the country's worst neighborhoods whose parents in an overwhelming number of cases have never set foot in a college do as well in mathematics as the privileged eighth graders of America's wealthy suburbs our kids reading is on point said David Levin who founded Kip with a fellow teacher Michael Feinberg in 1994. they struggle a little bit with their writing skills but when they leave here they Rock in math there are now more than 50 Kip schools across the United States with more on the way the KIPP program represents one of the most promising new educational philosophies in the United States but its success is best understood not in terms of its curriculum its teachers its resources or some kind of institutional innovation it is rather an organization that is succeeded by taking the idea of cultural legacies seriously in the early 19th century a group of reformers set out to establish a system of public education in the United States would pass for public school at the time was a haphazard assortment of locally run one-room schoolhouses and overcrowded Urban classrooms scattered around the country in rural areas schools closed in the spring and fall and ran all summer long so the children could help out in the busy planting and harvesting seasons in the city many schools mirrored the long and chaotic schedules of a children's working-class parents the reformers wanted to make sure that all children went to school and the public school was comprehensive meaning that all children got enough schooling to learn how to read and write and do basic arithmetic and function as productive citizens but as the historian Kenneth gold has pointed out the Early Educational reformers were also tremendously concerned that children not get too much schooling in 1871 for example the United States Commissioner of Education published a report by Edward Jarvis on the relation of Education to insanity Jarvis has studied 1741 cases of insanity and concluded that overstudy was responsible for 205 of them education lays the foundation of a large portion of the causes of mental disorder Jarvis wrote similarly the pioneer of public education in Massachusetts Horace Mann believed that working students too hard would create a most pernicious influence upon character and habits not infrequently is Health itself destroyed by overstimulating the mind in the education journals of the day they were constant worries about over taxing students or blunting their natural abilities through too much schoolwork the reformers gold writes strove for ways to reduce time spent studying because long periods of respite could save the Mind from injury hence the elimination of Saturday classes the shortening of the school day and the lengthening of vacation all of which occurred over the course of the 19th century teachers were cautioned that when students are required to study their bodies should not be exhausted by long confinement nor their minds bewildered by prolonged application rest also presented particular opportunities for strengthening cognitive and analytical skills as one contributor to the Massachusetts teacher suggested it is when thus relieved from the state of tension belonging to actual study at boys and girls as well as men and women acquire the habit of thought and reflection and of forming their own conclusions independently of what they are taught and the authority of others this idea that effort must be balanced by rest could not be more different from Asian Notions about study and work of course but then again the Asian worldview was shaped by the rice paddy in the Pearl River delta the rice farmer planted two and sometimes three crops a year the land was fallow only briefly in fact one of the singular features of rice cultivation is that because of the nutrients carried by the water used in irrigation the more a plot of land is cultivated the more fertile it gets but in Western agriculture the opposite is true unless a field is left fallow every few years the soil becomes exhausted every winter fields are empty the hard labor of spring planting and fall harvesting is followed Like Clockwork by the slower pace of summer and winter this is the logic the reformers applied to the cultivation of young minds we formulate new ideas by analogy working from what we know towards what we don't and what the reformers knew were the rhythms of the Agricultural seasons a mind must be cultivated but not too much lest it be exhausted and what was the remedy for the dangers of exhaustion the long summer vacation A peculiar and distinctive American Legacy that has had profound consequences for the learning patterns of the students of the present day summer vacation is a topic seldom mentioned in American educational debates it is considered a permanent and inviolent feature of school life like high school football or the senior prom but let's consider a set of elementary school test score results and see if our faith in the value of long summer holidays isn't profoundly shaken these test scores come from research led by the Johns Hopkins University sociologist Carl Alexander Alexander tracked the progress of 650 first graders from the Baltimore Public School System looking at how they scored on a widely used math and reading skills exam called the California achievement test the scores we're going to consider are for the first five years of Elementary School broken down by socioeconomic class lower middle and high if you look at the test score results what you find is that the students from all three socioeconomic classes start in first grade with meaningful but not overwhelming differences in their knowledge and ability the first graders from the wealthiest homes have a 32 point advantage over the first graders from the poorest homes and by the way first graders from poor homes in Baltimore are really poor but by fifth grade four years later that initially modest gap between the rich and the poor has more than doubled this achievement Gap is a phenomenon that has been observed over and over again and it provokes one of two responses the first response is that disadvantaged kids simply don't have the same inherent ability to learn as children from more privileged backgrounds they're not as smart the second slightly more optimistic conclusion is that in some way our schools are failing poor children we simply aren't doing a good enough job of teaching them the skills they need but here's where Alexander's study gets interesting because it turns out that neither of those explanations ring true the city of Baltimore didn't just give its kids the California achievement test at the end of every school year in June it gave them a test in September too just after summer vacation ended what Alexander realized is that the second set of test results allowed him to do a slightly different analysis if he looked at the difference between the score A student got at the beginning of the school year in September and a score he or she got the following June he could measure precisely how much that student learned over the school year and if he looked at the difference between how a student scored in June and how they scored the following September he could see how much the student learned over the course of the summer in other words he could figure out at least in part how much of the achievement Gap is the result of things that happened during the school year and how much it has to do with what happens during summer vacation let's start with the school year games that is how many points students test scores rise from the time they start classes in September to the time they stop in June these results tell a completely different story from the one suggested by the full year results the first set of test results made it look like lower income kids Were Somehow failing in the classroom but when you just look at the school year you see that that isn't true over the course of five years of Elementary School poor kids actually out learn the wealthiest kids 191 points to 186 points they lag behind the middle class kids by only a modest amount and in fact in one year second grade they learn more than anyone else now let's see what happens if we just look at how reading scores change during summer vacation here again is a totally different story in the summer after first grade the wealthiest kids come back in September and their reading scores have jumped more than 15 points the poorest kids come back from the holidays and their reading scores have dropped by almost four points poor kids May out learn rich kids during the school year but during the summer they fall far behind now suppose we total up all the summer learning gains from first grade to fifth grade the reading scores of the poor kids over those four Summers go up by .26 points when it comes to reading skills poor kids in other words learn nothing when school is not in session the reading scores of the rich kids over the summer holidays by contrast go up by a whopping 52 points virtually all of the advantage that wealthy students have over poor students is the result of the differences in the way privileged kids learn when they are not in school what are we seeing here one very real possibility is that these are the educational consequences of the differences in parenting styles that we talked about in the Chris Langan chapter think back to Alex Williams the nine-year-old whom Annette laroe studied his parents believe in concerted cultivation he gets taken to museums and gets enrolled in special programs and goes to summer camp where he takes classes when he's bored at home there are plenty of books to read and his parents see it as their responsibility to keep him actively engaged in the world around him it's not hard to see how Alex would get better at reading in math over the summer but not Katie brindle a little girl from the other side of the tracks there is no money to send her to summer camp she's not getting driven by her mom to special classes and there aren't books lying around the house that she can read if she gets bored there's probably just a television she may still have a wonderful vacation making new friends playing outside going to the movies having the kind of Carefree summer days that we all dream about none of those things though will improve her math and reading skills and every Carefree summer day she spends puts her further and further behind Alex Alex isn't necessarily smarter than Katie he's just out learning her he's putting in a few solid months of learning during the summer months while she watches television and plays outside what Alexander's work suggests is it the way in which education has been discussed in the United States is backwards an enormous amount of time is spent talking about reducing class size rewriting curricula buying every student a shy new laptop and increasing school funding all of which assume that there is something fundamentally wrong with the job schools are doing but think back to that second set of Statistics that showed what happened between September and June schools work the only problem with school for the kids who aren't achieving is that there isn't enough of it Alexander in fact has done a very simple calculation to demonstrate what would happen if the children of Baltimore went to school year round the answer is that poor kids and Wealthy kids would by the end of elementary school be doing math and reading at almost the same level suddenly the causes of Asian math superiority become even more obvious students in Asian schools don't have long summer vacations why would they cultures that believe that the route to success lies in Rising Before Dawn 360 days a year are scarcely going to give their children three straight months off in the summer the school year in the United States is on average about 180 days long the South Korean school year is 220 days long the Japanese school year is 243 days long one of the questions asked of test takers on a recent math test given to students around the world for example was how many of the questions they were asked in algebra calculus and geometry involved subject matter that they had previously covered in class for Japanese 12th graders the answer was 92 percent that's the value of going to school 243 days a year you have the time to learn everything that needs to be learned and less time to unlearn it for American 12th graders the comparable figure was 54 percent for its poorest students America doesn't have a school problem it has a summer vacation problem and that's the problem the KIPP Schools set out to solve they decided to bring the lessons of the rice paddy to the American Inner City they start school at 7 25. David Levin says of the students at the bronxkip Academy they all do a course called thinking skills until 7 55. they do 90 minutes of English 90 minutes of math every day except in fifth grade where they do two hours of math a day an hour of science an hour of social science an Arab Music at least twice a week and then you have an hour and 15 minutes of Orchestra on top of that everyone does Orchestra the day goes from 7 25 until 5. after five there are homework clubs detention sports teams there are kids here from 7 25 until 7 PM in the evening if you take an average day and you take out lunch in recess our kids are spending 50 to 60 percent more time learning than the traditional public school student Nevin was standing in the school's main hallway it was lunchtime and the students were trooping by quietly in orderly lines all of them in their Kip Academy shirts Levin stopped a girl whose Shark Tale was out do me a favor when you get a chance he called out miming a tucking in movement he continued Saturdays they come in nine to one in the summer it's eight to two by summer Levin was referring to the fact that KIPP students do three extra weeks of school in July these are after all precise to the kinds of low-income kids who Alexander identified as losing ground over the long summer vacation so Kip's response is simply not to have a long summer vacation the beginning is hard he went on by the end of the day they're Restless part of it is endurance part of it is motivation part of it is incentives and rewards and Fun Stuff part of it is good old-fashioned discipline you throw all of that into the stew we talk a lot here about grit and self-control the kids know what those words mean Levin walked down the hall to an eighth grade math class and stood quietly in the back a student named Aaron was at the front of the class working his way through a problem from the page of thinking skills exercises that all KIPP students are required to do each morning the teacher a ponytailed man in his 30s named Frank Corcoran sat in a chair to the side only occasionally jumping in to guide the discussion it was the kind of scene repeated every day in American classrooms with one difference Aaron was up at the front working on that single problem for 20 minutes methodically carefully with the participation of the class working his way through not just the answer but also the question of whether there was more than one way to get the answer it was Renee Payne's takingly figuring out the concept of undefined slope all over again what that extra time does is allow for a more relaxed atmosphere Corcoran said after the class was over I find that the problem with math education is a sink or swim approach everything is rapid fire and the kids who get a first are the ones who are rewarded so there comes to be a feeling that there are people who can do math and there are people who aren't math people I think that extended amount of time gives you the chance as a teacher to explain things and more time for the kids to sit and digest everything that's going on to review to do things at a much slower pace it seems counterintuitive but we do things at a slower pace and as a result we get through a lot more there's a lot more retention better understanding of the material it lets me be a bit more relaxed we have time to have games kids can ask any questions they want and if I'm explaining something I don't feel pressed for time I can go back over material and not feel time pressure the extra time gave Corcoran the chance to make mathematics meaningful to let his students see the clear relationship between effort and reward on the walls of the classroom were dozens of certificates from the New York State Regents exam testifying to first-class honors for Corcoran students we had a girl in this class Corcoran said she was a horrible math student in fifth grade she cried every Saturday when we did remedial stuff huge tears and tears at the memory Corcoran got a little emotional himself he looked down she just emailed us a couple weeks ago she's in college now she's an accounting major the story of the miracle school that transforms losers into winners is of course all too familiar it's the stuff of inspirational books and sentimental Hollywood movies but the reality of places like Kip is a good deal less glamorous than that to get a sense of what 50 to 60 percent more learning time means listen to the typical day in the life of a kip student the student's name is Marita she's an only child in a single parent home her mother never went to college the two of them share a one-bedroom apartment in the Bronx Merida used to go to a parochial school down the street from her home until her mother heard of Kip when I was in fourth grade me and one of my other friends Tanya we both applied to Kip Marita said I remember Miss Owens She interviewed me and the way she was saying made it sound so hard I thought I was going to prison I almost started crying and she was like if you don't want to sign this you don't have to my mom was right there so I signed it with that her life changed keep in mind while listening to what follows that Marita is 12 years old I wake up at 5 45 AM to get a head start she says I brush my teeth shower I get some breakfast at school if I'm running late usually get yelled at because I'm taking too long I meet my friends Diana and Steven at the bus stop and we get the number one bus a 5 45 wake up is fairly typical of KIPP students especially given the long bus and Subway commutes that many have to get to school 11 at one point went into a seventh grade music class with 70 kids in it and asked for a show of hands on when the students woke up a handful said they woke up after six three quarters said they woke up before six and almost half said they woke up before 5 30. one class made of burritas a boy named Jose said he sometimes wakes up at 3 or 4 AM finishes his homework from the night before and then goes back to sleep for a bit Merida went on I leave school at 5 pm and if I don't lollygag around then I'll be home around 5 30. then I say hi to my mom really quickly and start my homework and if it's not a lot of homework that day it will take me two to three hours and I'll be done around 9 00 pm or if we have essays then I'll be done like at 10 or 10 30. sometimes my mom makes me break for dinner I tell her I want to go straight through but she says I have to eat so around eight she makes you break for dinner for like a half hour and then I get back to work then usually after that my mom wants to hear about school but I have to make it quick because I have to get in bed by 11. so I get all my stuff ready and then I get into bed I tell her about the day and what happened and by the time we are finished she's on the brink of sleeping so that's probably around 11 15. then I go to sleep and the next morning we do it all over again we're in the same room but it's a huge bedroom and you can split it in two we have beds on either side me and my mom are very close she spoke in the matter-of-fact way of children who have no way of knowing how unusual this situation is she had the hours of a lawyer trying to make partner or a medical resident all that was missing was dark circles under her eyes and a steaming cup of coffee except that she was too young for either sometimes I don't go to sleep but I'm supposed to Merida continued I go to sleep at like 12 and the next afternoon it will hit me and I will doze off in class but then I have to wake up because I have to get the information I remember I was in one class and I was dozing off and the teacher saw me and said can I talk to you after class and he asked me why were you dozing off and I told him I went to sleep late and he was like you need to get to sleep earlier this is not the life of a typical 12 year old nor is it what we would necessarily wish for a 12 year old children we like to believe should have time to play and dream and sleep Marita has responsibilities she's being asked to make the same kind of hard choice but the Korean Pilots had to make to become a success at what they did they had to shed some part of their own identity because a deep respect for authority that runs throughout Korean culture simply does not work in the cockpit Marita has had to do the same because the cultural Legacy she has been given does not match her circumstances either not when middle and upper middle class families are using weekends and summer vacations to push their children ahead her community does not give her what she needs and what does she have to do to give up her evenings and weekends and friends all the elements of her old world for Kip here is Merida again in a passage that is little short of heartbreaking when we first started fifth grade I used to have contact with one of the girls from my old school and whenever I left school on Friday I would go to her house and stay there until my mom would get home from work so I'd be at her house and I'd be doing my homework she would never have any homework and she would say oh my God you stay there late then she said she wanted to go to kip but then she would say the kip is too hard and she didn't want to do it and I would say everyone says that Kip is hard but once you get the hang of it it's not really that hard she told me it's because you're smart and I said no every one of us is smart and she was so discouraged because we stayed until five and we had a lot of homework and I told her that us having a lot of homework helps us do better in class and she told me she didn't want to hear the whole speech all my friends are now from Kip but think of things from Marita's perspective she has made a bargain with her school she will get up at 5 45 in the morning go in on a Saturday and do homework until 11 at night in return Kip promises it will take kids like her who are stuck in poverty and give them a chance to get out it will get 84 of them up to or above their grade level in mathematics on the strength of that performance ninety percent of KIPP students get scholarships to private or parochial high schools instead of having to attend their own desultory high schools in the Bronx and on the strength of that High School experience more than 80 percent of KIPP graduates are now going on to college in many cases being the first in their family to do so how could that be a bad bargain everything we have learned in outliers says that success follows a predictable course it's not the brightest to succeed if it were Chris Langan will be up there with Einstein Nora's success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf it is rather a gift the successful are those who have been given opportunities and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them for hockey and soccer players born in January it's a better shot at making the All-Star team for the Beatles it was Hamburg for Bill Gates the lucky break was being born at the right time and getting the gift of a computer terminal in junior high Joe Flom and the founders of walked out Lipton Rosen and Katz got multiple breaks they were born at the right time with the right parents and the right ethnicity which allowed them to practice takeover law for 20 years before the rest of the legal World caught on and what Korean Air did when it finally turned its operations around was to give its Pilots the opportunity to escape the constraints of their cultural Legacy the lesson here is very simple but it is striking how often it is overlooked the myth of the best and the brightest and the self-made man suggests that in order to bring out the most inhuman potential we need only identify those whose promise and our work is done we look at Bill Gates and say in a spirit of self-congratulation our world allowed that 13 year old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur but that's the wrong lesson our world allowed only one 13 year old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. if a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity how many more microsofts would we have today when we misunderstand or ignore the real lessons of success we squander Talent if Canada had a second hockey league for those children born in the last half of the year it would have twice as many Adult Hockey Stars now multiply that lost potential to every field and profession the world we could have is so much richer than the world we have settled for Marita doesn't need a brand new school with Acres of playing fields and gleaming facilities she doesn't need a laptop a smaller class a teacher with a PhD or a bigger apartment she doesn't need a higher IQ or a mind as quick as Chris langans all those things would be nice of course but they missed the point Marita just needs a chance because people in her world rarely even get one chance at true success and look at the chance she was given someone brought a little bit of the rice paddy to the South Bronx and explained to her the miracle of meaningful work epilogue a Jamaican story if a progeny of young colored children is brought forth these are emancipated on September 9th 1931 a young woman named Daisy Nation gave birth to twin girls she and her husband Donald were School teachers in a tiny village called harrowood in a central Jamaican Parish of Saint Catharines they named their daughters faith and Joyce When Donald was told that he had fathered twins he sank down on his knees and gave responsibility for their lives over to God the Nations lived in a small cottage on the grounds of harewood's Anglican Church the schoolhouse was next door a long single roomed barn of a building raised on concrete stilts on some days there might be as many as 300 children in the room and on others less than two dozen the children would read out loud or recite their times tables writing was done on slates whenever possible the classes would move outside under the mango trees when things got out of control Donald Nation would walk from one end of the room to the other waving a strap from left to right as a children's scrambled back to their places he was an imposing man quiet and dignified and a great lover of books in his small Library were works of poetry and philosophy and novels by such writers as Somerset mom every day he would read the newspaper closely following the course of the events around the world in the evening his best friend archdiken hay the Anglican Pastor who lived on the other side of the Hill would come over and sit on Donald's Miranda and together they would expound on the problems of Jamaica Donald's wife Daisy was from the parishes in Elizabeth her maiden name was Ford and her father had owned a small grocery store she was one of three sisters and she was renowned for her beauty at the age of 11 the Twins won scholarships to a boarding school near the North Coast called Saint Hilda's he was an old Anglican private school established for the daughters of English clergy property owners and overseers from Saint Hilda's they applied and were accepted to University College in London not long afterwards Joyce went to a 21st birthday party for young English mathematician named Graham he stood up to recite a poem and forgot his lines and Joyce became embarrassed for him even though it made no sense for her to feel embarrassed because she did not know him at all Joyce and Graham fell in love and got married they moved to Canada Graham was a math professor Joyce became a successful writer and family therapist they had three sons and built a beautiful house on a hill off in the countryside Graham's last name is Gladwell he is my father and Joyce Scrabble is my mother that is the story of my mother's path to success and it isn't true it's not a lie in the sense that the facts are made up but it is false in the way that telling the story of Bill Gates without mentioning the computer at Lakeside is false or accounting for Asian math prowess without going back to the rice paddies is false it leaves out my mother's many opportunities and the importance of her cultural Legacy in 1935 for example when my mother and her sister were four a historian named William M McMillan came to visit Jamaica he was a professor at the University of edwardasrand in Johannesburg South Africa MacMillan was a man before his time he was deeply concerned with the social problems of South Africa's black population and he came to the Caribbean to make the same argument he had made back home in South Africa Chief among McMillan's concerns was Jamaica's educational system formal schooling if you could call what went on in the wooden Barn next door to my grandparents house formal schooling went only to 14 years of age Jamaica had no public high schools or universities those with academic inclinations took extra classes with the head teacher in their teenage years and with luck made it into a teacher's college those with broader Ambitions had to somehow find their way into a private school and from there to a university in the United States or England but scholarships were few and far between and the cost of private schooling prohibitive for all but a privileged few the bridge from the primary schools to high school McMillan later wrote in a blistering critique of England's treatment of its colonies entitled warning from the West Indies is narrow and insecure the school system did nothing for the humblest classes he went on if anything these schools are a factor deepening and sharpening social distinctions if the government did not give its people opportunities he warned there would be trouble a year after MacMillan published his book a wave of riots and unrest swept the Caribbean 14 people were killed and 59 injured in Trinidad 14 were killed and 47 injured in Barbados in Jamaica a series of violent strikes shut down the country and a state of emergency was declared panicked the British government took macmillan's prescriptions to heart and among other reforms proposed a series of all Island scholarships for academically minded students to go to private high schools the scholarships began in 1941. my mother and her twin sister sat for the exam the following year that is how they got a high school education had they been born two or three or four years earlier they might never have gotten a full education my mother owes the course her life took to the timing of her birth to the writers of 1937 and to William M McMillan I described Daisy Nation my grandmother as renowned for her beauty but the truth is that was a careless and condescending way to describe her she was a force the fact that my mother and her sister left Harewood for Saint Hilda's was my grandmother's doing my grandfather may have been an imposing and learned man but he was an idealist and a dreamer he buried himself in his books if he had Ambitions for his daughters he did not have the foresight and energy to make them real my grandmother did Saint Helens was her idea some of the wealthier families in the area sent their daughters there and she saw what a good school meant her daughters did not play with the other children of the village they read Latin and algebra were necessary for high school so she had her daughters tutored by Arch Deacon a if he'd asked her about her goals for her children she would have said she wanted us out of there my mother recalls she didn't feel that the Jamaican context offered enough and if the opportunity was there to go on and you were able to take it and to her the sky was the limit when the results came back from the scholarship exam only my odd one a mother did not that's another fact that my first history was careless about my mother remembers her parents standing in the doorway talking to each other we have no more money they'd paid the tuition for the first term and bought the uniforms and exhausted their savings what could they do when the second term fees for a mother came due but then again they couldn't send one daughter and not the other my grandmother was steadfast she sent both and prayed at the end of the first term it turned out that one of the other girls at the school had won two scholarships the second was given to my mother when it came time to go to university my aunt the academic twin won what was called a Centenary scholarship the Centenary was a reference to the fact the scholarship was established 100 years after the abolition of slavery in Jamaica it was reserved for the graduates of public elementary schools and in a measure of how deeply the British felt about honoring the memory of abolition there was a total of one Centenary scholarship awarded every year for the whole island with the prize going to the top girl and the top boy in alternating years the year my aunt applied happened to be one of the girl years she was lucky my mother was not my mother was faced with passage to England room and board and living expenses and tuition at the University of London to get a sense of how daunting that figure was the value of the Centenary scholarship my aunt won was probably as much as the sum of my grandparents annual salaries there were no student loan programs no banks with lines of credit for school teachers out in the countryside if I asked my father my mother says he would have replied we have no money what did Daisy do she went to the Chinese shopkeeper in neighboring town Jamaica has a very large Chinese population that since the 19th century has dominated the commercial life of the island in Jamaican parlance a store is not a store it's a Chinese shop Daisy went to the Chinese shop to Mr chance and borrowed the money no one knows how much she borrowed although it must have been an enormous sum and no one knows why Mr chance lented to Daisy except of course that she was Daisy nation and she paid her bills promptly and had taught the chance children at Harewood School it was not always easy to be a Chinese child in a Jamaican schoolyard the Jamaican children would taunt them Daisy was a kindly and beloved figure an oasis amid that hostility Mr chance may have felt in her debt did she tell me what she was doing I didn't even ask her my mother remembers it just occurred I just applied to University and got in I acted completely on faith that I could rely on my mother without even realizing that I was relying on my mother Joyce Global owes her college education first to William M McMillan and then to the student at Saint Hilda's who gave up her scholarship and then to Mr chance and most of all to Daisy Nation Daisy nation was in the Northwestern end of Jamaica her great-grandfather was William Ford he was from Ireland and he arrived in Jamaica in 1784 having bought a coffee plantation not long after his arrival he bought a slave woman and took her as his concubine he noticed her on the docks at Alligator Pond a fishing Village on the south coast she was an Igbo tribes woman from East Africa they had a son who then named John he was in the language the day a mulatto he was colored and all of the Fords should not point on fell into Jamaica's colored class in the American South during that same period it would have been highly unusual for a white landowner to have had so public a relationship with a Slave sexual relations between blacks and whites were considered morally repugnant laws were passed prohibiting miscegenation the last of which were not struck down by the U.S Supreme Court until 1967. a plantation owner who lived openly with a slave woman would have been socially ostracized and any Offspring from the union of black and white would have been left in slavery in Jamaica attitudes were very different the Caribbean in those years was little more than a massive slave colony LAX outnumbered Whites by a factor of more than ten to one there were few if any marriageable white women on the island and as a result the overwhelming majority of white men on the island had black or brown mistresses one British Plantation owner in Jamaica who famously kept a precise Diary of his sexual exploits slept with 138 different women in his 37 years on the island almost all of them slaves and one imagines not all of them willing partners and whites saw mulattos the children of those relationships as potential allies a buffer between them and the enormous number of slaves on the island mulatto women were prized as Mistresses and their children one shade lighter in turn moved still further up the social and economic ladder mulattos rarely worked in the fields they lived the much easier life of working in the house they were the ones most likely to be freed so many mulatto Mistresses were left substantial Fortunes in the wills of white property owners that the Jamaican legislature once passed a law capping bequests at two thousand pounds which at the time was an enormous sum when a European arrives in the West Indies and gets settled or sat down for any length of time he finds it necessary to provide himself with a housekeeper or mistress one 18th century Observer wrote the choice he has an opportunity of making is various a black a Tawny a mulatto or MSD one of which can be purchased for a hundred or 150 Sterling if a young progeny of colored children is brought forth these are emancipated and mostly sent by their fathers who can afford it at the age of three or four years to be educated in England this is the world Daisy's great-grandfather John was born into he was one generation removed from a slave ship living in a country best described as an African penal colony and he was a free man with every benefit of Education he married another mulatto a woman who is half European and half Arawak which is the Indian tribe indigenous to Jamaica and had seven children these people the coloreds had a lot of status the Jamaican sociologist Orlando Patterson says by 1826 they had full civil liberties in fact they achieved full civil liberties at the same time as the Jews do in Jamaica they could vote do anything a white person can do and this is within the context of what was still a slave Society ideally they would try to be Artisans remember Jamaica has sugar plantations which are very different from the cotton plantations you find in the American South cotton is a predominantly agricultural Pursuit you're picking this stuff and almost all the processing was done in Lancashire or the North sugar is an agro-industrial complex you have to have the factory right there because sugar starts losing sucrose within hours of being picked you had no choice but to have the Sugar Mill right there and sugar Mills require a wide range of occupations the Coopers the boilermen the Carpenters and a lot of those jobs were filled by colored people it was also the case that Jamaica's English Elite unlike their counterparts in the United States had little interest in the grand project of nation building they wanted to make their money and go back to England they had no desire to stay in what they considered a hostile land so the task of building a new Society with the many opportunities it embodied fell to the coloreds as well by 1850 the mayor of Kingston the Jamaican Capital was a colored person Patterson went on and so was the founder of the daily Gleaner Jamaica's major newspaper and from very early on they come to dominate the professional classes the whites were involved in business or the plantation the people who became doctors and lawyers were these colored people these were the people running the schools the bishop of Kingston was a classic brown man they weren't the economic Elite but they were the cultural Elite in the 1950s the Jamaican Census Bureau did a breakdown of all of the lawyers in the country according to their skin tone people who were white and light that is people who had some black Heritage that is no longer readily apparent made up 38.8 percent of the lawyers people who were Olive skinned or light brown or dark brown met up about a third of the lawyers people who were black made up about five percent of the lawyers and keep in mind that blacks made up a total of 80 of the Jamaican population do you see the extraordinary advantage that their little bit of whiteness gave the colored minority having an ancestor who worked in the house and not in the fields who got full civil rights in 1826 who was valued instead of enslaved who got a shot at meaningful work instead of being consigned to sugarcane Fields made all the difference in occupational success two and three generations later Daisy Ford's ambition for her daughters did not come from nowhere in other words she was the inheritor of a legacy a privilege her older brother Rufus with whom she went to live as a child was a teacher and a man of learning her brother Carlos went to Cuba and then came back to Jamaica and opened a garment Factory her Father Charles Ford was a produce wholesaler her mother Anne was a Powell the same Pals who would two generations later produce Colin Powell another educated upwardly mobile colored family her Uncle Henry owned property her grandfather John the son of William Ford and his African concubine ended up as a preacher no less than three members of the extended Ford family ended up winning Rhodes scholarships if my mother owed William M McMillan and the writers of 1937 and Mr chance and her mother Daisy Ford then Daisy owed Rufus and Carlos and Anne and Charles and John my grandmother was a remarkable woman but it is important to remember that the steady upward path upon which the Fords embarked began with a morally complicated Act William Ford looked upon my great great grandmother with desire at a slave market an alligator Pond and purchased her the slaves who were not so chosen had short and unhappy lives in Jamaica the plantation owners felt it made the most sense to extract the maximum possible effort from the human property while the property was still young to work their slaves until they were either dead or useless and then simply buy another round at the market they had no trouble with the philosophical contradiction of cherishing the children they had with a slave and simultaneously thinking of slaves as property William thistlewood the plantation owner who cataloged his sexual exploits at a lifelong relationship with a slave named FIBA who by all accounts he adored and Who Bore him a son but to his field slaves he was a monster whose preferred punishment for those who tried to run away was what he called Darby's dose The Runaway would be beaten salt pickle lime juice and bird pepper rubbed into his or her open wounds another slave would defecate into the mouth of the miscreant who would then be gagged for four or five hours is not surprising then that the brown skinned classes of Jamaica came to fetishize their lightness it was their great Advantage they scrutinized the shade of each other's skin and played the color game as ruthlessly in the end as the whites did if as often happens children are of different shades of color in a family the Jamaican sociologist Fernando Enriquez once wrote the most lightly colored will be favored at the expense of the others in adolescence and until marriage the darker members of the family will be kept out of the way when the friends of the fair or Fair members of the family are being entertained the Fairchild is regarded as raising the color of the family and nothing must be put in the way of its success that is in the way of a marriage which will still further raise the color status of the family a fair person will try to sever social relations he may have with darker relatives the darker members of a negro family will encourage the efforts of a very fair relative to pass for white the practices of intra-family relations lay the foundation for the public manifestation of color prejudice my family was not immune to this Daisy was inordinately proud of the fact her husband was lighter than she was but that same Prejudice was then turned on her Daisy's nice you know her mother-in-law would say but she's too dark one of my mother's relatives I'll call her Aunt Joan was also well up the color totem pole she was white and Light but she was a widow and her husband had been what in Jamaica is called an engine a man with a dark complexion and straight fine black hair and their daughters were dark like their father one day after her husband had died she was traveling on a train to visit her daughter and she met and took an interest in a light-skinned man in the same Railway car what happened next is something that Aunt Joan told only my mother years later with the greatest of Shame when she got off the train she walked right by her daughter disowning her own flesh and blood because she did not want a man so light-skinned and desirable to know that she had borne a daughter so dark 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 described the 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 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 as she wrote I complained to God in so many words here I was the wounded representative of the Negro race in our struggled 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 were 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's 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 mother's 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 the 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 the 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 an interview with Malcolm Gladwell let's begin with outliers what are they outliers he said is a scientific term that scientists use to describe phenomenon that lie outside everyday experience you know you're used to having a bell curve and as a couple people at one end and most people in the middle and a couple of the other end and the outlier is the phenomenon or the thing that just doesn't fit into that that normal expectation the book is really about an attempt to understand those people who who fall outside of our of our normal and everyday experience who are so special so exceptional so successful that they demand a more complete explanation the subtitle of your book is the story of success how do you put outliers together with success the goal of the book or the idea behind a book was to say look if we examine the lives and experiences of people who are off the charts who are outliers who who are just at the very very top of the pyramid rock stars and entrepreneurs and Geniuses and people like that can we learn anything can we learn something that can help the rest of us um be more successful or help Society design programs or policies or have ideas about um how to bring a level of performance a higher so that was the notion that there is something very useful to be learned um from people whose lives and experiences fall outside the norm that's where you started but where did you end up there is an ironic element to call into book outliers because in the end what I what I conclude and what I end up trying hoping to convince the reader of is that outliers aren't outliers the people who seem like they're off on their own having achieved extraordinary things are actually very ordinary and that they are there not because of some exceptionally heroic individual actions on their part but because of a whole series of circumstances and environments and cultural legacies that really implicate us all when you understand that the Beatles are The Beatles in large part because they got some insanely lucky break in the early 60s and got sent to Hamburg to play seven days a week eight hours a day for the better part of a year it changes your understanding of uh of The Beatles it you no longer think of them as being these kinds of one and a million Musical prodigies and you understand actually no they're who they are because they got this opportunity that allowed them to work really hard and that's a very very different way of understanding musical genius take for example Bill Gates why is the richest man in the world less special than we may think Bill Gates the Douglas story is actually fascinating it's um you know my discussion of Bill Gates uh ends when he graduates from high school I'm completely uninterested in what he did in college and more importantly what he did once he founded this little company called Microsoft I'm actually most interested in what happened to him when he was 13 years old and that is in 1968 when Bill Gates was 13 he got unlimited access to a computer terminal now to put that in perspective in 1968 most college professors in computer science did not have unlimited access to a computer terminal there just weren't computers around and they were so expensive and so rare and programming was so complex that it was programmed was something that you mastered after decades and decades Bill Gates at 13 gets access to not just a terminal but a terminal outfitted with what was then this revolutionary new way of programming that allowed you to sit at the terminal and program online and it is safe to say and Bill Gates himself in his interview with me confirmed this the Pittsburgh no one else in the world in 1968 no other 13 year old no other teenager in the world of 1968 had the same kind of access to a computer that he did what that means is that by the time he's 17 or 18 he's had hit thousands you know ten thousand hours of practice programming and no one else in the world at his age has got that kind of experience or expertise so when he starts his company Microsoft at the age of 21 or however old he was he's way ahead of everyone else in that in that space you know he's he has this incredible Head Start now he really is the rest of the world the computer science world was running a mile and Bill Gates was running a half mile and that's the reason why he is where he is today I mean there are other factors obviously that are part of that but he had this incredibly formative experience that had nothing to do with him that had to do with him being in the right place in the right time and being surrounded by a community that could provide him with every Advantage possible and that's the lesson of Bill Gates the lesson of Bill Gates is about the power of community it's not about um the individual value of Genius throughout outliers you talk about individual success and particular circumstances and opportunities tell us about that yeah I you know I got very interested there's a lot of in the book I do a lot of fun playing around with birth dates if success is a much a product of specific times and places then we ought to be able to identify well what are those times and what are those places and so I get really specific you know what if you're if you want to be a professional hockey or soccer player is there a is there a best time to be born answer is yes you're much better off being born in January than you are being born in December not just mildly better off in fact you probably can't be a professional hockey player if you're born in December if you want the full explanation of that you should read the book um but I start to play with this in a number of different instances and in one of them I go through all of the most famous people in Silicon Valley Bill Gates Bill Joy who is the guy who basically writes the software that the internet runs on Steve Jobs uh the guys who planted Sun Microsystems I mean the the list is quite endless and point out that they all have one really extraordinary thing in common which is they are all born in 1955 or late 1954. and I say all I mean all in fact the three most famous and important people in the history of personal computing Steve Jobs Bill Gates and Bill Joy are born within six months of each other now that is not a coincidence I mean I make the argument in the book that that is hugely significant because it means that they came of age at a moment they were 21 when the personal computer is invented and that is the perfect age at which to contemplate the possibilities of a new technology and if they would been 18 they wouldn't have ended up where they were and if they had been 25 in 1976 when this happened they wouldn't have ended up where they were we are products of particular environments and we we forget about that we think that Bill Gates would have been Bill Gates if you've been born you know anytime so not true um and even he will tell you as will Steve Jobs will tell you that they owe an extraordinary amount of their success to the very particular mix of circumstances that surrounded their coming of age so on the one hand you have these particular circumstances and the opportunities they bring but you're also interested in the influence of culture yeah I I I got very interested in uh the kinds of things that get handed down to us by our culture and by our families you know if you believe as this book does that no one is ever no success ever happens um by itself no successful person succeeds just because of their own efforts they are products of times and places and environments and it means you I think you have to take culture very seriously and you have to ask yourself what is it that we inherit from our forebearers and from our culture that makes a difference in our lives and I for example have a long chapter about um why it is that Asians do so well in math right we have a year um every four years there's an international math test given to seventh and I think ninth graders around the world and every year kids from Singapore South Korea Japan Taiwan a couple of other Asian countries not just mildly outperform the rest of the world but massively outperform the rest of the world um we're talking about a standard deviation difference an enormous Gap an issue with question is why is that I mean this has happened every year for as long as we have tested kids around the world for math ability Asian kids have destroyed the rest of the world at a certain point you have to stop simply accepting this fact and you have got to ask yourself why and some people have said oh it's because Asians have higher IQs than the rest of us which I think is nonsense I think there's a much more compelling argument he made that has to do with the cultural Legacy that Asian kids inherit in particular it has to do I think with the lessons learned from thousands of years of rice farming I think as strange as it seems that there is a bright line connecting the culture that arose out of the very particular and onerous demands of rice farming and the extraordinary success that modern day Asians have in mathematics and if that Peaks your curiosity you should listen to the book to a great extent you're debunking rugged individualism the myth of American success right I am I mean in some ways this book is a kind of somewhere between a corrective and a full-scale assault on on the way um Western Society in general an American society in particular has thought about success over the last few hundred years you know we have fallen in love with this notion of the self-made man of the rags to riches story of the idea that if you make it to the top of your profession you deserve a salary of 20 million dollars a year because you you know you're the one responsible for getting to the top you know why shouldn't you be richly rewarded and that idea that ethos has permeated virtually every way in which we think about achievement and um I think that that idea is uh is completely false it's worse than false it's dangerous and it completely obscures the real reasons why people succeed and it obscures the extraordinarily important role that we by which I mean Society can play in promoting success we make decisions every day over who gets to succeed and who doesn't without realizing we do it and I want to sort of bring those kinds of hidden mechanisms to light as a way of helping us understand what we can do to kind of uh promote achievement in on a much broader scale than we do now you're Canadian has this distance from American culture sharpened your perspective I think so I and I think because as Canadians we're far less caught up in the myth of individualism it's a much easier argument to make in Canada that success is a product of many different factors and forces and environments and Legacies working together and I think that's why I have this this is of all the books I've written this is the most personal in the sense that it really does represent my Bedrock philosophy as a human being and that was very much formed by my upbringing in Canada without giving too much away you conclude with a piece it's close to home it's about your mother as an outlier yeah because this book was so personal I thought it was be appropriate to end on a personal note and so the last chapter is all about my mother is Jamaican and grew up in house the size of the recording studio I'm in right now whose parents by any and although they were School teachers by any contemporary Reckoning were lower lower middle class and she ended up living in an upper middle class professional house in family in Canada in wealthy Canada and the question for that last chapter is how did she get there it would be tempting to say she got there because she's ambitious and really smart and in fact that that explanation as flattering as it is to my mother um is completely false and the last chapter is an attempt to go back in my own family and the own my they own my own culture or most specifically my mother's own culture and try and locate kind of antecedents of her success um first in her own mother my grandmother and then in um what was going on in Jamaica my mother was growing up um in what was going on in my mother's family two three four generations previously in what happened when my great great great grandfather who was an Irish coffee plantation owner um took as his concubine a slave he'd purchased and produced my great great great grandfather and why that mattered and continues to matter to this day in my family um just this idea of instead of thinking of my mother as someone who was born in 1931 and his whose life belongs entirely to the 20th and 21st century to make people understand that her success actually belongs to the 21st century the 20th century the 19th century and the 18th century and unless you look at her life and my family's life with that kind of remove you understand nothing about why we've achieved what we've achieved tell a tale on yourself as an outlier how that something formative from your childhood that has contributed to your own success well I went actually this is actually the best explanation for here's an example of if I was telling I don't in my book but if I was telling a similar kind of story of my own life there is one fact which I one very lucky fact I would have to dwell on which was I went to a I grew up in a very rural area of Ontario and I went to a one of these country schools where I would say 75 to 80 percent of the kids were farmers kids and in my high school of 1200 kids probably 20 went to college every year right so that gives you a sense of was not a highly intellectual environment however by sheerest Good Fortune my oldest friend who I met on the first day of first grade and was has been my closest friend ever since and was when was in every class was made from first grade to the end of college happened to be one of the very very few educated literate sophisticated people in town in fact he's today a edited at the New York Times my other best friend from that period who was a farmer's kid but also was very kind of educated and literate was just two years ago the youngest tenured professor at Harvard University so here I was in the middle of nowhere in Canada and my two best friends happened to be people who were outliers I mean absolutely particularly the one at Harvard is a who's a once in a one in a million kind of guy I would not be here without those two absolutely not I mean they shaped me in ways that I can barely even begin to understand and that was that was just luck I mean pure and simple and it's very humbling to think of the fact that your life was um was in the hands of to such a large degree of these two you know two peers these two friends from first grade who turned out to have been perfectly remarkable in every way so that's a that's something I've thought about since writing this book we've just been through the Summer Olympics our Olympians outliers oh yeah I mean absolutely there are and they're a really wonderful things we can learn by looking at the kinds of people who succeed at that level you know it is a perfect confirmation of the thesis of this book one is that what um sets them apart as much as anything is their ability to work hard and hard work is one of the big themes of this book it just says it just shows how outliers are people who have been given not just who want to work hard but more importantly have been given the opportunity to work hard you need an opportunity to work hard if you want to be a great gymnast in the Olympics all of the ambition and drive and discipline in the world will come for naught unless there is a gym within walking or driving distance of your house when you're six years old stacked with someone who knows how to teach gymnastics right you know all of you look at all the gym great female gymnasts in the United States in this past Olympics you know they come out of gyms they don't they're affiliated with a gym run by invariably someone who was themselves a world-class gymnast Nastia Lucan comes from a gym in Texas run by her father and mother who were themselves world-class gymnasts right without her father and mother she's not there Sean Johnson comes from a gym in I think somewhere in Iowa right that was started by someone who was a world-class gymnast in China and who left China and moved to Iowa and opened a gym unless that guy moves to Iowa and opens the gym Sean Johnson is not a Gold Medal winner in the Olympics she might have been a fine gymnast but she needed that opportunity to learn and work hard in order to reach the level that she reached um and you can't and you know I am sure that if we had Sean Johnson and Nasi Luke in here the first thing they would do was credit their coaches and their gyms not because they're being modest or being nice but because they're being honest and almost all world-class athletes recognize instantly how critical those kinds of of communities of learning were in their own achievement and that's why they'll always when you ask them they'll always start with coach family you know club and then move on to their own personal um uh gifts and contributions I can't help but ask about the great string of comedians from Canada I actually thought of doing a chapter on this it has to do with it gets slightly off topic it has to do with outsiderness so it's a subset of the same reason why all great comedians are Jewish and black and that is uh to be a minority to be a stigmatized minority is uh to to be given the comic stance right you're constantly looking at this much larger group and you are allowed to make fun of them because you're not threatening right you permit minorities to make light of you because there's no way they can first of all they're not powerful enough to threaten you in some way but secondly because they're not part of their of Your World they can be rude right the person who you grew up with in your family or who's a close part of your culture you hold them to a very high standard of behavior you can't you know you have to observe the rules of the community the person outside the community doesn't have to observe the rules at all right well comedy is all about not observing the rules so people who come from outside the dominant Community always have a comic advantage so Jews have a comic Advantage African-Americans have a comic Advantage Canadians have a comic Advantage um and that's always been the case as long as people have made jokes jokes have been made by Outsiders so it's another way in which your upbringing influences um your success