In the past couple weeks, I zoomed through two books: Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s The Black Swan.
At the most fundamental level, the books share the same topic: outliers. Outliers are things that are statistically rare or unexpected. While Gladwell’s book focuses primarily on people and cultures (Bill Gates, The Beatles, Asians) and presents his ideas from sociological and psychological standpoints, Taleb’s discourse deals more heavily with events (stock market crashes, 9/11) from a philosophical stance. Both books are full of interesting ideas and information.
I thoroughly enjoyed them, and think anyone with any kind of interest in business or social science should check them out.
My book reviews are below:
Outliers. I recommend reading this one first: The overall style is just easier to digest. It’s full of fun little vignettes, the technical vocabulary is minimal, and it doesn’t require as much thinking. It’s a simpler introduction to the idea of outliers. It’s also about half the length of The Black Swan.
The first part of the book focuses on individuals: how the best hockey players are made, where computer wizards like Bill Gates came from, why The Beatles became the greatest rock band of all time, and several others.
The second part deals with culture and its effects on people — good and bad. A significant portion discusses why Asians are so good at math.
Two main ideas permeate the text: 1) to become an outlier, you must prepare by working very hard, and 2) (more importantly than #1) to become an outlier, you have to be at the right place at the right time; or in other words, you are a product of your surroundings.
Insights can be inferred on how to accomplish the above things. But nothing is ever really explicitly recommended. Outliers is not a self-help book.
As I stated above, I enjoyed this book. However, I felt that Gladwell’s two ideas/conclusions ultimately conflict with one another. If, as #2 suggests, you are a product of your surroundings, and becoming an outlier is based on the luck of the draw, then what purpose is there to work hard? The implication of #2 is that luck is more important than skill.
Besides, doing #1 (working hard) will be of no avail if #2 doesn’t come along. No matter how hard you try, you’ll never be an outlier without luck.
But at the same time… can you think of anyone who made it big without some lucky break? Even our current president, as much as I don’t like the guy, is a perfect example: by pure luck, he got to speak at the Democratic convention during the 2004 Election, which initially put him in a national spotlight. Of all the people to speak, he was chosen. Is that not serendipity? (I mean for him, not for the country.)
And if you read the book, you’ll see countless other examples. It’s hard not to put some stock in what Gladwell presents.
The Black Swan. Amazing. But much more difficult to get through than Outliers. I have an easier time recommending Outliers, simply due to the ease-of-reading aspect. I sometimes felt like Taleb was trying to impress me with his technical vocabulary and his abililty to speak several languages. Luckily, he would restate his foreign sentences in English. And since the technical vocabulary was mostly philosophy, business/finance, or economics-based, I didn’t have a hard time following along. But still. I worry that someone like my mother, who might not be familiar with what epistemology is, or what standard deviations have to do with the Gaussian curve, might get annoyed with the book.
A black swan is Taleb’s name for an outlier — specifically a very unexpected one. As I mentioned above, 9/11 and stockmarket crashes are black swans. He claims that we could get rid of black swans: at the very least, we could turn them into “gray” swans by mitigating the risk associated with unexpected negative events. In order to do this, however, one must first understand why black swans exist.
The bulk of the book then goes off on a philosophical treatise regarding uncertainty and randomness. The key point can be made by a small analogy.
If you line up 1,000 random people and add up their weights, even if you find the world’s heaviest man and add him to the line, his weight won’t increase the overall weight of the group by much.
On the other hand, if you look at the incomes of those 1,000 people, and then you add the world’s richest man to the end of the line, his wealth will dwarf the entire group. It would be like adding a several-million-pound person to the line in the first example.
Whenever you’re looking at physical things like weights or molecules, their distribution makes up what is known as the Bell Curve. However, with social phenomenons, the Bell Curve is not applicable. Despite this, it is applied to everything by statistcians, businessmen, governments, and other so-called “experts.” Taleb explains how you can get out of this “trap.”
The biggest reason I liked this book probably stems from Taleb’s attitude. He’s incredibly skeptical and full of himself, and I guess I can relate with that. Hahaha.
So, go pick them up. I have the audio books, so if you’d prefer that to reading, let me know and I can hook you up.