The Homa Files

This is the first of several posts extracting some key points from the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell, Little Brown, 2008

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Gladwell’s Observation

When you’re born significantly impacts the likelihood that you’ll be successful.

On a macro level, outliers reach maturity in the early stages of a “transformational era”.  For example, Bill Gates was wildly successful, in part, because he caught the early wave of PCs.

On a more micro level, your specific birthdate matters because of “relative age”.  Many schools and sports have cut-off dates for admitting annual cohort groups.  For example, little league baseball leagues typically place kids in age brackets that run from Aug.1 to July 31.  Schools may require that a student turn 6 by a certain date (say, Sept.1)

Kids born right after a cut-off date have an advantage — they’re older.  At young ages, there’s a big  proportional maturity difference (physical & intellectual) between the oldest and youngest members of the cohort.  So, the oldest tend to outperform the youngest by a big margin.

And, the advantage tends to be an accumulative because early high achievers are often “steamed” or “tracked” — think fast reading groups and competitive travel teams — with their sub-cohorts getting more attention, more resources, and better teaching & coaching.

Generally speaking people born on the right date are beneficiaries of  more and more specialized opportunities to succeed.

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This entry was posted on March 17, 2009 at 7:00 am and is filed under Book Summaries, Success Factors. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.