Everyone is talking about Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers: The Story of Success. Many people say it’s great, and it is.

It’s filled with amazing insights into success. It took me a long time to read it because I found that reading just a few pages sometimes gave me enough to hold me over all week.

You can read the prologue here and some excerpts here. (See “The 10,000 Hour Rule,” “Harlan Kentucky,” and “Rice Paddies and Math Tests” in the sidebar. The last one was enough to make me start learning to count in Cantonese.)

Just be aware that it’s not a how-to guide with a list of steps to take. In fact, his idea that successful people are merely a product of their environment might make you go all fatalistic like the Merovingian. It’s meant to be more intriguing than practical.

My only disappointment is that I was hoping for a lot more detail about the 10,000 hour rule that he’s so well known for. It says that pretty much anyone can become successful in pretty much anything if and only if they put in 10,000 hours of practice.

But what level of granularity does that apply to? Does 10,000 hours of being creative make you successful at being creative, or is that too broad? Does it really take 10,000 hours of practice to be successful at reciting the alphabet, or is that too narrow?

In Success Is For Suckers, I wrote about whether success is worth it, in response to Glen Allsopp’s post What Malcolm Gladwell Should Have Told You In ‘Outliers’. Now having finished the book, I can better see what Glen was talking about.

Compare these two examples from the book of people who sacrificed their childhood in the name of success. One was Bill Gates. He sacrificed his childhood to become the richest man in the world doing what he loved. That’s way more than a fair tradeoff.

Another was a poor girl named Marita. She sacrificed her childhood for an 84% chance of catching up to her grade level in mathematics. It’s not mentioned whether she got there, and if she did, we’re only talking about mediocre math ability by the standards of a country that’s notoriously bad at it. The link between that and success is far from clear.

Of course, Bill Gates didn’t know things were going to work out so well for him. But he would have gladly made the sacrifice regardless, just because it was more appealing to him than anything else he could be doing. Maybe Marita feels the same way. I hope she does.

But not knowing the outcome in advance can make the decision very difficult. In eighth grade, I had to decide what high school I wanted to go to. I could have gone to my local high school, which was a perfectly good one. Or I could have applied to the Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology, which has been ranked the #1 public high school in the country by U.S. News and World Report.

Although TJ would have been an incredible experience, there was a price to be paid. If I remember correctly, I would not only be leaving for school earlier in the morning, but I’d be getting home at 7 or 8 every night instead of 3 in the afternoon like a normal kid. And that’s to say nothing of homework, or how stressful it would be during the day.

My dad made it very clear to me what the tradeoff was. He said, “If you want to learn everything you possibly can about math and science, then this would be the best thing in the world for you. But if you don’t, you would absolutely hate it.”

I went to the regular school, and to this day I’m still pretty sure I made the right choice. I think I learned plenty, and I probably would have gone to the same college anyway (the University of Virginia). And remember that there are some advantages to, you know, not sacrificing your childhood.

On the other hand, say my future self had come to me in eighth grade and said, “If you go to TJ, you’ll become interested in robotics. Because of that, you’ll go to MIT. There, you’ll meet a professor who will steer you towards nanotechnology. You’ll go on to invent a race of nanobots that can be injected into the blood stream and safely kill cancer cells. You’ll be an outlier. But if you don’t go to TJ, then none of this will happen.”

In that case, then yes, of course I’ll make the sacrifice, knowing that the payoff is coming. But no one wants to make a sacrifice when your best prediction is that it’s not worth it. And not knowing the future is what makes it so hard to make the right decision.

One of the books I’m reading now is Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. I’m just reading a little bit here and there, but I’ll definitely be reviewing it when I’m done.

So far, it’s about how success is less dependent on talent and hard work than we think. Yes, it still takes a lot of hard work (according to the 10,000 hour rule) and a good amount of talent. However, one critical factor is often ignored – the environment that made you who you are. It turns out that random factors such as your birth date can be hugely important.

But my review will come later. For now, I just want to talk about what success means.

In What Malcolm Gladwell Should Have Told You In ‘Outliers,’ Glen Allsopp says that while he’s a huge fan of Outliers, he has one problem with it. Namely, that Gladwell tends to define success as a large bank balance or some form of status. Glen says:

“While Bill Gates spent years behind a computer screen, people his age where going to parties, sunning on the beach, meeting new people and making the most of life…yet he has made it.

While kids were playing the violin for hours every week, their friends were playing in the park, running through fields and making the most of their childhood. Yet now the violinists are professional or well known…they’ve made it.”

I agree, people who are considered successful have paid an enormous price to get there. If you’re willing to accept being “average” or “good” instead of “off the charts,” you can free up massive amounts of time for other things.

Someone who’s OK with being a little overweight might be a lot happier than a gym rat who works out several hours a day. Someone who’s OK with being a little uninformed might be a lot happier than a Jeopardy champion. It’s much, much easier to be average than an outlier.

Still, the book is about success, not happiness. To learn about success, it makes sense to study Bill Gates and world class violinists. On the other hand, we don’t need to read a book to learn how to go to parties and play in the park. If you want to do those things, you’re free to just do them.

Which brings me to this question: Is success important?

That may sound like a strange question, but it has to do with how you think of success. A lot of people think success is the ultimate measure of your life. Either you’re successful and you’ve had a good life, or you’re unsuccessful and you’ve had a bad life.

I don’t see it that way. To me, success simply means what the traditional definition says. For now, let’s just use this dictionary definition: the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence.

Is there more to life than the attainment of wealth, favor, or eminence? Of course! I’ve written about a lot of things that are important to me, but which have absolutely nothing to do with wealth, favor, or eminence.

Some people want to be successful. Some people want to be happy. Some people want to be in good shape. Some people want to travel. Some people want to learn. Some people want lots of friends. These are all different things, none of which is the be all, end all of life. We all value different things.

And guess what? It’s OK if you don’t want to be successful!

But wait, if you’re not successful, does that make you unsuccessful, a failure, a bad person? Not at all. I can’t play the violin, but I wouldn’t consider myself a failed violinist. The violin just isn’t important to me, so it’s not how I judge myself.

Likewise, I wouldn’t consider Barack Obama a failed dentist, or Mohandas Gandhi a failed football player. Maybe they’re not good at those particular things, but they have different objectives.

When you walk past a homeless person, your first thought probably isn’t “Wow, look how successful he is!” Because face it, success, as defined by society, means money. After all, money is what society invented as a store of value. On the other hand, no one needs to feel threatened by this, because you don’t need to make money a priority if you don’t want to.

If you want to live the life of the Mexican fisherman, fine. But don’t redefine “success” to mean “happiness” just because it’s much easier to achieve, and you have this false idea that all good people are required to be successful. It’s perfectly fine to decide that success – or if you prefer, “traditional success” – isn’t important to you.

Some people are meant to chase success, but most aren’t. Not everyone can be in the richest 1%, or the healthiest 1%, or the most educated 1%, or the happiest 1%, or the friendliest 1%, and so on. We have to decide on our priorities.

I once met a homeless woman who was doing exactly what she wanted with her life: enjoying the weather, scenery, and tourists outside the White House while protesting nuclear weapons. No sane person would consider her successful, and she wouldn’t be the subject of a book like Outliers, but she was doing what she wanted to do.

And in the end, isn’t that what we should all be striving for?

Oh, regarding the post title – is success for suckers? Yes, but only if you spend your life chasing it at the cost of things that are more important to you. However, if success is important to you, then we have something in common. There’s room for both types.

Photo by aloshbennett