Outliers: The Story of Success (Pt. 4)

Hello and welcome to Readers, a podcast where the real-life lessons and applications of books are talked about by a 16-year-old, me, Prithviraj Chavda. Hello viewers and welcome back to Readers, a podcast for the lifelong learner. This is part 4 of Outliers. Last episode, we discussed a number of concepts, chief among them the importance of communication Mitigation, Cultural Legacies, and a Culture of Honor. Today we are diving into Part 4 of Outliers, chapters 8 and 9. With me today, I have Mr. Neil Patel. Hey, Neil. Hey. Who has been my guest on this podcast for this book so far. Let's get right into it. You ready?

Yeah, let's get right back into it. It's funny enough, last week while I was in New York, I had a friend who came up to me and she's been reading a lot more books. And one of the books she's been reading actually is Outliers. And she's currently like in the process of having kids and she's thinking about how to raise her kids, right?

Yeah.

And this chapter that we're, you know, getting a dive into, chapter 8, the one with the rice paddies and Chinese agriculture, she kind of was talking about that because it talks about hard work. And concepts like that and things that she wouldn't want to instill in her kids, right? So, you know, the author kind of starts this book, this chapter, talking about how in ancient, you know, Eastern civilization, for like Chinese culture especially, they used to do agriculture and it was hard work, right? And they didn't have the resources and the money to produce rice as it would be produced, say, like in America. So they had to figure out ways to learn how to make rice more efficiently with the limited resources that they had. So they had to work hard and they had to put in a lot of effort, and they didn't rely on concepts like luck and faith. So that's how this chapter kind of starts, and you know, as the chapter goes on, he relates it to other education, which maybe you could go a little bit more into.

Yeah, for sure. I think it was really interesting how the, the author kind of starts off with, you know, most of this chapter and this part is going to be a little bit more about educational reform, but he starts a lot of it off with agriculture, which is really interesting. He talks about kind of the, uh, how agriculture has formed a sort of work ethic in Asians and how it's actually formed in America as well and how the two differ. So here the author introduces an interesting concept, which was Asians and math, right? And although some may view this as a stereotype, the author says the numbers don't lie. Children from China, Korea, Japan, and the kids of recent immigrants from there have all pretty consistently scored around the 98th percentile in mathematics, whereas more Western countries have scores around 26th or 36th percentiles, right? But why is that? You know, are these people just born smarter, or is there, is there something a little bit more to it? So the author, the author talks about this a little bit, and he starts off with the English alphabet and the Chinese or Asian alphabets. So he says that the English alphabet's pretty confusing, uh, in terms of like patterns and speech and how to say it and all. He says you go from, you know, you go from single-digit numbers to the teens, then you have your tens of numbers, all of which they never really follow any particular pattern, right? You think of 11, right? How does 11 make sense? That doesn't, you know, it's, it's 2, it's 10 and then 10 plus 1. It's, it's all pretty confusing. 13 doesn't really sound much like 3. 20 doesn't sound a lot like 2. Same with a lot of other, same with a lot of other numbers. Whereas in the Chinese numbers, their numbering system is a lot more simple, uh, and their number words are really brief. So he says that in, in the American or English system, there are also a lot longer words to remember. You think of words like 7 or 13, or even, you know, longer or bigger words like 97 and more. Uh, he says in the use or example of Chinese numbers, their numbering system's a lot more simple. Their number words are incredibly brief. So he gives the example of like 4 and 7, which is si and qi. Uh, and he also says that their counting system is a lot simpler. 11 is 10-1, 13 is 10-3, and it goes on like that, right? So the author says that this difference means Asian children learn to count a lot faster, which brings them ahead of their Western counterparts at an early stage in life. And this kind of goes back a little bit to at the beginning in part 1 and 2 of Outliers that we discussed how these small advantages kind of snowball and help them get in a higher position and give them a big head start, which, which can clearly show to help.

I think, you know, two parts kind of— two things stick out to me when you're like recently just talking about this. One is like the butterfly effect, right? So it's like one small thing could lead to another thing. And when we began this chapter, it was like agriculture impacted education, right? To see the link between those two things, it's something that I think people initially would not see, but to actually dig deep and to like look into why certain things cause certain things. I think that's one of the cool parts about reading this book. It's things that you would never assume are correlated or related, but actually impact each other. And the second thing that kind of ties in with that is it kind of makes us question our education system, right? I think we take it for granted and we don't really question the system we're a part of, but like reading this book, it makes you think, like, are the way that we're doing things the right way to do it? And is there a better way to do it? And like, how have other parts of the world that have also succeeded probably more than America in terms of education to some extent, how have they done it? But going back to some of the points that the author was like talking about, and one thing that you mentioned towards the end was like the short names for numbers, right? So the author shared statistics that like native Cantonese speakers can remember 10-digit strings, whereas compared to native English speakers, because of like the different naming conventions, they have less than a 50% chance of remembering a 7-digit string. And when you think about it, for me even, I look at my own life and I'm like, how many phone numbers do I have memorized besides my dad's and my parents'? It's really hard to have those digit strings memorized, but I have a feeling that if I talk to someone in eastern part of the world, they would have a lot more easier time memorizing people's numbers. So it also impacts our short-term memory, which is kind of interesting to talk about. And another point was that the western farms have more machinery and eastern farms, due to affordability, they had to work harder and more efficiently. And Alfred goes into some Chinese proverbs about rice farming that were all related to hard work and not luck. And the lesson about this is that because they heard these proverbs growing up, right, and maybe the lessons secondhand from their, their grandparents and their parents is that they developed a skill that helped them advance in other fields, right? Suppose they didn't continue rice farming. They learned the value of persevering and putting in work. And to exemplify this, the author shared an experiment that was done in an American university with a foreign student where students had to do algebra and they had to play with a computer program that plotted lines. And there was this one student that spent 22 minutes trying to input the slope that would produce a vertical line. Eventually they realized that it would be divisible by— divisible by zero and an undefined number. But the point of this wasn't the solution. The point of it was that most people would give up, right? I think in our current education system, it's so easy just to be like, oh, I'll try a couple times, but it's too hard. But this student was willing to put in more of an effort. And the benefit of that is that you're more likely to retain a lesson if you're going to try and put in more, more of an effort than be handed something, right? So it kind of makes you think, like, in terms of retaining the information we learn, it definitely has impacts.

Yeah, for sure. And, you know, you bring up two really interesting points here. I think one is like, you never really think so much about a system that you've always been a part of, and that's been so traditional, you know, like the education system. And I think now, you know, there's a lot more thought being put behind the education system with a lot more research being put out. But for so long, we followed, you know, pretty much the traditional same education system, which now people are realizing may not be the best. You look at, you know, cars have developed, you know, you've seen companies, businesses, technology right now, you know, you think of so many things have developed. Why hasn't our education system grown. And then another really interesting thing you were talking about, you know, those Chinese proverbs about rice farming and hard work. One of them is actually mentioned in this chapter, and that's that no one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich, right? Nobody who wakes up pretty much every day a year and works doesn't end up achieving success, you know. And that's just one of those many proverbs that are in Asian culture that show the importance of hard work. And here, you know, you finished off talking about that student who spent 22 minutes trying to input a slope that eventually just ended up being, you know, undefined. But this was a really interesting point and a really interesting concept to me because This was done by a teacher who actually videotapes his students doing difficult math problems and solving these issues. And he videotapes this to test whether his students continue to persevere through their math challenges to achieve success or not. And the author says that to this professor, it's not so much ability as attitude. You know, you don't have to be born naturally being more gifted at something. As if you have that attitude of, I'm gonna spend 22 minutes inputting different things, even if the answer might just be zero. And the author kind of finishes this chapter out talking about how, and asks us to envision a country where this perseverance or this grit, this is not an exception, you know, but rather what he calls a cultural trait. Embedded as deeply as the culture of honor, which was a concept that we kind of talked about a little while back, a concept that, you know, we— this is not something that should just be embodied by an outlier in society, but it should be embedded in the very culture.

So, you know, I think that concept of it being a cultural trait, right? I think it's very interesting because if that's true, then it has like a lot of implications for what's going on in current society. And you could relate that to like a bunch of different things, right? So there's like a couple of different things that come to my mind when, while you were talking. One of them is especially recently, you see like a lot of older generation workers complaining about like all these immigrants coming in and taking their jobs, especially within a tech field and how it's changing things. And you can look at that and be like, hey, You know, individual, that individual skill is based off of that intelligence. So, you know, they're just, they're, they're attributing it to that, whereas these workers who are complaining, they're essentially, you know, they're not taking responsibility, but having that skill set of that persistence, which typically is helping all these immigrants get ahead and take those higher paying jobs and to put more of an effort, that's actually what's getting them ahead. They're actually equal in, in a skillset and intelligence, but it, it's more about who is actually striving and who is actually going out of their way to get outta the status quo, right? So I think it has a lot of implications in things related to that. And I mean, when we look at our current, like, society, especially the younger generation, Asian Americans do really well. They're looked at as the most hardest working, some of the most, you know, studious people within the school system. And when you look at even the spelling bee, right, since 1999, 27 of the spelling bee competition winners have been Indian American, right? And when you— when we look at the reason of why that could be, It could be a lot of that skill set, that persistence being embedded in by their parents, right? Because they were working a lot, they were left at the library where they had to pick up resources like books around them to pick up that vocabulary. So it's a mixture of that environment and it's a mixture of putting in those efforts which led to a lot of that. And we see a lot of that in terms of just that persistence. But also, on the other hand, right, another fascinating thing to think about is Americans compared to East Asians do show persistence, but it's not related really to education. I see a lot of it related to more sports. So in my workplace, I have a lot of people spending multiple hours on focusing on fantasy football. They know every single football player's statistics. And I think they focus it on that competition, whereas, you know, how Asians are good at math and Americans are better at athletics. Maybe it's because they're more persistent in regards to a different dimension of what they find value in life. So it's interesting to take that concept of hard work but to apply it in different fields.

Yeah, no, that's really interesting. I feel like it's really just what you're— what you value, um, and based off of that is what you put that effort into, you know. And in this chapter, the author talks a lot about how persistence can really be a cultural trait, um, something that can be passed down through generations. And individual skill is not always based on intelligence, but it's really just A lot of it is attitude and that this hard work in Asian culture is actually tied to agriculture, which has ties to our academics today. And, you know, human, human, you know, humans always look for the faster, the easier route. But a product of building resilient human beings is having them go through the most challenges, right? You'll never become a better person. You'll never push yourself if you don't step outside of that comfort zone, you know, if you never go into that challenge zone.

Um, yeah, that's kind of why I think it's important to read books like this, right? Because I think it's easy to go through life and you could go on autopilot, but if you have reminders from books like these which motivate you to do something different, to kind of fight that innate laziness, it could definitely inspire you to live a great life, which is worthwhile.

Yeah, speaking of which, um, let's go into Chapter 9 now, which is where they actually talk a lot about this and an actual education system that, uh, defied the norm and ended up succeeding because of following these rules. Um, so this chapter starts off by introducing a public school that opened up in the 1900s. Uh, this was a public school that— so it opened up in mid-1990s, and it opened up in the South Bronx, which is one of the poorest neighborhoods in New York. This school is called KIPP, which stands for Knowledge is Power Program Academy. There are no entrance exams at this school nor admission requirements. Half of the students at this school were African American, and the rest were Hispanic. 3/4 of the kids come from single-parent homes, and 90% of them qualified for free or reduced lunch. So thinking about this, right, from everything you just heard, it doesn't really seem like a school that's destined to do so well. You know, these are kids that don't come from very well-off families in neighborhoods that are poor and probably have a lot of crime. Um, these are not This is not a school you expect to do so well, but just 10 years after its opening, it's become, and I quote here, one of the most desirable public schools in New York. Their mathematics program in particular is exceptional, right? By 7th grade, the children are studying high school level algebra. Today there are over 50 KIPP schools across the US. But the author says that its success is really not because of the curriculum, the teachers, or the resources, but rather KIPP has succeeded by taking the idea of cultural legacies seriously. So here the author kind of talks about edu— Western educational reform, and he goes a little bit into history, and he says that it was created by the view that work must be balanced by a hefty amount of rest. He says that in 1871, the US Commissioner of Education concluded that overstudying was a cause of mental disorder. Therefore, the US educational system was made to be less taxing on the minds of students. That's why you see students in the US with 2-3 months of summer break. Uh, and the author also says that this, this philosophy could not be more different than the Asian notion of work. He says that a farmer on average would plant about 2 to 3 crops a year in Asia. He also says that one of the features of rice is that the more a plot of land is cultivated, the more fertile it becomes and the more it produces. However, in Western agriculture, it's quite the opposite. Often the soil becomes exhausted and every winter fields become empty. Summer and spring is the time to grind. Or sorry, spring and fall is the time to grind, but summer and winter are much slower. So this is the logic that educational reformers brought to the educational view of students. They thought that a mind cannot be overworked, otherwise it becomes exhausted and cannot produce more. Therefore, they made the educational system much less taxing, much easier, and made break much longer. What do you think?

That's kind of crazy to think about because, A, we're living in an education system that was formed in the 1870s, and obviously a lot has changed societally. So it makes me think, like, how much have people actually, like, questioned that system throughout that period? Obviously, maybe back then for that part of history or society, maybe it was the best thing for society, but I think it's definitely something I've never really thought about until I read this chapter. And the first thing that kind of jumped out to me was I started thinking about all my high school and middle school summer vacations. I used to love looking forward to them because it's like 3 months of doing nothing, right? You wake up at 12, you know, you're watching TV, playing video games the whole night, you're talking to your friends online. It seems like it's the best time. But there's a lot of other things that happen if you're not using that time productively, right? You could form bad habits. I think that it's something that I now look at, and I, I actually do think about this now. It's like, I think it's too much time because like, I think you need a break, right? You just don't want to continue working. I think it's good to have a healthy break, but 3 months is probably way more than anyone needs because A, the parents aren't even at home to take care of their kids because they have to work. They can't about 3 months. So I think from that perspective, it's, um, it's, it's, it's definitely interesting to think about. And the author kind of talks about how schools are not failing the underprivileged students, it's just a lack of learning when they are not in school. So the summer vacations, right? And that's because when you think about different socioeconomic backgrounds, right, the higher income households, they're the ones who are going to be able to send their kids to Kumon or all these different learning programs or these summer camps where, you know, if you're in a lower economic household, you're going to essentially stay stagnant or even regress. Right. So I think from that perspective and even relating it to like how things are happening now, it's fascinating to think about.

Absolutely. And so I have actually, I'll tell you two things that this kind of stood out to me from actually my personal experiences. One, I'll tell you, and I go to a pretty alternative model of school myself. We have a much shorter summer break, a month or more less than the average American public school system summer break, which, you know, it's always been a little bit a thing of jealousy, you know, being younger and seeing kids get on summer break in June and us still being, you know, not even close to school finishing, you know, everybody's waking up at noon and going to the swimming pool, but we're, we're still waking up at 6 and going to school. But now that I kind of realize a little bit more about, you know, everything that Malcolm Gladwell talks about here, it makes a lot more sense. You can't have a break that's so long, otherwise your mind does kind of becomes stagnant and it gets used to it. You know, I think, uh, you probably remember, and I'll tell you because my school just started, uh, a couple of weeks ago, is that, you know, when you get back into school after, even if our break is shorter, it definitely does feel like you're getting into a whole new schedule, and it's 10 times harder when it's longer. Uh, and then the second thing, a good friend of mine right now is actually in Italy Um, and he is, uh, volunteering at a farm over there, a nonprofit farm. And the farmer there, he told me, has this philosophy that you should never work over 2 days without a rest. So obviously, I mean, they don't have any source or any sense of summer break or anything, but they actually get Wednesdays off, which is really interesting to me. So his— this farmer's philosophy is you work 2 days, Monday, Tuesday, get Wednesday off. You work Thursday, Friday, and then you get the weekend off. And that's what he does with everyone who works there, which is— it's pretty interesting to me, you know. You get obviously not a 3-month summer break, but a more spread out period of time to pace yourself. I feel like is a much more meaningful method. Um, anyway, moving on. The, uh, you also talked about how schools aren't failing the underprivileged students. It's really that lack of learning. And the author actually provides a lot of test scores and evidence to back this up. He says that children from poor homes can actually tend to learn the same amount or even more than their richer counterparts during the school year. However, it's during summer that they fall behind, right? You think of these children who come from lower-class families. They don't have access to go to summer camps every year or special classes and read books that are lying around the house, right? Because they end up wasting a whole summer. They end up watching the TV, or they just end up playing outside, all of which is, you know, fun and nice and all, but it needs to be in moderation. But the author says that after this summer vacation, many of the poor students who don't have those same educational resources during the summer, their scores drop and they fall a step or two behind the richer kids. The author says that for its poorest students, America doesn't have a school problem. It has a summer vacation problem. And that's the problem that these KIPP schools set out to solve. They decided to bring the lessons of the rice paddy to the American inner city. What do you think about this?

I, when I, when I think about that, right, I agree with that. I think especially when you look at the KIPP system of how they even went to school on like on a Saturday. I remember like the author mentioned that, right? So they kind of talked about how it, you know, the use of the time within the educational system was more of an issue than just the educational system itself.

Yeah, that's definitely true. And, and the author also talks about how A lot of these kids who are actually not from the richer families, they don't mind working hard, you know, because they realize the value of the opportunities that they've been given. And even though these children from these KIPP schools definitely have to work really hard, they don't have a long summer break, they have to work Saturdays, and it's not like they get to have as much fun as everybody else, they have been given those opportunities. So the author closes this chapter and actually this book out with a couple of really interesting statements. He says, outliers are those who have been given opportunities, and society needs to work to create those opportunities for them. These people don't need 100-acre schools or shiny new pencils every week. They don't need the newest MacBook or a higher IQ like Chris Langan's. A guy who we talked about a couple episodes ago, that he said, the point is they just need a chance, an opportunity. Society just needs to bring them opportunities. So that actually brings us to the end of the book of Outliers. We've talked about a lot of things. We've talked about educational reform. We've talked about cultures of honor. We've talked about IQ, the importance of hard work and, and you know, the importance of family and everything around you. Do you have any final things you'd like to say, Neil?

So I, I think this book, especially when you look at the concept that it's trying to— I think the point is that you have— everyone wants success, right? Everyone's like trying to achieve success, and we always try to look at what attributes that success. So I think the point of this book for me was that it's a, it's more than meets the eye, right? But it's also that when we look at success as a society, that everyone, you know, everyone can have that success if they could shape their environment using some of these things that Gladwell talks about throughout his book. And it's also that these people also had a mix of luck and opportunity, right? A lot of people that he talked about throughout the book. So I think it's more— this book kind of made me think in a different way towards when I say like, oh, like, I've— I achieved this. Did I really achieve that, or was it, you know, being born to the family I was born to, or circumstances in my life, or who else was there to help me that I didn't really think about, right? What were those factors in my life? So for me, this book is also about that gratitude, or that you know, getting rid of that ego that, oh, I did it myself, right? So I think this book was cool in making me think in a different way. And I think a lot of books do that in general, but this one in particular stood out to me.

Absolutely.

And it was fun talking to you about this and revisiting some of the concepts that this book had.

It was amazing. Such a pleasure. I hope we can have you on sometime again, for sure.

Yeah, I'm excited to listen to more of your podcast and like to kind of see what other books people, you know, enjoy reading and what concepts that stood out to them. So I'm looking forward to listening to more of your podcast as well.

Absolutely. I appreciate that. Thank you so much everybody for being on this journey with us. Uh, over the past few episodes, we've learned and reviewed Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. I would highly recommend reading it personally. Uh, I've learned a lot on this journey, you know, about defining success and how to achieve it, uh, what opportunities to take. Thank you so much, Neil, for joining me.

Thank you for having me.

Of course. And, and stay tuned for our fourth book. And don't forget to keep learning, keep changing, and keep growing.