Outliers: The Story of Success (Pt. 2)

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.

Alright everybody, welcome back to part 2 of Outliers. Today, as you might notice, we're only covering 2 chapters. The reason for this is because these 2 chapters are extremely packed and full of content that we're going to be covering today. The first of these is chapter 4. The Trouble with Geniuses Part 2. Last episode we started with The Trouble with Geniuses Part 1. Today is Part 2. So this chapter starts off with going back to the topic of a man, Christopher Langan. This name might sound familiar to you as we have discussed him in the last chapter. This was the man to score highest on the IQ scale. However, the author takes us through a different story today. At a young age, Christopher's family was in shambles. His 3 brothers each had different fathers, and they each only had 1 pair of clothes. His stepdad would disappear on drinking sprees and whip Chris and his brothers, and the family would constantly be moving to different towns. These are the problems that Christopher Langen had to face at such a young age. Although the school Chris went to never recognized his genius, Upon graduation from high school, he got a full-ride scholarship to Reed College in Oregon. He says it was a huge mistake because the culture was very different from anything he was accustomed to, and not in a good way. He says that he would hide out in the library and took to being alone most of the time. However, one day, since his mother neglected to fill out the financial statement for the renewal of the scholarship, Chris lost it and he was forced to drop out of the university. After this, he decided to enroll in his hometown, Montana State University. This— at this place, he faced more hardships, including not even being able to move the times for his classes because of the rigidity of the dean and professors. After facing more hardships, he decided that he didn't need the higher education system, so he dropped out of college altogether. The author says that without a degree, Chris was struggling. He worked in many construction jobs, factory jobs, and even became a bouncer. Even so, he continued to apply himself in philosophy, math, and physics. Surprisingly, he created a treatise called the Cognitive Theoretic Model of the Universe, but without academic credentials, he did not think he would ever get published in a scholarly journal. So he kept living his normal everyday life and never ended up achieving more.

Another story of someone who was very similar to him in genius, but actually did achieve a lot in his life, is that of Robert Oppenheimer. So Oppenheimer was a child with a genius mind as well. He was doing lab experiments by 3rd grade, studying physics and chemistry by the 5th. And when he was in 9th, he told his cousin, "Ask me a question in Latin and I will answer in Greek." Oppenheimer went to Harvard and then went to Cambridge to pursue a doctorate in physics. Over there, his tutor was forcing him to attend a class which he hated. As a man who struggled with depression for his whole life, Oppenheimer took some chemicals from the laboratory and tried to even poison his tutor. That tutor found out, and the university was informed. After negotiations, it was agreed that Robert would be put on probation and have sessions with a psychiatrist in London. That's it. No death penalty, not even a jail sentence.

So here we see the stories of two people, right? Chris and Robert. These are both two students who ran into a problem that derailed their college careers. To continue, they both have pleaded their case to, to authority. One of them got his scholarship taken away and the other gets sent to a psychiatrist. However, the author says that although you see all these similarities in their stories, these two students could not have been more different. So he shares a story. About 20 years after this incident, Robert Oppenheimer wanted to be scientific director of something called the Manhattan Project. This seemed like a long shot. He was just 38, much younger than many of the people whom he would manage. He was a theorist for the job that required experimenters and engineers, had absolutely no administrative experience, and even his political affiliations were shady. And it goes without mentioning that he tried to kill his tutor in grad school. As the author puts it, this was the resume of the man who was trying out for what might have been said to to be one of, to be one of the most important jobs of the 20th century. And the same exact thing happened. Robert Oppenheimer got everyone to see things his way. So the author here asks a question: would Oppenheimer have lost his scholarship at Reed? Would he have been able, unable to move his classes to another time? And the author answers his own question: of course not. This is not because Robert was smarter than Chris. It's because he possessed the kind of social skill that allowed him to get what wanted from the world.

The author then gives a short story about Chris Langan here. Chris, a man who is exceptionally gifted in calculus and math, was required to take calculus in Montana State. However, his professor was someone who taught it in an incredibly dry manner, so Chris decided to ask him why he teaches it this way. The answer he received was honestly sad. The professor looked at him and said, "Some people just don't have the intellectual firepower to be mathematicians." The saddest part of this entire story is that Chris managed to have an entire conversation with his calculus professor without ever communicating the most important fact. The professor never realizes that Chris Langen is good at calculus.

So what was lacking, right? According to professor— to psychologist Robert Sternberg, the skill of knowing what to say to whom, when to say it, and knowing how to say it all falls under the category of what he calls practical intelligence. This is a skill that the author says is knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want.

Additionally, it's a kind of intelligence separate from the analytical ability measured by IQ. General intelligence and practical intelligence are orthogonal. The presence of one doesn't imply the presence of another. So where does practical knowledge come from? We know analytical knowledge can, in part, come from your genes. For example, Chris Langan started talking at 6 months. He taught himself to read by 3. He was born smart. However, social savviness is knowledge that has to be learned, usually from our families.

One example of this is a study that was conducted by the sociologist Annette Lareau. She picked a group of 12 third graders from different races and financial status. She would visit the families of these kids hours on end. She would follow them to all of their activities, to their school, and to their appointments. She realized that there were two parenting philosophies, as she says, and these were divided almost completely along class lines. The wealthier parents were heavily involved in their children's free time and were always doing intensive scheduling for their kids. This was almost completely absent from the poorer children. Play for them was not piano practice 3 times a week. It wasn't soccer practice. It was playing around with other kids from their neighborhood and making up games. She mentioned that the middle to higher class parents talked about a lot of things with their children. They encouraged negotiation, questioning, and challenging. These parents also challenged authority, encouraged the challenging of authority. Leroux gives an example of a kid misses qualifying for a program. Her mother arranges a retest, creates a whole petition, and gets her daughter admitted. Leroux also says that these poorer parents were intimidated by authority. They were more passive and subdued. In their eyes, it was the teacher's job to manage their kids' education, not theirs. Leroux calls the strategy displayed by the middle to higher class parents concerted cultivation. Quoting directly from the book, it is an attempt to actively foster and assess a child's talents, opinions, and skills. Poor parents, on the other hand, display a strategy of accomplishment of natural growth. They see it as their responsibility to care for their kids while letting them grow and develop on their own. So just to clarify here, LeRoux did say that no one style is more morally better than the other. The poorer kids, on one hand, were often better behaved, less whiny, more creative with their time, and more independent. However, she says, practically, concerted cultivation had many advantages. The heavily scheduled child is introduced to many experiences. This child learns teamwork, structure, interaction with adults, and how to speak up if needed. Leroux says they acted as though they had a right to pursue their own individual preferences and to actively manage interactions in institutional settings. They were open to sharing info and asking for attention. By contrast, poorer children had more distrust, distance, and constraint. They never learned to customize their environment to their advantage. These skills that the more wealthy children have did not come from genetics. They didn't come from race or ethnicity. They received these skills because of the nudging and encouragement from parents. And the wealthier child is better off than the poorer one. Not only because he is richer and goes to a better school, but also because, as the author says, the attitude he has learned is one perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world.

Going back to Robert Oppenheimer and Chris Langan, this was an advantage Robert had and Chris did not. Oppenheimer was raised in a wealthy neighborhood, driven by a chauffeur, and went to one of the most progressive schools in the nation. This is why Oppenheimer was able to handle his challenges so well. Chris Langan, on the other hand, grew up poor in an unstable home run by an angry, drunk stepfather. This is what Chris learned: distrust authority, be independent. Taking a trip back to the last chapter, When Turman's termites, a group of people dubbed geniuses, were into adulthood, Turman looked at all the records and divided them up into 3 groups. 150 people, top 20%, fell into the A group. These guys were the true success stories. The middle 60% were the B group, and the bottom 150 people were the C. So Terman decided to run through every explanation. He looked at physical, mental health, their hobbies, IQ, and many more things. In the end, only one thing mattered, and that was family background. The A's came from middle-high class families. Their houses consisted of books, and their parents had college degrees. The C's, on the other hand, were completely different. Almost a third of them had a parent who dropped out of school before 8th grade. These are all people who were true outliers at a young age and had some incredible mental capacity. The sad truth, though, is that almost none of these geniuses from low social and economic classes made a name for themselves.

So, this chapter shows that these people faced a problem very similar to Chris Langan. Right? He never had help along the way, and neither did many of these people. And as the author states in the closing words of this chapter, no one— not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses— ever make it alone. So this chapter really stood out to me personally because, A, it kept it real, right? Even though we may see all these movies, all these— read all these books and see all these stories about people who made it by the, you know, by their own bootstraps and pulled themselves up out of the mud and did all these things, that in reality, the people who tend to succeed might really just be those who ended up having an advantage in the first place. Of course, no one is saying that there's no effort that has to be put in by yourself. Just because you're wealthy doesn't mean you're going to succeed in the end. But it shows that having that extra head start, as we discussed in the first couple of chapters in this book, really matters. I don't know, what did you think, Neil?

Yeah, I think one of the key takeaways for me from this chapter was that I think when you were setting up and we're looking at the young generation that has high IQ, making sure that for them to be truly like productive in society, that they have a system in place where, you know, their, their family life isn't neglecting their capabilities to actually add value in society.

So yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Yeah. And this, these words kind of bring us to the chapter, the end of chapter 4, right? And here we move on to chapter 5. This chapter is really interesting. It's labeled The Three Lessons of Joe Flom. And the author starts this chapter off with a bit more of an uplifting story than the one that we heard in the last chapter. About, about a man who you might have guessed is named Joe Flom. This man is a partner of a major law firm today, but wasn't that way his whole life. Joe grew up in the Great Depression in Brooklyn. His parents were Jewish immigrants and were desperately poor. They moved almost every year growing up and lived very meagerly. In junior high school, Joe took an entrance exam for an elite school in Manhattan. A school that produced 3 Nobel Prize winners, 6 Pulitzer Prize winners, 1 Supreme Court Justice, as well as an inventor of the polio vaccine, all in only 40 years. So after getting accepted at this school, he would obviously go there. After school, he would push a hand truck. He did 2 years of City College on nights. And work during the day to make ends meet. He signed up for the Army, served time there, then applied to Harvard Law School. Even though Joe didn't have a college degree, they decided to take him in, all because of the personal letter that he sent them.

One thing worth mentioning is he would never take notes, whereas his college classmates, classmates would write, make an outline of their notes, a condensation, and then again, Joe got. And so his classmates recognized him for having a great capacity for judgment, a great quality for a lawyer. In law school, Flom was named to the Law Review, which was an honor for top students in his class. He mentions that during hiring season, he went down to New York to interview for jobs. He says he was awkward and uncomfortable. He was one of two kids in his class who, by the end of hiring season, did not even have a job.

So this is really interesting, right? Here we hear— in the just the last chapter, we heard about a person who ended up or and started off kind of at the same place, right? Even though today he might not be extremely poor, he still hasn't achieved incredible things. But this chapter starts off with us having reassurance that this man, Joe Flom, is going to become a partner of a major law firm. But so far, all I've heard is the amount of struggle that he's had to endure and he's had to face. So I'm really curious about kind of his story and what, what really comes out of this. So I think one of the biggest turning points that happened in Joe Flom's life was one day, actually not outside of class, but in class. One day, one of his professors mentioned that there was a group starting a firm, so Joe decided to have a visit with them. He didn't have a job, just like many of the other people, and he decided to take a chance. In the beginning, he was an associate, but the author mentions that by 1954, he took over as a managing partner, and the firm grew, grew quickly. Soon the firm gained 100 lawyers then 200. When the number hit 300, one of Flom's partners said it was hard to imagine the firm growing beyond that. Flom infamously responded by telling him, "We'll go to 1,000." Today, this firm, which is known as Skadden, Arps, Meagher Flom, has almost 2,000 attorneys in 23 offices around the world, specializes in mergers and acquisitions, and earns billions yearly. Flom today lives in a luxurious apartment in Upper Manhattan. So why does this make sense, right? Going back to my original question, a child who grew up in poverty and the Great Depression makes his way up through sheer will and effort. Everything that we've talked about through these past couple of chapters shows us that success doesn't happen this way. Success can't do it alone. So Neil, how do you think he was able to do that, and what do you think were the big factors in his life that led him up to be able to do that?

So the author takes another dive into the life of Joe Flom, this time without his personality, intelligence, or ambition being part of the conversation. What were his opportunities, people who helped him? The author says that Joe Flom's story is intriguing because many of his disadvantages are actually advantages. The author dives into a story about Joe's time in law school and a classmate that shared many similarities with him. The classmate, Alexander Bickel, his parents were also Jewish immigrants who lived in Brooklyn. He had also gone to school in New York and then to City College. Bickel was also a star in his law school class. The author says that before his career was cut short due to cancer, he became perhaps the greatest constitutional scholar of his generation.

So the author gives a bit of a backstory about Bickel. During hiring season, Alexander Bickel went down to Manhattan to find himself a job, where he was rejected from his first interview. The author says that this was not due to a lack of mental capacity, but rather due to his background of immigrant parents and non-American origin. Although this was incredibly unfair, the author also mentions that this initial setback presented Bickel with a golden opportunity. Although many of the old-line firms did not like to involve themselves in hostile takeovers, by the 1970s, with less federal regulations and more aggressive investors, corporate takeovers saw a huge boom. Now, the things that these old-line firms did not want to do were the expertise of people like Flom and Bickel.

So there is also a story in a chapter of the garment industry where immigrants would arrive into New York City, and those that came from an area in Europe that had a background in clothing manufacturing was considered a stroke of extremely good fortune, right? They were born to parents that did meaningful work also. So to be children of these type of immigrants made a huge difference in the outcome of many of these people's lives as they progressed and started their careers. And one of the similarities that I kind of drew while I was reading about the situation of many of these Jewish Americans back in this day was that to— of currently Indian Americans. And a lot of Indian Americans with statistics, you know, they, they show the high achieving and all these good things, going to top schools and starting companies, but it doesn't mean that they're gifted. Maybe it just means that they also came at the right time and that helped to lead to a lot of the success. And that was one of the pieces of the puzzle.

And this proves an incredibly important point that the author has attempted to make, right? That when you are born or when you go into a specific field can matter so much, right? We talked in the first chapter about a hockey team that predominantly had people who were born in the first couple of months, right? And Here he gives another example about Flom and Bickle. If these two people were born previous to the time that they were, they probably wouldn't have had the success that they did. They might have just ended up being people who really didn't get their interviews, who didn't get the jobs that they wanted. And the author says that many people can make it based on which world that they live in, right? The world that my parents grew up in and even you grew up in was— is very different from the world that I'm growing up in right now, right? There's completely different things. I mean, when my parents were growing up, they didn't have iPhones, right? Now we do. They didn't have these laptops. They didn't have even podcasts, right? Like, something like this would never have existed back when, you know, in the 1970s. And so the author kind of talks about That the fact that it's up to you to recognize the latent potential in the era that you live in. And this brings us to the end of our episode for today. To me, this really showed that there's a lot of possibility no matter where you are, right? Sometimes I think myself, man, if I was just born at this point, things would've been so much better, right? At, if I was just, you know, here, things would be better. And it's not always about what time I was born either, right? If I was, just this way. If I was going to a different place, things like that. If I had different opportunities, there's always excuses that can be made. But one thing that this chapter really showed me was people like Flom and Bickle, people who seem to have so much adversity growing up, these people were able to make it out not just because of the luck, but also because of the fact that they were able to capitalize on it. If I'm able to be aware of what era I live in right now, of what opportunities are presented to me right now, and if I'm able to capitalize on them, then it can provide me with so much more and I can be so much more, just like these people are kind of showing us. And the point of this chapter, at least to me, wasn't about showing the luck factor. It wasn't about, oh, you know, it's— everything is a lottery wheel, and if you're born at this point in time, then you're you know, then you end up being successful. But if you're not, then you won't be successful. It's about seeing your opportunities and it's about learning on them. What do you think?

I agree with you. I think it's not really about saying like if you were born in a certain era, life was easier. And I think now more than ever, right, especially with YouTube, with podcasts, learning is pretty much universal, right? So just recognizing that The era that we're currently in is of if you're curious to learn something, it's within your capabilities. It's just about stepping up to the plate. So I looked at, I looked at this chapter in saying that these people recognize that they definitely had some innate talent from, you know, hard work. I mean, like they also had hardworking parents, but at the end of the day, they recognized that they had to make efforts to get to the level that they ultimately ended up in.

Yeah, absolutely. And I think through these chapters, the first one, we've definitely learned that you can be as smart as you want, right? If you aren't growing up in the right environment, if you can't create that right environment, there's a lot that could go— your life could go astray, right? So this is, you know, of course, to the parents to, you know, make sure your kids have that, that environment that they're growing up in. I'm certainly grateful for mine that they've created an environment that's better for me to grow in. And I'll definitely keep it in mind, you know, whether it's wealth or whether it's the values you give your kids, right? Ultimately, it wasn't just the wealth. It was the values that these parents were able to give. And we've learned that. We've learned the importance of effort, and we've learned the importance of capitalizing on your opportunities. So next time we'll talk more. We'll check out the next couple of chapters. Thank you so much, everybody, for listening. Thank you so much, Neil.

Thank you.

Yeah, we'll, we'll see you guys next time.