Create West Virginia

Malcolm Gladwell, best-selling author of books such as The Tipping Point and Blink, has a new book out called Outliers: The Story of Success. In it he seeks to debunk our myths about what makes extraordinary people, such as genius scientists or billionaire business leaders, successful. His argument is that we tend to attribute their success to sheer genius and indvidual giftedness, when in fact it has a lot more to do with other factors such as: 

Timing - Many successful people have received the benefit of being born at the right time. Example: Kids who are older in their class, and therefore more mature in younger grades, tend to be perceived by teachers as more gifted than those whose birthday falls closer to the end of the school year. They begin to receive beneficial treatment at these earlier ages, which leads to a lifelong advantage.

Opportunity - Many of our most successful American business tycoons happened to receive amazing strings of circumstancial benefits when they were young, and they took advantage of these unique opportunities.

Cultural Characteristics - He points out unique aspects of Asian and Jewish cultures that have placed more of their members into positions of success. In the case of Asians, who highlights cultural factors that have enabled them to achieve more in the field of math, and in the case of Jewish immigrants in New York, enabled them to be positioned for success in the legal field. In many cases, a culturally derived work ethic is a valuable driver of success. He has an interesting section about Appalachian and Southern cultural traits vs. the rest of the United States where he highlights the "culture of honor" phenomenon. This is the tendency for people in these regions, based on long historical connections to their original European roots where this developed, to become more offended over perceived slights.

Parenting and Class - Children from middle or high-income families are taught by their parents to expect that they can shape the world around them, leading them to form an approach to life that is proactive and self-determined, vs. a more fatalistic approach by lower-income children who tend to accept their lot in life.

But more than anything else, Gladwell highlights a clear correlation between putting in hard work and becoming an "outlier" - someone who stands out from the rest in their given field. He writes about the 10,000 hour effect in which it seems to take that number of hours focusing deeply on a subject before mastering it. The trend seems to hold true across music, science, computer programming and other fields.

Like all Gladwell books, it's an interesting skim of existing research on related topics, wrapped up in easy-to-digest story snippets. Gladwell sometimes gets criticized for cherry-picking which research he chooses to highlight and not going deep enough, but it definitely caused me to think about West Virginia and our cultural antecedents relative to our collective success (or lack thereof) in areas of economic and academic achievement.

What can we learn from books such as Outliers that we can apply to our future? For example, it was documented in the book that children in Asian countries, which are at the top of the world heap in math test scores, put in up to 40% - 50% more time in actual learning time than American students. American students receive among the least amount of actual classroom time than other countries. When experimental schools in the United States are set up in similar ways as Asian schools, they actually begin to achieve at the same levels. This includes inner-city schools where the vast majority of students come from broken and low-income homes.

What would West Virginia be willing to invest in terms of time, energy and money to become an outlier, not in under-performance, but in high performance in economic and academic rankings?