My grandmother was a remarkable woman. But it is important to remember that the steady upward path upon which the Fords embarked began with a morally complicated act: William Ford looked upon my great-great-great-grandmother with desire at a slave market in Alligator Pond and purchased her.

The slaves who were not so chosen had short and unhappy lives. In Jamaica, the plantation owners felt it made the most sense to extract the maximum possible effort from their human property while the property was still young-to work their slaves until they were either useless or dead-and then simply buy another round at the market. They had no trouble with the philosophical contradiction of cherishing the children they had with a slave and simultaneously thinking of slaves as property. Thomas Thistlewood, the plantation owner who cataloged his sexual exploits, had a lifelong relationship with a slave named Phibbah, whom, by all accounts, he adored, and who bore him a son. But to his "field" slaves, he was a monster, whose preferred punishment for those who tried to run away was what he called "Derby's dose." The runaway would be beaten, and salt pickle, lime juice, and bird pepper would be rubbed into his or her open wounds. Another slave would defecate into the mouth of the miscreant, who would then be gagged for four to five hours.

It is not surprising, then, that the brown-skinned classes of Jamaica came to fetishize their lightness. It was their great advantage. They scrutinized the shade of one another's skin and played the color game as ruthlessly in the end as the whites did. "If, as often happens, children are of different shades of color in a family," the Jamaican sociologist Fernando Henriques once wrote:

the most lightly colored will be favored at the expense of the others. In adolescence, and until marriage, the darker members of the family will be kept out of the way when the friends of the fair or fairer members of the family are being entertained. The fair child is regarded as raising the color of the family and nothing must be put in the way of its success, that is in the way of a marriage which will still further raise the color status of the family. A fair person will try to sever social relations he may have with darker relatives... the darker members of a Negro family will encourage the efforts of a very fair relative to "pass" for White. The practices of intra-family relations lay the foundation for the public manifestation of color prejudice.

My family was not immune to this. Daisy was inordinately proud of the fact her husband was lighter than she was. But that same prejudice was then turned on her: "Daisy's nice, you know," her mother-in-law would say, "but she's too dark."

One of my mother's relatives (I'll call her Aunt Joan) was also well up the color totem pole. She was "white and light." But her husband was what in Jamaica is called an "Injun"-a man with a dark complexion and straight, fine black hair-and their daughters were dark like their father. One day, after her husband had died, she was traveling on a train to visit her daughter, and she met and took an interest in a light-skinned man in the same railway car. What happened next is something that Aunt Joan told only my mother, years later, with the greatest of shame. When she got off the train, she walked right by her daughter, disowning her own flesh and blood, because she did not want a man so light-skinned and desirable to know that she had borne a daughter so dark.

In the 1960s, my mother wrote a book about her experiences. It was entitled Brown Face, Big Master, the "brown face" referring to herself, and the "big master" referring, in the Jamaican dialect, to God. At one point, she describes a time just after my parents were married when they were living in London and my eldest brother was still a baby. They were looking for an apartment, and after a long search, my father found one in a London suburb. On the day after they moved in, however, the landlady ordered them out. "You didn't tell me your wife was Jamaican," she told my father in a rage.

In her book, my mother describes her long struggle to make sense of this humiliation, to reconcile her experience with her faith. In the end, she was forced to acknowledge that anger was not an option and that as a colored Jamaican whose family had benefited for generations from the hierarchy of race, she could hardly reproach another for the impulse to divide people by the shade of their skin:

I complained to God in so many words: "Here I was, the wounded representative of the negro race in our struggle to be accounted free and equal with the dominating whites!" And God was amused; my prayer did not ring true with Him. I would try again. And then God said, "Have you not done the same thing? Remember this one and that one, people whom you have slighted or avoided or treated less considerately than others because they were different superficially, and you were ashamed to be identified with them. Have you not been glad that you are not more colored than you are? Grateful that you are not black?" My anger and hate against the landlady melted. I was no better than she was, nor worse for that matter.... We were both guilty of the sin of self-regard, the pride and the exclusiveness by which we cut some people off from ourselves.

It is not easy to be so honest about where we're from. It would be simpler for my mother to portray her success as a straightforward triumph over victimhood, just as it would be simpler to look at Joe Flom and call him the greatest lawyer ever-even though his individual achievements are so impossibly intertwined with his ethnicity, his generation, the particulars of the garment industry, and the peculiar biases of the downtown law firms. Bill Gates could accept the title of genius, and leave it at that. It takes no small degree of humility for him to look back on his life and say, "I was very lucky." And he was. The Mothers' Club of Lakeside Academy bought him a computer in 1968. It is impossible for a hockey player, or Bill Joy, or Robert Oppenheimer, or any other outlier for that matter, to look down from their lofty perch and say with truthfulness, "I did this, all by myself." Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky-but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all.

My great-great-great-grandmother was bought at Alligator Pond. That act, in turn, gave her son, John Ford, the privilege of a skin color that spared him a life of slavery. The culture of possibility that Daisy Ford embraced and put to use so brilliantly on behalf of her daughters was passed on to her by the peculiarities of the West Indian social structure. And my mother's education was the product of the riots of 1937 and the industriousness of Mr. Chance. These were history's gifts to my family-and if the resources of that grocer, the fruits of those riots, the possibilities of that culture, and the privileges of that skin tone had been extended to others, how many more would now live a life of fulfillment, in a beautiful house high on a hill?

Reading Group Guide

Outliers

The Story of Success

by

MALCOLM GLADWELL

A conversation with Malcolm Gladwell

What is an outlier?

"Outlier" is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. In the summer, in Paris, we expect most days to be somewhere between warm and very hot. But imagine if you had a day in the middle of August when the temperature fell below freezing. That day would be an outlier. And while we have a very good understanding of why summer days in Paris are warm or hot, we know a good deal less about why a summer day in Paris might be freezing cold. In this book I'm interested in people who are outliers-in men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are as puzzling to the rest of us as a cold day in August.

Why did you write Outliers?

I write books when I find myself returning again and again, in my mind, to the same themes. I wrote Tipping Point because I was fascinated by the sudden drop in crime in New York City-and that fascination grew to an interest in the whole idea of epidemics and epidemic processes. I wrote Blink because I began to get obsessed, in the same way, with how all of us seem to make up our minds about other people in an instant-without doing any real thinking.

In the case of Outliers, the book grew out of a frustration I found myself having with the way we explain the careers of really successful people. You know how you hear someone say of Bill Gates or some rock star or some other outlier "They're really smart" or "They're really ambitious"? Well, I know lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and they aren't worth 60 billion dollars. It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude-and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations.

In what way are our explanations of success "crude"?

That's a bit of a puzzle because we certainly don't lack for interest in the subject. If you go to the bookstore, you can find a hundred success manuals, or biographies of famous people, or self-help books that promise to outline the six keys to great achievement. (Or is it seven?) So we should be pretty sophisticated on the topic. What I came to realize in writing Outliers, though, is that we've been far too focused on the individual-on describing the characteristics and habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world. And that's the problem, because in order to understand outliers I think you have to look around them-at their culture and community and family and generation. We've been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looking at the forest.

Can you give some examples?

Sure. For example, one of the chapters looks at the fact that a surprising number of the most powerful and successful corporate lawyers in New York City have almost the exact same biography: they are Jewish men, born in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the mid-1930s to immigrant parents who worked in the garment industry. Now, you can call that a coincidence. Or you can ask-as I do-what is it about being Jewish and being part of the generation born in the Depression and having parents who worked in the garment business that might have something to do with turning someone into a really, really successful lawyer? And the answer is that you can learn a huge amount about why someone reaches the top of that profession by asking those questions.

Doesn't that make it sound like success is something outside of an individual's control?

I don't mean to go that far. But I do think that we vastly underestimate the extent to which success happens because of things the individual has nothing to do with. Outliers opens, for example, by examining why a hugely disproportionate number of professional hockey and soccer players were born in January, February, and March. I'm not going to spoil things for you by giving you the answer. But the point is that the very best hockey players are people who are talented and work hard but who also benefit from the weird and largely unexamined and peculiar ways in which their world is organized.

I actually have a lot of fun with birthdates in Outliers. Did you know that there's a magic year to be born if you want to be a software entrepreneur? And another magic year to be born if you want to be really rich? In fact, one nine-year stretch turns out to have produced more outliers than any other period in history. It's remarkable how many patterns you can find in the lives of successful people when you look closely.

What's the most surprising pattern you uncovered in the book?

It's probably the chapter near the end of Outliers where I talk about plane crashes. How good a pilot is, it turns out, has a lot to do with where that pilot is from-that is, the culture he or she was raised in. I was actually stunned by how strong the connection is between culture and crashes, and it's something that I would never have dreamed was true in a million years.

Wait. Does this mean that there are some airlines that I should avoid?

Yes. Although, as I point out in Outliers, by acknowledging the role that culture plays in piloting, some of the most unsafe airlines have actually begun to clean up their act.

In The Tipping Point, you had an entire chapter on suicide. In Blink, you ended the book with a long chapter on the Diallo shooting-and now plane crashes. Do you have a macabre side?

Yes! I'm a frustrated thriller writer! But, seriously, there's a good reason for that. I think that we learn more from extreme circumstances than anything else; disasters tell us something about the way we think and behave that we can't learn from ordinary life. That's the premise of Outliers. It's those who lie outside ordinary experience who have the most to teach us.

How does this book compare to Blink and The Tipping Point?

It's different in the sense that it's much more focused on people and their stories. The subtitle-"The Story of Success"-is supposed to signal that. A lot of the book is an attempt to describe the lives of successful people, but to tell their stories in a different way than we're used to. I have a chapter that deals, in part, with explaining the extraordinary success of Bill Gates. But I'm not interested in anything that happened to him past the age of about seventeen. Or I have a chapter explaining why Asian schoolchildren are so good at math. But it's focused almost entirely on what the grandparents and great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents of those schoolchildren did for a living. You'll meet more people in Outliers than in my previous two books.

What was your most memorable experience in researching Outliers?

There were so many! I'll never forget the time I spent with Chris Langan, who might be the smartest man in the world. I've never been able to feel someone's intellect before, the way I could with him. It was an intimidating experience, but also profoundly heartbreaking-as I hope becomes apparent in "The Trouble with Geniuses" chapter. I also went to southern China and hung out in rice paddies, and went to this weird little town in eastern Pennsylvania where no one ever has a heart attack, and deciphered aircraft "black box" recorders with crash investigators. I should warn all potential readers that once you get interested in the world of plane crashes, it becomes very hard to tear yourself away. I'm still obsessed.

What do you want people to take away from Outliers?

I think this is the way in which Outliers is a lot like Blink and The Tipping Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with The Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances, and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds-and how many of us succeed-than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

I noticed that the book is dedicated to "Daisy." Who is she?