IT ALL ADDS UP I owe my success, in part, to a Chinese man. He loaned my Jamaican grandmother the money to send my mother to university in England, which is one of those lucky breaks that you'll find in the stories of all the successful people I write about in Outliers. It's the first time I've ever written anything that personal in a book.
It follows the chapter explaining why Chinese people are so good at mathematics. I first became interested in this subject when I was having lunch with a guy in New York who owned a very successful company that makes headsets in China. He was Indian, by the way, and he was telling me about the work culture [on the mainland] and he was astonished by it. I think there is something very beautiful in that culture. So much of Outliers is a celebration of work, so to find a culture that has assigned so much meaning and importance to it made it central to the story.
RICE WORK Part of the explanation [for why the Chinese are so good at maths] is linked to rice farming. Rice farming is intellectually engaging because it is so complex [requiring extensive and intricate calculations for irrigation, terrace gradients and seed placement] and does not rely on machinery. Throughout history the people who grow rice have always worked harder than almost any other kind of farmer. Chinese farmers had sayings such as: 'No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year, fails to make his family rich.' But their work was meaningful because there was a clearer relationship between effort and reward in rice farming, and more autonomy, whereas the [farming] peasants of Europe were essentially low-paid slaves. If you were a rice farmer, you would have more control over your destiny than your counterparts in Europe. That is the difference between leading a life that is meaningful and one that is pure misery.
LUCKY MAN The self-made man is a myth. People who are honest about their success acknowledge that it's a complicated mixture of many different factors. Nobody [who I've written about] has yet challenged that notion. In Outliers I give an account of the lives of successful people, such as Bill Gates, and I've had feedback telling me he is pleased with my account of his life. I think he prefers the much more honest version of events. I think many people do. Gates knows he was lucky, he told me so as he walked me through his childhood. He had a lot of luck such as the extraordinary fact that he got a computer when he was 13 years old when nobody else had one. He knows the truth and he's not afraid of it. He's now devoting his life to philanthropy because he understands how much can be done for people by creating the sort of opportunities he had.
PLANE TALKING Probably the most surprising discovery I made while writing Outliers was during the research on the chapter about plane crashes when I found out that Korean Air's accident rate was very high in the decade 1988-1998 [excessive deference to authority meant that bad decisions were not questioned]. I've been criticised for making generalisations but I never even dreamt that there was such a strong cultural component. It's the Koreans who are the heroes in this story. I didn't write about them to denigrate them but to highlight their act of honesty and courage for acknowledging - in this one specific area - that their own cultural heritage fell short. They weren't squeamish about that at all. They were incredibly bold and honest. I wanted to write about the Korean Air crashes because I wanted us to learn from their lesson. They put the safety of their passengers first and their culture second. Every culture in the world should learn from that.
SCHOOL'S IN I feel a responsibility to help create opportunities. That is why the penultimate chapter of Outliers is about KIPP schools [Knowledge is Power Programme for children from low-income families that advocates longer school days and no summer holidays], which I work with. I put that in the book deliberately because their educational philosophy is the embodiment of the argument [in the book] that you can create opportunities from outside and that hard work is important, as is attitude. It's more than a school, it's becoming an educational movement and I'm going to continue to work with it by helping to raise funds and awareness.