Response to "The Matthew Effect" from Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell

Question: "In what ways does Gladwell's examination of hockey challenge traditional notions of success as merely the result of hard work and talent?"

Gladwell's examination of hockey challenges traditional notions of success because Gladwell is suggesting that the success of young hockey players is because of a cut off date. Gladwell explains to the audience that because Canada sets the age-based deadline for players qualifying for the team for that year at January 1, a difference is established simply based on the month of the player's birth. There is a difference in attention and practice the players that are closest after that cut off date receive versus players born later in the previous year.

This notion is best explained in the words of Gladwell; “A boy who turns ten on January 2, then, could be playing alongside someone who doesn't turn ten until the end of the year—and at that age, in preadolescence, a twelvemonth gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity.” This gives that player who was born on January 2 more attention from the coaches because he is more developed than the players on his team that were born sometime in November or December. This “twelvemonth gap in age” also allows that player with the January 2 birth date more time to practice and develop his skills than a player with the November or December birth date that may have barely made the age cut off for the team for the previous year. While in essence, these two players may have only been born a few months apart and may be developing in “physical maturity” at a similar rate, the January 2 player, who barely missed the age cut off date, has almost a whole extra year to improve his skills before he plays on the team. This gives the player an “enormous difference” over that other player. That other player with the November or December birth date has been lost in the shuffle of other players who were born many months before him in that same year and are many months more developed than him.

Gladwell challenges the traditional notions of success as merely being the result of hard work and talent because he believes that this age-based deadline is truly a significant factor in deciding the success of a player. He is saying that a player doesn't necessarily have to be a hard working and talented player, that player just has to have an advantage over the other players. Gladwell explains this best when he says, “Success is the result of what sociologists like to call "accumulative advantage." The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his peers. And that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still—and on and on until the hockey player is a genuine outlier. But he didn't start out an outlier. He started out just a little bit better.”

The author also uses this “accumulative advantage” explanation to show that his same thing is happening in the education system. If the school has an August 1 birth date deadline for the class for the next year, a child born on August 2 will barely miss out on making that year's class. But the extra time that that child gets to develop his skills over other students born just a few months before the August 1 cut off date gives the child the advantage of being “a little bit better than his peers.” Every subsequent year, the “advantage” that the August 2 child has gets a little more better than it already was. This makes “the initially small difference bigger still.”

But after all of that, what do we get from what Gladwell is telling us? In the case of the age difference when it comes to schooling, “The small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists. It locks children into patterns of achievement and underachievement, encouragement and discouragement, that stretch on and on for years.” To put it simply, “Opportunity plays a critical role in their success.” It's not so much talent that gets a child to exceed over his or her peers, Gladwell says it is opportunity. Our world may be much different today if we didn't have this conceptualization that we should be grouped by some made up cut off date. If we really think about it, certain people in history may or may not have succeeded simply due to this realization.