Timing and Historical Context Theme Analysis

Outliers is deeply concerned with the role of historical context and timing in determining success. Having a set of skills that one develops through hard work is not enough to guarantee success. In addition, one must also live in a time when those skills are valued by your culture. Your historical moment might also prevent you from acquiring certain skills. For example, Gladwell argues that if you entered the workforce as a computer scientist (say, at IBM) before the era of personal computers, when the personal computer did finally become mainstream, you would be too invested in the “old” way of doing things. You would be inevitably stuck in a historical status quo, and you would never attain the level of success of someone like Steve Jobs or Bill Gates, both of whom benefitted greatly from the timing of their involvement in the personal computer and software revolution. Gladwell uses statistical analysis to support his argument that timing plays a key role in determining success by examining the average age of Silicon Valley titans like Gates and Jobs: he finds that many of the most successful entrepreneurs of the computer age were born in or around 1955, placing them at the right time (and at the right age) to ride the wave of the personal computer revolution. Gates and Jobs are extreme examples of outliers, of course, but Gladwell “pans out,” so to speak, to show that almost any major success story can trace its roots to the societal context in which it occurred.