I finished reading Malcom Gladwell's latest book, Outliers, a few nights ago.
I know what I have to say about this book is going to be completely esoteric, in the sense that you will likely have to read it before fully participating. Not that you're not brilliant people; I'm sure you can easily make sense out of my words. But my fear is that if you haven't read it, you may be tempted to take some of the things I say at face value, which is not how they're written -- they're written with the mental tapestry of Outliers as a background. I'm not sure of another way to do this, as I want to attempt to take the concepts Gladwell presents in Outliers one step further.
You should probably view these initial paragraphs as much of a disclaimer as anything else, as I don't want to "give away" the book for you. Go read it and come on back!
I enjoyed this read immensely, as I have all of Gladwell's works, and this is perhaps even my favorite. Where all his works provide plenty of abstract intellectual fodder for my mind to gleefully process for weeks, Outliers has a sharp edge of pragmatism that makes it special. It also contains tinges of the kind of social activism that really revs my engine, turns my crank, places my soapbox before a microphone... that kind of thing. Here's a few thoughts:
1. Education
How can the educational system continue to ignore works like this? In Outliers, Gladwell presents a bevy of facts (not to mention crystal clear logic) for how and why the college admission process, for one thing, is mostly an outdated ludicrous absurdity. But he doesn't stop there; it turns out, the social constructs we've built around most organized projects (schools, sports, music, etc.) have become self-fulfilling prophecies, archetypal facades that have been built on so many layers of edifice that they can no longer even see where they began, and for what purpose.
How does one even go about reforming these magnificent disasters of greed and perpetual fragmentation? Do we even try? I'm inclined to encourage the beginning of something else; to foster and support a brand new educational model, for example, that can hopefully someday replace the current system. (Gladly, some of this discussion has already begun: P21, KIPP, etc..)
2. Self-Made BS
I love the idea that the "self-made man" is a total myth. I've suspected this to be true for awhile, intuitively, so it's nice to see some logical background for it. The truth is, nobody makes it on their own. EVER.
This makes infinitely more sense to me. People don't live in a vacuum; we are constantly "made" by our social surroundings. That's not to say we have no control, but once we begin to realize that we need to change our surroundings and not just ourselves, I think we'll be a long way towards undersatnding how to better create the future.
3. Social Assessments
How can we connect an understanding of the social construction component in success with studies of our own lives, past and future?
This is the issue that intrigues me the most about the implications of Outliers: is there a way to somehow extrapolate a model from Gladwell's work to where we could analyze our own life story -- our own social constructs, our family backgrounds, the month and year in which we were born, and the particular moment of history we were born into -- and combine it with personal research into individual talents and strengths, and then multiply that knowledge by what we are passionate about, thereby providing a much more insigntful process into each person's unique "place in the world"...??
Seems like a an intense endeavor, to say the least, but just imagine the possibilities if we could! We've already made so much progress within individualized assessments (psychological, emotional, talent, etc.); why couldn't we develop systems to generate "social" or "contextual" assessments?
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I came across an fascinating list of stats provided by Dr. Donald E. Wetmore, the President of the Productivity Institute in Connecticut. Some pretty interesting stuff in here!
- There will be 2 million marriages in this country this year and 1 million divorces. 95% of divorces are caused by a “lack of communication”
- The average working person spends less than 2 minutes per day in meaningful communication with their spouse or “significant other”. The average working person spends less than 30 seconds a day in meaningful communication with their children.
- 80% of employees do not want to go to work on Monday morning. By Friday, the rate only drops to 60%.
- 31% of working Americans do not use all their vacation time that they have earned. On average, three out of twelve (one quarter!) of all vacation days go unused.
- The average person gets 1 interruption every 8 minutes, or approximately 7 an hour, or 50-60 per day. The average interruption takes 5 minutes, totaling about 4 hours or 50% of the average workday. 80% of those interruptions are typically rated as “little value” or “no value” creating approximately 3 hours of wasted time per day.
- On an average day, there are 17 million meetings in America.
- By taking 1 hour per day for independent study, 7 hours per week, 365 hours in a year, one can learn at the rate of a full-time student. In 3-5 years, the average person can become an expert in the topic of their choice, by spending only one hour per day.
- 95% of the books in this country are purchased by 5% of the population. 95% of self-improvement books, audio tapes, and video tapes purchased are not used.
- 97% of workers, if they became financially independent, would not continue with their current employer or in their current occupation.
- 20% of the average workday is spent on “crucial” and “important” things, while 80% of the average workday is spent on things that have “little value” or “no value”.
- In the last 20 years, working time has increased by 15% and leisure time has decreased by 33%.
- A person who works with a “messy” or cluttered desk spends, on average, 1 1/2 hours per day looking for things or being distracted by things or approximately 7 1/2 per workweek. “Out of sight; out of mind.” When it’s in sight, it’s in mind.
- The average reading speed is approximately 200 words per minute. The average working person reads 2 hours per day. A Speed Reading course that will improve the reading rate to 400 words per minute will save an hour per day.
- 90% of those who join health and fitness clubs will stop going within the first 90 days.
- 9 out of 10 people daydream in meetings.
- 60% of meeting attendees take notes to appear as if they are listening.
- 40% of working people skip breakfast. 39% skip lunch. Of those who take a lunch break, 50% allow only 15 minutes or less.
- The average American watches 28 hours of television per week.
- 78% of workers in America wish they had more time to “smell the roses”.
- 49% of workers in America complain that they are on a treadmill.
- Angry people are twice as likely to suffer a heart attack as a person in better control of their emotions.
- 75% of heart attacks occur between the hours of 5:00 a.m.-8:00 a.m., local time, and more heart attacks occur on Monday than on any other day of the week.
- 25% of sick days are taken for illness. 75% of sick days are taken for other reasons.
- 95% of the things we fear will occur, do not occur.
- Taking 5 minutes per day, 5 days per week to improve one’s job will create 1,200 little improvements to a job over a 5 year period.
- 1 out of 3 workers changes jobs every year.
- 1 out of 5 people moves every year.
- 70% of American workers desire to own their own business.
- 75% of American workers complain that they are tired.
- The average worker gets a 6 hours and 57 minutes of sleep per night.
- The average worker spends 35 minutes per day commuting.
- When someone is asking for our time for a meeting, 80% of the time, there is an alternate date and time that will be acceptable.
- Good time managers do not allocate their time to those who “demand” it, but rather, to those who “deserve” it.
- The most powerful word in our Time Management vocabulary is “no”.
- 1 hour of planning will save 10 hours of doing.
- Hiring a college student to do routine tasks (grocery shopping, yard work, household chores, etc.) will create as much as 20 hours per week for the average person to devote to more productive uses.
- The average person today (1999) receives more information on a daily basis than the average person received in a lifetime in 1900.
- We retain 10% of what we read. We retain 20% of what we hear. We retain 30% of what we see. We retain 50% of what we hear and see. We retain 70% of what we say. We retain 90% of what we do.
- Half of what is known today, we did not know 10 years ago. The amount of knowledge in the world has doubled in the last 10 years. And it is said to be doubling again every 18 months.
UPDATE DECEMBER 2025
Many years ago, I came across an idea called "The Tytler Cycle" — you can still read my original post about it below if you like (although it's mostly a re-post of someone else's thoughts).
These days, I find the Tytler model to be less helpful.
It might still be accurate, at least from a spiritual perspective, but doesn't strike me as terribly constructive in what it adds to how we actually interact with the systems that reinforce these cycles, nor does it go deeply enough into what generates these cycles to begin with.
If you'd like more of my recent thinking on cycles and related topics, please check out the following:
- The Fourth Turning Explained — Article or Podcast or YouTube
- Why Is Capitalism Bad? — Article or Podcast or YouTube
- Living In The Age Of Compound Change — Article or Podcast or YouTube
- The Hidden Violence Destroying Your Life — Article or Podcast or YouTube
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ORIGINAL POST (NOVEMBER 10, 2008):
I was meaning to write a profound and incendiary blog post today about something I recently learned of called The Tytler Cycle, but in my research, I came across an article written by John Eberhard and posted here.
I don't know anything about the author or the website it came from, but this essay is fascinating and communicates some of the very things I considered writing about. Eberhard posted his article on September 15, 2003, but it seems just as poignant today, if not more so.
Here's his post:
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Alexander Tytler [was] a Scottish historian who lived at the same time as the American Founding Fathers, [and] described a repeating cycle in history. He had found that societies went through this same cycle again and again, and that the cycle lasted roughly 200 years each time.
Tytler said the cycle starts out with a society in bondage. Then it goes in this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
From spiritual faith to great courage;
From courage to liberty;
From liberty to abundance;
From abundance to complacency;
From complacency to apathy;
From apathy to dependence;
From dependence back into bondage.
Tytler organized these items in a circle:
So to give a little more on the sequence above, a society starts out in bondage, meaning no or very limited freedoms. Now faced with a very difficult situation (bondage), they turn to religion and religious faith. Through this they achieve the courage they need to fight for and win their freedom. Next, through the benefits of freedom, they achieve an abundance in material things.
Now we start into the other side of the circle/cycle. We get selfishness and laziness setting in. Then we get apathy and finally dependence. Then we arrive back up at the top with bondage again.
I was intrigued. I looked for information on Tytler on the Internet, could find none, and finally wrote to Dr. Brooks. [Note: Dr. Shannon Brooks gave a lecture on politics at George Wythe College in Salt Lake City called "The Liber," which is where Eberhard learned of Tytler.] He told first how to spell Tytler's name, and told me that most of Tytler's work has been completely lost. On further online search I found a number of sites with limited information on Tytler, but little more than what Brooks had said in his lecture.
I found this cycle to be very interesting in relation to where we are in the United States today. Dr. Brooks said he has asked the question of where the U.S. is in this cycle, in every one of these lectures he has given, to over 10,000 people to date. No one so far has said that we are on the right side of the cycle (spiritual faith, courage, liberty, abundance). Everyone has said we are somewhere on the left side of the circle (selfishness, complacency, apathy, dependence).
Let's talk about selfishness for a second. We have a situation in America today where many people are trying to get whatever they can out of the "system," with no concern of how this hurts the overall group of the United States of America.
Remember JFK's words at his inauguration speech? "Ask not what your country can do for you. Ask what you can do for your country." You'd be hard pressed to find that sentiment in America today.
You've got one third of the US Post Office and the US Printing Office out at any given time on Workers Compensation disability. Does anyone really believe that at any given time, one third of those workers are injured so badly (and injured on the job mind you) so that they are physically unable to work? There are cases documented of federal government employees, for example, going out on disability in 1983, and collecting $5,000 per month for the last twenty years on a completely fraudulent claim. And only now is something being done about some of these cases.
How about all the damage claims cases in the courts? We've perhaps lost our incredulity for suits against the tobacco companies. But how about the new crop of suits against the fast food companies because they somehow misled people about the fact that their food is not really that good for you and (horrors) the customers became fat.
Recently a person sued his neighbor because that neighbor's dog bit him. And he won! Despite the fact that he was in the neighbor's yard at the time within the reach of the dog who was tied up, and was throwing rocks, antagonizing the dog!
Then we've got the welfare class. My mother taught school in the inner city, and would sometimes ask kids what they wanted to do when they grew up. They would sometimes reply, "Get high and get drunk." These kids' parents had been on welfare their entire lives and these kids expected to do the same. Why work or learn or achieve anything in class?
Selfishness Crisis
What we have in the U.S. today is a selfishness crisis. And believe me, this did not exist in any way, shape or form 227 years ago.
We have a generation, many of whom are looking for a way to bleed the system to get their "fare share." We could call them the "entitlement class." But it goes beyond the welfare class to people with jobs and careers, looking for some way to "cash in" in some way. There are many variations, but the common denominator is people looking for a way to get some kind of a free ride, in a manner in which they did not work for it or earn it.
This reaches even to the tops of corporate America, with the recent bunch of corporate executives and CEOs that had a lapse of ethics and conscience and seem to have forgot such annoying things as laws, in the interest of their own personal fortunes. Enron et al.
I'm not necessarily saying we are at the "selfishness" part of Tytler's cycle. We might have gone past that point. But we are at least up to that point. And complacency, apathy and dependence are not far behind. You could argue that some people today, such as those who have been on welfare for years, are in the dependence part of the cycle. I know that we had federal welfare reform passed a few years ago and that things are improving somewhat in that zone, but there's no question that dependency has become a way of life for a certain portion of our citizenry.
And when a people becomes completely dependent, they can be made into slaves. Rather easily.
What Next?
Since learning of this Tytler cycle, hearing the lecture myself and meeting Dr. Brooks, and discussing the issue with friends, I've been grappling with the idea that our country may go through a major crisis within the next 30-50 years.
As someone who feels that the United States is without a doubt the best form of government ever seen on this planet, the idea of such a crisis that could lead to what Tytler called "bondage" is very painful.
And yet, we can see the signs. Welfare recipients on the dole for life, people suing others for wacky reasons just so they can "cash in," state legislators and judges insisting that we must give billions in free benefits to illegal aliens, the concept of personal responsibility becoming a foreign concept, insurance claim fraud accounting for one third of all claims in California - all of these things weaken the group, the group of the USA. These examples penalize the ones who work hard and try to build a society, because these entitllement types are tearing it down. Those who take responsibility are hurt.
So is the cycle inevitable? Are we heading down the drain in the next few years? I wish I had the answer.
But I will say that I don't believe in the inevitability of our collapse. I don't think we can believe in it or that it's sane to believe in it. Otherwise that puts us squarely in the apathy part of the cycle. So I believe we have to assume it's not inevitable.
We need to educate people on the importance of ethics, of contributing rather than just taking, on insisting that people work for and exchange for what they receive. Only in that way can we reverse this slide. And I believe we can.
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P.S. Here's the Wikipedia page on Tytler