Outliers: The Story of Michelle and Barack Obama
Yes I heart the cardigan. And yes I heart her arms. Mostly I heart Michelle Obama — I’ll have to get in line behind half the world it seems these days (and who can blame them?) — because she is such a warm, positive force for good. Not to mention the fact that she and that husband of hers have somehow made stodgy, power grubby D.C. the cool, hip, happening place to be (though they haven’t quite managed to scrub off the power grubbiness).
First Lady Michelle Obama spoke today at the Elizabeth Garrett Anderson Language School in London. (Yes, I want the Junya Watanabe cardigan!)
In London today she spoke at the Elizabeth Garret School where according to this Time article, 55 languages are spoken by a 95% ethnic student body. Watching her speech on CNN tonight, I was struck by how accessible, real, and completely confident she was in her own skin, as she talked about her childhood, about growing up in the south side of Chicago (not the good part), raised by working class parents, neither of whom went to university – a stay at home mom and a dad “who never complained…he just got up earlier and did the job.”
“Nothing in my life’s path would have predicted that I would be standing here, the first African-American first lady,” she told the students. “I am an example of what is possible when girls, from the very beginning of their lives, are loved and nurtured by the people around them.”
Watching her got me to thinking about Malcom Gladwell’s book “The Outliers” which I just finished reading. (Definition of ”outlier in Wikipedia: “In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data.”) In people terms Gladwell says “An outlier is the person who doesn’t fit into our normal understanding of achievement. They are men and women who do things out of the ordinary.”
Microsoft’s Bill Gates and The Beatles are outliers. By that definition so are Michelle and Barack Obama. Gladwell argues that our commonly held notions of success against all odds, of people rising above difficult circumstances through their own merit and effort, are in a word, “wrong.” “People don’t rise from nothing,” he writes. “The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves, but in fact they are the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and opportunities that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways that others cannot.” He goes on to describe story after story of successful people who were amazing, yes, but whose lives and successes were shaped by circumstance, age, family life, heck, even a particular month of the year in which you were born (in the case of Canadian hockey players, if you had the bad luck to be born after April then tough, you’re not likely to go pro.)
The book’s an engaging read populated by lots of interesting anecdotes but very little hard data — ironic since “outlier” is a statistical term — so it doesn’t quite make the case for me. It’s very interesting nonetheless. And it does apply to the Obamas who both came from humble beginnings and somehow got to where they are now, standing before royalty on the “world’s stage.” Their advantages? Not so hidden. As Michelle says it, she had loving and nurturing parents who valued education. In Barack Obama’s case, he had a dedicated mother who woke up with him at 5 am daily to take him through his lessons before he went to school (Read his wonderfully written “Dreams from my Father”.) It doesn’t take much common sense to know that a nurtured child will do better than one who isn’t.
Outliers. Obamas. The Story of Success.
