Outliers, The Story of Success

5.

This was Terman's error. He fell in love with the fact that his Termites were at the absolute pinnacle of the intellectual scaleat the ninety-ninth percentile of the ninety-ninth percentilewithout realizing how little that seemingly extraordinary fact meant.

By the time the Termites reached adulthood, Terman's error was plain to see. Some of his child geniuses had grown up to publish books and scholarly articles and thrive in busi ness. Several ran for public office, and there were two superior court justices, one municipal court judge, two members of the California state legislature, and one prominent state official. But few of his geniuses were nationally known figures. They tended to earn good incomesbut not that good. The majority had careers that could only be considered ordinary, and a surprising number ended up with careers that even Terman considered failures. Nor were there any Nobel Prize winners in his exhaustively selected group of geniuses. His fieldworkers actually tested two elementary students who went on to be Nobel laureatesWilliam Shockley and Luis Alvarezand rejected them both. Their IQs weren't high enough.

In a devastating critique, the sociologist Pitirim Sorokin once showed that if Terman had simply put together a randomly selected group of children from the same kinds of family backgrounds as the Termitesand dispensed with IQs altogetherhe would have ended up with a group doing almost as many impressive things as his painstakingly selected group of geniuses. “By no stretch of the imagination or of standards of genius,” Sorokin con cluded, “is the 'gifted group' as a whole 'gifted.' ” By the time Terman came out with his fourth volume of Genetic Studies of Genius, the word “genius” had all but vanished. “We have seen,” Terman concluded, with more than a touch of disappointment, “that intellect and achievement are far from perfectly correlated.”

What I told you at the beginning of this chapter about the extraordinary intelligence of Chris Langan, in other words, is of little use if we want to understand his chances of being a success in the world. Yes,he is a man with a one-in-a-million mind and the ability to get through Principia Mathematica at sixteen. And yes, his sentences come marching out one after another, polished and crisp like soldiers on a parade ground. But so whatIf we want to understand the likelihood of his becoming a true outlier, we have to know a lot more about him than that.