Outliers, The Story of Success

2.

I hope by now that you are skeptical of this kind of story. Brilliant immigrant kid overcomes poverty and the Depression, can't get a job at the stuffy downtown law firms, makes it on his own through sheer hustle and ability. It's a rags-to-riches story, and everything we've learned so far from hockey players and software billionaires and the Termites suggests that success doesn't happen that way. Successful people don't do it alone. Where they come from matters. They're products of particular places and environments.

Just as we did, then, with BillJoy and Chris Langan, let's start over with Joseph Flom, this time putting to use everything we've learned from the first four chapters of this book. No more talk of Joe Flom's intelligence, or personality, or ambition, though he obviously has these three things in abundance. N o glowing quotations from his clients, testifying to his genius. No more colorful tales from the meteoric rise of Skadden, Arps, Slate, Meagher and Flom.

Instead, Fm going to tell a series of stories from the New York immigrant world that Joe Flom grew up inof a fellow law student, a father and son named Maurice and Mort Janklow, and an extraordinary couple by the name of Louis and Regina Borgenichtin the hopes of answering a critical question. What were Joe Flom's opportunitiesSince we know that outliers always have help along the way, can we sort through the ecology of Joe Flom and identify the conditions that helped create him?

We tell rags-to-riches stories because we find something captivating in the idea of a lone hero battling overwhelming odds. But the true story of Joe Flom's life turns out to be much more intriguing than the mythological version because all the things in his life that seem to have been disadvantagesthat he was a poor child of garment workers; that he was Jewish at a time when Jews were heavily discriminated against; that he grew up in the Depressionturn out, unexpectedly, to have been advantages. Joe Flom is an outlier. But he's not an outlier for the reasons you might think, and the story of his rise provides a blueprint for understanding success in his profession. By the end of the chapter, in fact, we'll see that it is possible to take the lessons of Joe Flom, apply them to the legal world of New York City, and predict the family background, age, and origin of the city's most powerful attorneys , without knowing a single additional fact about them. But we're getting ahead of ourselves.