Outliers

Bill Joy is a cofounder of Sun Microsystems whose life story Gladwell uses as an example of his theory of success. Joy was a studious child who was talented in math and was thinking about a career in that field or in engineering. He chose the University of Michigan for college, in the early 1970s, and there fell in love with computers. Gladwell writes that the timing was significant: Computers at that time were large machines that were usually programmed by feeding punch cards into them, one for each line of code. In short, it was tedious and time-consuming. As computers progressed in power, they were redesigned to process tasks simultaneously. Known as time-sharing, this meant that one could run code without delay, and the University of Michigan was one of the few places at that time to adopt this advanced method.

Gladwell uses Joy’s story to show how many factors needed to combine for Joy to become successful. The most important of these was his decision to attend the University of Michigan, which had time-sharing when it was still rare. Beyond that, the computer center was open 24 hours a day, providing the maximum time to practice. What’s more, by chance, the students discovered a glitch that allowed them to work on the computers without paying; otherwise, this expense would have limited Joy’s practice time.