Outliers

I just finished reading Malcom Gladwell's book, Outliers, last week. For those of you who haven't read it, it's a book about what makes successful people successful. He looks at several seemingly unrelated variables, of which many of those successful people had to little to no control over. He looks at birth dates and birth years, and pinpoints several months in the year in which many successful people are born in, as well as specific years. He points to 1954-55 and 1930-31 as several years in which people were given amazing opportunities as a result of the years in which they were born. In his book, he also looks at Jewish people living in the 1930s in the states, and this is what I found to be most fascinating, because I can actually draw a parallel.

In his book, Gladwell writes about how when Jewish people were fleeing Nazi Germany in the 1930s, they came to the United States having already learned or mastered particular skills or a trade as a result of being confined to their own ghettos in Europe. They could not do business with those who were different from them, so they developed a specialized skill to help thrive in their own community. They brought their skills and trades with them, and when they went to New York, for the most part, they brought their trade skills with them and used them as they tried to survive in New York. Trying to feed their families and make it in the tough city that New York is, they saw potential opportunities for business and many of them became garment makers in New York. They worked long hours each night and prospered over their hard work. In some cases, their businesses flourished to the point that companies like Bloomingdale's began to pick up their lines, and the rest, as they say, is history, and New York remains one of the fashion capitals in the world.

As a result of this success, the garment makers' children learned the hard work ethic, business skills and survival skills necessary to thrive in todays' world. Many of the garment makers' children went on to go to medical and law school, eventually starting their own successful law firms and medical practices. It was through their parents that they learned how to specialize in a trade, and then to also start their own successful businesses. Some of those businesses are the largest in the world, one of which is Skadden Arps, a litigation firm based in New York.

I came away from reading that section of the book with a sense of enlightenment, but I hadn't realized that it also has something to do with my family, too. I didn't realize it until B was telling me about how the owner of the company where Barry works, who is Jewish, got his start in the family furniture making business, which fits in with Gladwell's observations.

My father is first generation American. His parents were from Norway and Sweden, and they both immigrated from their countries in the late 1920s, early 30s. My grandmother had no intention of staying in the United States, but the Depression hit, and she couldn't get back to Sweden. So she took up a job as a cook for a Jewish family in New York. My grandfather had been in a traveling singing group in Europe, but then he came to Hoboken, New Jersey in the same time period. He first got his start drilling doorways for speakeasies in Hoboken, but he eventually went to build ships in the Brooklyn shipyard.

Growing up, my dad lived in a community in Queens that was primarily Jewish. He actually thought that everyone in the world was Jewish, except for his Lutheran family. As a kid, he made money by doing little favors for the Jewish families, like digging holes for burying hair, climbing into windows to unlock doors (on the Sabbath, using a key to open a door is forbidden--even B's boss has a keypad to get into his house, because he can't use a key) and whatever else they wanted him to do. He was a poor kid, so he did whatever he could to make a few dollars here and there.

When my dad was older, he began learning how to make furniture. When I was very little, he had taken an old cabin and turned it into a woodworking shop where he began to make his own furniture. The only problem was that at this point, he was in Virginia, and very far away from any place where he could have made a viable business out of it. But still, he had learned a thing or two from the community where he was from. He learned that he had to have a trade, or a skill.

To adapt to the environment that was as constrictive as it was, he realized that people needed to have their furniture refinished. People in my hometown are notoriously cheap. I suppose it comes from their Confederate hardships that were carried down from generation to generation, but nevertheless, people weren't really interested as much in buying handmade furniture as they were in having their own furniture refinished so that it could last longer. He set up shop in the early 1980s, right when the recession was at its lowest point, and right when people were trying to make everything last for as long as it could.

My father owned and operated his furniture business for 15 years, with its start in a little cabin, to its end in a store on a main highway in my old hometown, which ended because of a divorce and because he was tired of smelling the chemicals that were used for stripping the furniture. He had managed to secure contracts with a local private college and he refinished all of the college's furniture each summer.

As a kid, I went to the store after school and learned the ropes of his business. I saw a strong work ethic everyday and even today, I know what it takes to run a business, which actually helps me with my current career. And it all started from my dad's roots in a Jewish neighborhood in Queens, New York.

I also realized that my uncle also benefited from these roots, too, perhaps even more so. He learned how to mould plastic, and from the 1970s through the mid-1990s he ran his own small business making plastic moulds. After giving up on running his own business, he started a consulting business for plastics plants. He met a man who offered to help him get started with his own large plant, and gave him the money he needed to get his business running. From that point, my uncle managed to do exceedingly well, and managed to get contracts with major cosmetic and pharmaceutical firms, and made plastic items for those companies. The best part of that is that he was approached by both Disney and McDonald's to make various plastic items for them, and he turned them down because they were trying to cheat him out of what he thought he deserved. He said that only a fool would take that money. I admire that part of him, and I know that sometimes the biggest companies will try to screw you the hardest.

My uncle also works LONG hours. He often goes to work at 6:30am, and will work until 8pm. There are times when he doesn't come home until 1am. He is tired, and his whole body aches from his hard work, but again, like the Jewish immigrants from the 1930s, he has prospered from that work ethic, and his kids are set for life. And now that my dad is no longer able to work, I also know that if my dad ever needs any help, my uncle is there to help him. Although I haven't reaped the benefits of my father's hard work in a financial sense, I did learn work ethic, and I believe that that work ethic is what is necessary for our country to survive. I only wonder if there are too little of us that actually have a trade or a skill to carry forward, so that our future generations will learn the same work ethic that I and my family did.