Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell Page A

the Termites—and dispensed with IQs altogether—he 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 concluded, “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 what? If we want to understand the likelihood of his becoming a true outlier, we have to know a lot more about him than that.

CHAPTER FOUR
    The Trouble with Geniuses, Part 2
    “AFTER PROTRACTED NEGOTIATIONS, IT WAS AGREED THAT ROBERT WOULD BE PUT ON PROBATION.”
    1.
    Chris Langan’s mother was from San Francisco and was estranged from her family. She had four sons, each with a different father. Chris was the eldest. His father disappeared before Chris was born; he was said to have died in Mexico. His mother’s second husband was murdered. Her third committed suicide. Her fourth was a failed journalist named Jack Langan.
    “To this day I haven’t met anybody who was as poor when they were kids as our family was,” Chris Langan says. “We didn’t have a pair of matched socks. Our shoes had holes in them. Our pants had holes in them. We only had one set of clothes. I remember my brothers and I going into the bathroom and using the bathtub to wash our only set of clothes and we were bare-assed naked when we were doing that because we didn’t have anything to wear.”
    Jack Langan would go on drinking sprees and disappear. He would lock the kitchen cabinets so the boys couldn’t get to the food. He used a bullwhip to keep the boys in line. He would get jobs and then lose them, moving the family on to the next town. One summer the family lived on an Indian reservation in a teepee, subsisting on government-surplus peanut butter and cornmeal. For a time, they lived in Virginia City, Nevada. “There was only one law officer in town, and when the Hell’s Angels came to town, he would crouch down in the back of his office,” Mark Langan remembers. “There was a bar there, I’ll always remember. It was called the Bucket of Blood Saloon.”
    When the boys were in grade school, the family moved to Bozeman, Montana. One of Chris’s brothers spent time in a foster home. Another was sent to reform school.
    “I don’t think the school ever understood just how gifted Christopher was,” his brother Jeff says. “He sure as hell didn’t play it up. This was Bozeman. It wasn’t like it is today. It was a small hick town when we were growing up. We weren’t treated well there. They’d just decided that my family was a bunch of deadbeats.” To stick up for himself and his brothers, Chris started to lift weights. One day, when Chris was fourteen, Jack Langan got rough with the boys, as he sometimes did, and Chris knocked him out cold. Jack left, never to return. Upon graduation from high school, Chris was offered two full scholarships, one to Reed College in Oregon and the other to the University of Chicago. He chose Reed.
    “It was a huge mistake,” Chris recalls. “I had a real case of culture shock. I was a crew-cut kid who had been working as a ranch hand in the summers in Montana, and there I was, with a whole bunch of long-haired city kids, most of them from New York. And these kids had a whole different