A tale of opportunity and legacy
4th July 2009

This is the story of a book, a movie and a life.

In his recent book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell dissects some of the world’s most highly successful people in pursuit of the idea that nurture trumps nature. According to Gladwell success is due to happy accidents of legacy and opportunity, from something as simple as being born at the right moment in history, to something as complex as inheriting a particular set of cultural values and practices.

Bill Gates, for example, was born at the perfect time – 1955 – to be an inquisitive young teenager at the precise moment that computers became accessible. If he’d been born a few years earlier he would have been already too set in his ways to grasp the vision of desktop computing. A few years later and someone else would have beaten him to it.

Furthermore, his parents sent him to a private school where the PTA mums banded together to buy a computer in 1968 to which young Bill had unlimited access. 1968! - in Tuatapere we’d only just got television.

Gladwell points out that what appears to be raw talent is sometimes the product of deep social bias. He explains the apparently random preponderance of top Canadian ice hockey players with birthdays in January or February as a result of the grading cut off date of 1 January. A ten year old with a January birthday will be slightly bigger and stronger than his age group peer born in October or November, and will therefore be more likely to be picked for the rep team, where he will get better coaching and more game time which will eventually make the accident of birth seem like an accident of talent.

Ideas of legacy and opportunity appear also in the movie Bride Flight, currently screening in Christchurch. It is based on the true story of a planeload of Dutch immigrants to New Zealand in 1953, following the lives and loves of several men and women as first they zig-zag their way across the globe in one of the earliest long-haul flights, and then grapple the reality of immigration in this strange, wild, unpeopled land.

Some succeed, some fail, some do both in either order, others muddle along. The fortune of each is determined by personality, luck and ability. The Dutch themselves will tell you it is down to sheer hard work. Gladwell would pick apart each individual’s life to reveal their DNA of legacy and opportunity.

Drina Verstappen, my mother, should have been on that plane. In 1953 she was preparing to join her fiancée who had left for New Zealand the previous year. She turned down a place on the aircraft because there was no room for her two travelling companions, opting instead for the sea route on the immigrant ship Subayak via the Panama Canal.

Like all immigrants my mother became an outlier the moment her feet left her native soil. When she walked up the gangplank she changed the course of her life forever.

I have often wondered at the breath-taking magnitude of that decision. There has been nothing to match it in my own life.

My mother possessed neither wealth nor education. She knew nothing of the world beyond the small villages and farms of southern Holland. What she did was to seize the only opportunity she had ever been offered to set her own course and break free of a past marked by war, economic malaise and tradition.

Drina is 83 now. It takes a long life to reveal a big story and as the years unfolded I have come to understand that the experiences of my mother’s early life in Holland, so easily dismissed as hardships, became assets in New Zealand. In particular, the act of emigrating gave her a courage that she has never lost.

Although she possesses neither fame nor fortune Malcolm Gladwell would appreciate my mother’s story. Like the heroes in his book she understands the ‘culture of possibility’ and has used it brilliantly to shape her own life, and mine.