 "The Factors Behind Success" | 2009-11-05 |
| - Reviewed By belcanto78 |
In the never-ending nature vs. nurture debate, Malcolm Gladwell comes down squarely on the side of nurture in "Outliers." That's the fast and dirty gist of the book. Gladwell probably won't convince those on the nature side of the question, and in the popular imagination I doubt this will be the last word by a long shot. Still, he is an elegant, persuasive writer who gives us much to think about.
According to Gladwell, talent and hard work are only part of what makes someone successful. They are important, but circumstances have a lot to due with success as well. He gives examples to back up his claim. In Canada there is an elite Junior Hockey League, out of which many prominent NHL Players have come. In the team, he noticed a disproportionate number born in January. The reason that is that the league determines eligibility by calendar year, so children born on January 1 play in the same league as those born on December 31 in the same year. So adolescents born earlier in the year would be bigger and more mature than their younger counterparts, thereby being identified as better athletes, leading to extra coaching and a better chance of being selected for the elite hockey league. That is an example of cumulative advantage. Another example is with the disparities in education results between lower-class and middle-class children. The tests in early childhood that Gladwell quotes show no significant difference between the two groups at first, but with each year, the lower-class kids fall further behind. The reason is that middle-class parents over the summer constantly expose their children to learning opportunities that simply don't exist in most lower-class homes.
An interesting part of the book for me was his 10,000-hour rule- You can only truly become an expert in something once you've practiced it for 10,000 hours- natural talent makes a difference, but not that much of a difference. Gladwell gives examples from the experiences of the Beatles, Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, and others to demonstrate how, through their unique circumstances and opportunities, they were able to practice their craft for 10,000 hours.
"Outliers" is an excellent book which will hopefully spark a national discussion about success and the factors that create it. And maybe, just maybe, we can talk about how to change circumstances so that more people are successful. Much in his book is no doubt debatable, but it should be debated, and read, and pondered over. |
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 "Selecting for Success, One Policy and Culture at a Time" | 2009-11-04 |
| - Reviewed By wjr77 |
I already was aware that many of the methods by which society selects for "success" are biased towards many under-represented groups. I just didn't realize how many groups were under-represented: culture, language and most surprisingly: birthday.
I appreciated the fact that Gladwell opened the book with a story about Roseto, the small Pennsylvania community of Italian immigrants that lived like Italians. Leading towards abnormally low death rates from "American" health problems. In my own quest for a healthy lifestyle, this story was another level of reinforcement. But did Gladwell completely contradict it by speaking of 24/7/365 work in the book's closing chapters? I was rather aghast at the lifestyle required by children in the KIPP schools, especially after becoming familiar with John Taylor Gatto's Underground History of American Education, the fact that the modern education system was built to create a mass of people accustomed to dull repetitive work. However, the point here is that constant schooling is the only way to allow impoverished students to compete with their affluent counterparts.
Frankly, Outliers has led me to summarize that the individual is important to each life's success story but clearly contributes something more like 20% whereas societal context, background, culture, parental influence, etc... results in 80% of our outcomes as "people", and I place people in quotes because I doubt that we truly exist without such context. This may be tough medicine to swallow for a nation like America, devout in its adherence to individualistic ideas like entrepreneur-ship and hard work yielding big results. The philosophies of those around me in a corporate environment often leave little time for relationships and hobbies. The truth is that success is more like a combination of luck and preparation, as demonstrated by the 10,000 hours of practice being the key that set the Beatles and Bill Gates apart when opportunity came knocking. Perhaps the line between genius applied to scientific revelation and isolated anger is all too thin as denoted by Robert Oppenhimer and Chris Langan, respectively. Social background may limit more of our great minds than any other mechanism.
As stated above, most surprising to me was the role that birth date played in professional athlete selection. Seemingly a parody, it is sadly a very real demonstration of how our methods of choosing "winners" from little leagues to SATs lop off a huge chunk of talent from the overall talent pool that we can draw on to solve new approaches to human innovation. A "discrimination" that has played out in my own life, achieving acceptance to Stanford University's Graduate School yet being denied by University of San Diego despite the fact that UCSD admissions didn't review my file, they just saw that I didn't have a 700 quantitative GRE and refused to pursue me any further. I wouldn't want to be part of a school that selected merely on the basis of GRE, if my GRE score led to my denial as part of a holistic view of my record then I would gladly accept that outcome. Doubly so, I don't want to be part of a society that chooses people of status based on such ridiculous criteria, the absurdity of which Gladwell excels in exposing.
One could argue that the evidence of selection bias is too anecdotal but perhaps that is the crux of the entire argument: the stories we tell ourselves about success are outdated and it is time for some new ones. Outliers is a quick read and an important one. I hope that the architects of society at all levels take the opportunity to read or at least skim this volume. Outliers could very quickly and inexpensively bring equality and innovation to new levels of ubiquity. |
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 "Didn't we already know this?" | 2009-11-02 |
| - Reviewed By phjpatel |
I picked up Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers after viewing him on an interview with Charlie Rose. What I found intriguing was his explanation of why Asians are good at math. Gladwell claims that it is a combination of working hard and how numbers are heard in the Chinese language, which according to Gladwell is more logical. According to him, the work ethic derives from having to cultivate rice, which takes a good deal of labor and SKILL. I thought it was a bit far fetched. I still think so. There can be numerous other cultural explanations other than the one he proposes. China also has an internal control, a northern region that is predominantly wheat growing. He talks about this in a footnote saying that no studies have been done yet. Too bad, because otherwise the arguments are awfully faulty. Then again many of the arguments in the book are.
Success it seems rises from many different conditions (Didn't we already know that?). For Gladwell culture is an important component of determining success at any given field. Opportunity is another component. When opportunity and hard work comingle, then success is a result. Didn't we already know this? Charlie Rose asked him the same thing, and Gladwell said that the reason for his writing the book is that we don't seem to SAY this as a society but instead claim it is all due to hard work alone. I think this is FAIR for Gladwell to say. I think this is the main point of the book. Opportunity is important too.
The book is well written and I think the first half is more interesting than the last half, especially chapters 1-4. It is actually an interesting book if you are going to have kids; you can learn what to do to raise successful kids, like schedule 10,000 hours of practice (of what I don't know; a very few know what they want to do as a child). While Malcolm Gladwell doesn't say it, success seems to be sowed at an early age. You can also amuse yourself by wondering what went wrong if you are not currently successful. Sad to say, it may be too late. Oh well.
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 "A Review by Dr. Joseph Suglia" | 2009-11-01 |
| - Reviewed By User: AKP3K6EBNDGCJ |
According to Nietzsche, Kant writes what the common man believes in a language that the common man cannot understand. Malcolm Gladwell, it must be said, vigorously reaffirms what the common man believes in a language that the common man CAN understand, thus flattering the common man and "making him happy." "To be made happy": a Gladwellism for "to be satisfied with a consumer item, such as a book by Malcolm Gladwell."
In OUTLIERS (2008), Gladwell argues, in essence: "It is better to be mediocre than it is to be brilliant!" Perhaps that is too blunt of a truncation, but the book seems to welcome such simplicity.
We are introduced to Chris Langen, "the public face of genius in American life" [70], who nonetheless works in construction and "despairs of ever getting published in a scholarly journal" [95]. Langen fails because he was raised in abject squalor, and his mother "missed a deadline for his financial aid" [98]. By contrast, Robert Oppenheimer, a "success" for his complicity in the atomization of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, was "raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan" [108]. Other actors on the community-theater proscenium include Marita, a twelve year old from an impoverished family who gives up her evenings, weekends, and friends to slave away in one of New York City's most rigorous and competitive middle schools. She will succeed, Gladwell suggests, because she "works hard" and is given a "chance." Indeed, Bill Gates was a "success" because he was given unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal at the age of thirteen. The Beatles were a "success" because they forced themselves to perform eight-hour concerts in Hamburg between 1960 and 1962. Along the way, the reader is pepper-sprayed with anecdotes about Korean aviation and Kentuckian aggression that have no apparent relevance to the thesis of the book, except to "demonstrate" that one's "cultural legacy" sometimes has to be jettisoned in order for one to become "successful."
Gladwell is arguing, in nuce, that success--euphemistic for "financial prosperity"--corresponds not to one's intelligence, but rather to opportunity and social savoir-faire. The thesis isn't so much false as it is banal. Of course, one must have social skills and opportunity to be "successful." And yet I would contend, pace Gladwell, that even social skills and opportunity are not enough, by themselves, for an individual to succeed financially. Life never brooks such easy recipes (or follows such "predictable courses" [267], to use Gladwell's language).
What, precisely, does Gladwell mean by "intelligence"? Quite ironically, the author hypostatizes the Intelligence Quotient Test and thus subscribes to the false supposition that intelligence can be quantified and measured. If you receive 180 on the Intelligence Quotient Test, in other words, then you are a super-genius. Now, I did, in fact, score 180 on the I.Q. Test, but that, in itself, is no guarantor of my genius. Intelligence is an impalpable thing, and there is no necessary relationship whatsoever between one's intelligence and the I.Q. examination, just as, following Gladwell, there is no necessary relationship between one's I.Q. score and "success."
Moreover, Gladwell ignores the temporal differences that separate his stories. Oppenheimer lived in an America that was less intimidated by, and envious of, intelligence than the America of the twenty-first century. I differ from Gladwell, and my counter-thesis is the following: Even if Langen possessed superior social skills, it is very likely that he still would have failed in life.
Why? Because the culture has become a home for Swiftian Lilliputians, ever-ready to manacle down any Gulliver who comes their way. Yes, Gladwell is correct in suggesting that geniuses almost always fail and the mediocre almost always triumph, but he completely misses the reasons. You cannot possibly succeed if you are a genius unless you camouflage, to a certain extent, your intelligence. We are living a culture that, instead of lionizing intelligence, disdains it. Those who possess a higher intellect than the multitude are looked upon with acrimony and mistrust. Such is the "leveling-off" or equalization of all distinction to which polymaths and geniuses, such as myself, have long since grown accustomed.
Similarly, there is the impulse in this book to anathematize genius, as if genius were some kind of cancerous polyp that should be excised. It is not difficult to detect a certain defensiveness in Gladwell's anti-intellectualist posturing, not merely as if the myth that genius equals success needed to be debunked, but as if genius, in itself, were something intrinsically negative, threatening--damaging, even. Gladwell, non-genius, is content to attack genius in OUTLIERS with the same vehemence with which he attacked critical thinking in BLINK. And for exactly the same affective reason: Gladwell is as intimidated by genius as he is cowed by critical thought, for which he substitutes anecdotes lifted, quite uncritically, from single sources: books by John Ed Pierce, Richard E. Niebett and Dov Cohen, Kai Bird and Martin J. Sherwin...
Gladwell's most ardent admirers --- non-brilliant readers who want reassurance that their non-brilliance is a formula for success --- sigh plaintively and bleat. And the mediocre shall inherit the Earth.
P.S. Niccolo Machiavelli argued that the expansion of power comes from opportunity in the early sixteenth century. But he qualified: from opportunity and through cleverness ("virtu" in Italian).
Dr. Joseph Suglia |
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| "Thoroughly enjoyable & informative" | 2009-10-28 |
| - Reviewed By User: A3H4OE1MLBW55C |
| I just finished Outliers, and I really enjoyed it. Gladwell's insights into the everyday things we take for granted are not only interesting and entertaining, but informative. I can't wait to read his next work. |
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