Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers
Gladwell, Malcolm. Outliers: The Story of Success (New York: Little, Brown, 2008)
Malcolm (Tipping Point, Blink) Gladwell tells the stories of many exceptionally successful people, the "outliers" of his title, in an engaging fashion. On the nature-vs-nurture questions, Gladwell is firmly in the nurture camp--with a strong social and cultural emphasis. He turns up many interesting examples: hockey stars' tendency to be born in the early months of the year, Southerners' emphasis on "honor" that leads to a violence-filled culture, the Korean deference to authority (Hofstede's "Power Distance Index," or PDI) that led to airliner crashes--even aspects of his own Jamaican heritage. As he summarizes near the end of the book, "Everything we have learned in Outliers says that success follows a predictable course:"
It is not the brightest who succeed. [...] Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities--and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. (p. 267)Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don't. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky--but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all. (p. 285)
Amid all the tales, I found the "10,000 hour rule" to be most interesting:
"The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert--in anything," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. [...] "It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery." (p. 40, referring to the work of K. Anders Ericsson, an excerpt from which is here)
This dovetails with something I remembered about Wynton Marsalis:
"Once I got to eighth grade, I was practicing my horn at least four hours, sometimes six, every day. My father told me, if you want to be good and separate yourself from other musicians you have to be willing to do what they don't want to do. A lot might practice one or so hours, but almost none four or five." (Jazz in the Bittersweet Blues of Life, p. 128)
As much as circumstances may align in one's favor, those ten thousand hours are still hard work--and cannot be avoided. Gladwell has been criticized for his methodology (see Dalton Conley in American Prospect, Isaac Chotiner at TNR,
and David Wallace-Wells at Washington Monthly) but this book is nonetheless informative as well as enjoyable.
links:
Malcolm Gladwell (website, Wikipedia)
Geoff Colvin's article "What It Takes to Be Great"
Colvin's book Talent Is Overrated