Malcolm Gladwell's Secret Of Success

Thank you, Isaac, for continuing to lead the charge against these false prophets of interestingness. Ever since Malcolm Gladwell wrote his inane piece for The New Yorker about To Kill a Mockingbird, in which he combined the various bad ideas of others into a single turd of Gladwellian proportion, he has crossed the line in my mind from glib, offensively trivial, offensively best-selling purveyor of pop- -- well, pop-what? -- let's just say, tediuously written, self-satisfied musings on business and culture that are either wrong or obvious or irritatingly elusive as to which, to something harder to ignore -- the personal embodiment of a pet peeve, a symbol for all that is wrong with everything, evidence that even American elites don't know rigorous thought when they see it, and proof that the universe is decidedly, firmly, gleefully insipid. We have always had charlatans, and the old-style charlatans -- say, that disgusting "Secret" woman -- are still popular. Gladwell is a different sort of charlatan, a more dangerous sort. He presents himself as, is marketed as, and is generally seen as someone who has got something intelligent to say. He writes for the New Yorker. He appears on Charlie Rose. His books are devoured by otherwise smart people who, it turns out, are more attracted to obnoxious enthusiasm than serious thought. (It's the same reason everybody reads The World is Flat, except Friedman isn't nearly as bad.) Yes, you're being sold a bill of goods by people who don't know what they're talking about. I mentioned before that I wanted to see a great, high-profile Gladwell dissent -- a piece that would really take this jackass and his breed down a peg. Think of it as an expose of the new gurus. I think TNR and Isaac are the people for the job, but maybe the new Newsweek -- with its saucier tone -- might want to take it up for a bigger audience. Either way, let's get the message out there!

I hate piling on but I couldn't agree more. Gladwell looks like a caricature of the post-grad who sleeps in the university library and speaks in such tautological loops no one can disagree. His presence is entirely contrived, like his "scholarship". A Warholesque figure, he manufactures pure conjecture out of inverting conventional wisdom. And somehow he gets away with it. Is it the poker face?-- the bizarre appearance? The bold-faced lie? No, I'm not talking about Dick Cheney here.
His success utterly defies understanding. After I've read a paragraph by him I feel stupid; a page, an imbecile. I've attempted to read one of his books but was stupefied by its banality. I understand that it's nearly impossible to understand someone who's intelligence is more than two standard deviations from ones own: I'm perplexed in which direction Gladwells lies. Perhaps if he used more jargon and arcane language I could feel justifiably intimidated. No such luck.
Finally, I'll bet this guy starts his own think tank in a couple of years. (Where else to go from the NY Times best seller list, right?) And it will be funded by the likes of the McCormick and the Casey foundations. More evidence of a culture in decline.

I thought this was a pretty amusing parody

http://www.vanityfair.com/culture/features/2009/12/gladwell-200912

Gladwell is an idiot. His message of "practice,practice,practice" has a certain appeal for parents of superlatively average children who want to believe that "all children are gifted", and that everyone can achieve anything as long as they put their mind to it. What Amurican could disagree?

Too bad it is bullshit. Practice IS important, but although I have practiced piano more years and hours than George Li, his genius allows him to play things as a child that I will never learn in my lifetime. Listening to him play is an impressive antidote to Gladwell's uninformed, pandering musings.

http://adizzylife.blogspot.com/2009/07/green-with-envy.html

In "Music from the inside out", one of the Philadelphia orchestra members remarks on hearing 9 year old Sarah Chang do things with violin, that she would never do. So much for practice trumping talent, especially at least 10,000 hours--or maybe there is something to training in the womb.

I also remember a wrestler with so much talent that he could beat almost anyone while coasting. In his senior year he won the NCAA championship in his weight class even though he was completely out of shape. I wonder what 10,000 hours of practice would have done from him?

What I'm going to say may sound trivial and silly, but I remember reading an article by Gladwell in which he stated that diet mayonnaise tasted just as good as the real thing--and that's when I realized he may be full of shit.

Gladwell acknowledges innate talent exists. And in fact, he claims it is an essential ingredient, and of his hockey example he notes that only the innately talented players succeed. But he also notes that success is a function of talent + preparation. If George Li never practiced, he'd be just another guy that was pretty dang good on piano. But he also has a gift, and with what I'm sure is craploads of practice, the child is amazing.

So, Seattle, Gladwell's insight is that talent and practice are two ingredients of spectacular success in certain contexts. See ten random examples. Brilliant.

This is what I mean when I say that he's either obvious or wrong. (In the case of mayonnaise, just wrong!) He emphasizes rigorous practice. But, of course, rigorous practice is not always required to enjoy great success. What about talent? Oh, well, of course, talent too! What about those like Gladwell, for whom neither practice nor talent are "essential ingredients"?

He fails to make an actual point. He can't be bothered to make a systematic argument. He merely muses randomly, and, like gabriel, I feel dumber for the experience.

Thanks, adaglas, for the Vanity Fair link! Perfect.

jhildner1: You actually missed the point. The point was the 10,000 hour threshold. Just that number. Perhaps that figure is widely discussed by psychologists and neurologists, but it's not been out there in popular literation that I've seen prior to Gladwell. Yes, people pay for books that take the technical and arcane and make it digestible and entertaining by the masses. See Freakonomics. See The Black Swan.

And it's indeed interesting examined in such a wide range of contexts--contexts that are normally attributed to raw talent. And it's a wonderful teaching tool when your 10 year old spends 30 minutes on a skateboard, realizes he can't do the tricks he sees the older kids doing, and gets frustrated. Or when that same 10 year old thinks he "sucks at math" When I was younger the parents just said "practice makes perfect" and left it at that. Personally, I'm a bit more goal oriented and prefer a bit more data for my parenting lectures. :)

But Seattle, the 10,000 hour number is purely anecdotal -- not the result of systematic study. If Gladwell wanted to be a *popularizer* of the rigorous, otherwise inaccessible study of others, I would have no objection. In fact, we could use a lot more of that. But he's not that. He mostly ignores such study, or else cherry picks whatever counterintuitive, dubious "study" strikes his fancy. Blink, for example, was notable for its absence of discussion of the research of professionals in just the areas he was discussing -- research about which Gladwell was apparently unaware.

Moreover, the 10,000 hour number obviously doesn't apply to many fields of endeavor. In my field of the law, for example, advice to practice something, other than simply practicing law, for 10,000 hours would make no sense, and lawyers at the top of the profession will have practiced law for much more than 10,000 hours (about five measly years).

Besides, I still insist that it's painfully obvious that the top performers in certain fields -- say athletics or classical music -- spend their lives -- or, at least, their young lives -- practicing. And in fields like mine, it is likewise obvious that experience is key to performing at the highest level. This is all wisdom accessible from the armchair -- no breathless book required.

As for a child with a skateboard, I don't really see how the 10,000 hour number -- which both you and Gladwell identify as the key insight of Outliers -- has much relevance. Your kid isn't going to spend 10,000 hours practicing the skateboard, nor should he. If the point is the hard lesson that you need to practice something like that with a certain dedication, resolve, motivation, etc. in order to get good at it, well, once again, duh.

Gladwell articulates certain notions that are congenial to his readers, but he fails to develop them beyond citing often dubious examples of the notion at work, and giving the notion a catchy name. And he even botches the basic intellectual chores he deigns to take on. Often, his examples don't really prove the point he wants to make, but rather some other more tricky point he doesn't fully grasp. (He's smart enough to recognize a problem when he comes across one, and it's painful to read his efforts -- including generous use of weasel words and goal-post-moving -- to paper over them.)

It would be different if Gladwell purported to be a journalist -- someone who has decided to interview some outliers, for example, and share with us what he found. Two problems: He's trying to do more, to make a broader point, which he fails to do. Secondly, as journalism, his stuff would be tedious. His writing style is annoying as hell -- a sort of expository version of Dan Brown.

Anyway, what *is* the point of Outliers? It's not just this anecdotal "10,000-hour-rule," which anyone, I'm sure, could disprove with an equal or greater number of counter-examples. In fact, Gladwell emphasizes that circumstances beyond one's control can determine one's destiny, and perhaps society should invest in tapping unseen potential -- providing opportunities to rack up those hours.

So, what we're left with is that practice and/or experience and/or staying time, which are really three entirely different things, either more or less than 10,000 hours of it, talent, though we don't like to talk about that as much, and fortunate circumstances combine in some unknown measures to produce outliers. Time to call Little, Brown and sucker some yuppies!

The fundamental flaw of Outliers -- and his other books too -- is that Gladwell too freely draws general lessons from the sui generis. Outliers, by their nature as such, are not well suited to describing people or society generally. Gladwell gravitates toward the unique, the spectacular, the unusual. But those things tell us little about how the world works, precisely because they are unique, spectacular, and unusual. The story of Bill Gates, for example, is really the story of Bill Gates. It strikes me as downright silly to extrapolate from his experience a formula for producing Bill Gateses, because a few butterflies flap their wings at different times, and Bill Gates would be some other person with an entirely different story to tell Gladwell.

Many of us emphasize hard work when we think about success. Others emphasize talent. Still others emphasize opportunity and luck. Some focus on systemic social, economic, or political forces. Others take the micro view, and talk about attitude and habits of mind, or point to specific success skills one should focus on developing. (For example, someone may be smart on substance and hard-working too, but be hampered by poor interpersonal skills or a lack of confidence.) The obvious truth is that all of those things, which any thoughtful person could list while sitting at his or her kitchen table, play a role and in different measures for different people in different circumstances. It all depends.

I of course welcome systematic and rigorous discussion of any of those things. And that's just the sort of thing academics in a wide variety of fields do as they try to make quality contributions to the body of human knowledge, blissfully free of the Gladwellian fog of casual impressions. But Gladwell isn't looking at the world. He's looking at a few outliers, and so his conclusions, such as they are, are giant non sequiturs.

jhildner1, read the book. He cites several studies, the most detailed he walks through is from Ericsson and two other authors at Berlin's Academy of Music. He claims the study revealed distinct patterns emerged among violinists by the age of 8. Those that went on to do great things accelerated their practice times in the years to follow, hitting 16 hours a week by age 14, and 30 hours a week at the age of 20. Perhaps they went on to practice so much because they were good at it.

He then cites neurologist Daniel Levitin (page 40), who writes "In study after study, of composers, basketball palyers, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals...this number comes up again and again.

And Gladwell notes "In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours"

So, he's clearly leaving the reader with the impression this is well researched and settled among the experts. As I noted, that figure isn't widely known by the unwashed masses, and thus it's interesting and worth a 20 minute read for this particular chapter.

Agree on your listed ingredients for success. However, you are being too hard on Gladwell. Humans do a horrible job of understanding when they are witnesses something truly rare, sort of rare, and common. How many kids in high school right now think they have a shot at the NBA? Books such as Outliers (and The Black Swan) do a wonderful job of help people understand the magnitude of exceptionalism (good and bad) and rare events.

Are there exceptions? Of course. There will always be outliers to the outliers, right? His point about Bill Gates was really that there was a vacuum to be filled, and there weren't many people int he world at the time the vacuum was ready to be filled that had the experience (10K hours), vision, drive and freedom to do what he did. It's not that far fetched to believe at all. Stevel Ballmer has noted himself that if certain deals didn't go through, Microsoft would still be a small software firm on Northup (a street) here in Bellevue. He obviously recognizes that luck played a huge part in this.

These books aren't bibles, but they aren't filled with obvious drivel either.

I have my issues with Gladwell, for sure. I only made it a fourth of the way through "Tipping Point" before dismissing it as uninformative almost to the point of being obnoxious. He has his good articles though. His recent piece demolishing crime "profilers" was excellent, and this article on peoples' tendency to overestimate the seriousness of traumatic experiences is something everyone everywhere should read:
http://www.newyorker.com/archive/2004/11/08/041108fa_fact1

Like Levitt and Friedman, the guy is really hit or miss, and tends to oversimplify. Like Friedman, he is better at plain old reporting and simple analysis than he is at grand theory weaving. But unlike some commenters here, I'm not ready to cast him into the fires of Hell quite yet. Also, his monologue at The Moth, however untrue, was really funny.

Levitt is the worst of the trio in my opinion. He is just flat wrong about a lot of things, and has a habit of withholding all contradictory evidence from readers. This is bad in any writer, but downright sinful in an academic.

Seattle, more later, if you're so inclined. Can't get into it right now. I'm practicing being a master criminal....

Seattle, I did read the book, although, to be honest, I skimmed over some passages, lest I run into another superfluous description of an invariably "squat," unassuming building that happened to house someone's key to success. Gladwell's writing is filled with such descriptions, which are both unimaginative and pointless, as well as a Dan Brownian use of italics, condescending instructions to "think about" this or "notice" that, and hyperbolic expressions of amazement -- thus-and-so mildly interesting fact is always astonishing.

But those style issues don't go to the substance -- or lack thereof -- which is where Gladwell really falls down. His books, including Outliers, lack explanatory power. They do not help us better understand the world, or at least not in the way he intends. Rather, they confuse the issue, either obscuring what's obvious by casting the obvious as astonishing or else over-generalizing.

I asked before, and I'll ask again: What is the point of Outliers? There are a couple of running themes: hard work and fortuitous circumstances play a large part in the success equation. Talent, we're instructed, is of course important too, but the role of talent is, he says, "obvious," and he wants to downplay it. He's uncomfortable with it -- uninterested, as he said to Charlie Rose. But the roles of hard work and fortuitous circumstances are also obvious. I'm sorry, but Gladwell hasn't developed any idea here beyond what any thoughtful person could conjure from the comfort his armchair without squandering valuable practice time reading his book.

I admit that I overstated when I said that the 10,000-hour rule is "purely anecdotal." I'll revise that statement to remove the "purely." But the studies cited remain anecdotal in that they only examine certain fields. The number may have validity in those prototypical fields, such as sports and classical music, where, as I said before, practice at a young age obviously makes perfect. I asked what that number has to do with, say, my field of the law. Although Gladwell talks later in the book about lawyers, the 10,000-hour number isn't mentioned there. That's probably because it would make no sense in that context. It's not a general rule of success; a magic number. It's not even a big number, unless you're talking about a kid who's going to school and doing other things. It takes about five years to accumulate 10,000 hours of experience in the workplace -- assuming you work an ordinary American work week for the full year and take short vacations. Superstar lawyers, along with many mediocre lawyers, will have much more than that under their belts. So what?

Gladwell is arguing against straw men: "[W]e cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all" (33). Who's this "we," kemosabe? "[D]on't matter at all"? Really? Nobody is seriously arguing that systemic factors "don't matter at all." Later: "If we put the stories of hockey players and the Beatles and Bill Joy and Bill Gates together, I think we get a more complete picture of the path to success" (55). This is preposterous; it almost seems like a satire of a Gladwell book. Those stories give us a picture of Bill Gates, Bill Joy, the Beatles, and hockey players; they explain little about anything else. He proceeds to acknowledge that the talent of such people is "obvious," but "what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities." You could write the reverse here and be just as right. As in: "Bill Gates, Bill Joy, and the Beatles all benefited from the luck of the draw -- fortuitous circumstances. That much is obvious. What truly distinguishes them, though, is their extraordinary talent and ability." When you can state the exact opposite of the thesis and be equally right, it's not much of a thesis. Even the Ericsson study you mention is about people who were talented enough to get into a top music school. It hardly argues against "the primacy of talent," which Gladwell sets out to challenge. Is talent merely a threshold? Gladwell argues that. But, then again, he finds astonishing that a certain amount of work is a threshold. So, we're left with something like the following: "10,000 hours of practice is a threshold to success. Isn't that incredible? Talent is a threshold to success. Isn't that boring?" No and no, so what's your point?

The point often seems to be to notice the happy accidents on the way to success. So, that's it? Be lucky? That's not enlightening at all. The chapter on Joe Flom urges aspiring superlawyers to be Jewish, be the son of garment workers, and be a member of a less populous generation, and to do all that many years ago when those things happened to pay off. Also, seize opportunities, work hard, have practical skills, etc. In other words, go back in time and be Joe Flom, and you'll be lucky enough to get in on the ground floor of Skadden Arps. Thanks, Malcolm Gladwell! Duly noted.

With respect to your point about basketball players, and the rarity of super-achievement in that and similar fields, I think that that point is obvious to anyone who would buy the book. The notion that some kids stupidly overestimate their prospects of becoming NBA stars, or something like that, isn't even touched on in the book. The fact that you mention it, and cite the book for support, I think says more about you than the book. In other words, that was a notion -- one that has entered the popular imagination among us educated types -- that you had, and you saw some confirmation in the book. But the book really isn't about that. It doesn't, in fact, talk about the "magnitude of exceptionalism." In fact, it's hopelessly muddled on what constitutes exceptionalism. This is reflected in the contradictory full title: "Outliers: the Story of Success." Successful people are not necessarily outliers. Is the book about success, which a lot of people enjoy, or spectacular success, which only a few enjoy? I don't know. Gladwell never even explains what exactly he's talking about.

The book says the following, in order: (1) Arbitrary factors like when in the year you were born can make a difference in how successful you are. (2) Hard work is important. (3) Intelligence isn't everything. (4) Practical success skills can be important to success and being born into the middle class doesn't hurt. (5) Be Joe Flom. (6) Southerners are primitive jerks. (7) Asians, much as they can't drive, crash airplanes, just like Colombians, but (8) they're good at math. (9) Hard work is important.

I'm exaggerating a little bit for effect, but not much. Yes, it's drivel.