We all know the secret to success. We read it in books, see it in films.
Malcolm Gladwell sums it up with customary precision in his new book, Outliers:
“Our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and
talent fights his way to greatness.”
It’s the story of pop stars and entrepreneurs, sports stars and CEOs. There’s
just one problem with this way of seeing success. It is, argues Gladwell, a
load of old nonsense. Not because you don’t need talent and grit to get
ahead – you do – but because our achievements are the product of
so many other factors we can’t always control. Our culture. Our language.
Our parents. Our race. The lessons we learn, in short, when we don’t think
we are learning any lessons.
And Outliers, which Gladwell comes to London to perform as a
spoken-word show on Monday, is his inspiring, revelatory attempt to look at
the qualities that aren’t mentioned enough in a culture of individualism.
“People don’t rise from nothing,” he writes. “We do owe something to
parentage and patronage.”
Gladwell is a serious success story himself. A staff writer at The New
Yorker, he is also the author of two earlier books of ideas – The
Tipping Point and Blink.They’re rigorous, intellectual mixtures
of science, sociology, psychology and anecdote. And they’ve sold in their
millions, as well as inspiring all manner of copycat books, which rarely
have Gladwell’s scope or lucidity. He is the best kind of writer –
the kind who makes you feel like you’re a genius, rather than
that he’s a genius.
He was inspired to write Outlier by reading countless stories about
chief executives earning multimillion-dollar salaries. “I just got annoyed,”
he says on the phone from his apartment in downtown New York, “at the
self-righteousness of their justification of why they deserved that much
money. I don’t feel I deserve the money I make, and I don’t make $300
million a year!”
Gladwell is uneasy about applying his principles to his own story: “It would
seem presumptuous, and it’s a bit early!” But, with a bit of strong-arming
from The Knowledge, he agreed to look at the secrets of his success.
And, whaddya know, there’s more to Malcolm Gladwell than talent and grit.
1) PRACTICE MAKES PERFECT
Both the Beatles and Bill Gates had massive talent. They also had something
even more important: incredible opportunities to practise their craft early
on: Gates thanks to (among other things) a school computer room that was
freakishly good for 1968; the Beatles thanks to their many, many marathon
gigs in Hamburg. Ten thousand hours, or ten years, is the amount of practice
you need to have a chance of being a master of your craft, Outliers
tells us. “And I had ten years at the Washington Post,” says
Gladwell. “When I started there I was a lousy reporter and an indifferent
writer. When I finished I was a good reporter and a much better writer. I
stayed at the Postuntil I felt I had mastered those two skills. That
was my Hamburg.”
2) BE BORN AT THE RIGHT TIME
In Outliers, Gladwell explains why being born Jewish in New York in
1930 was the perfect launchpad for a legal career. And why being born on the
West Coast in the mid1950s – as Bill Gates and Paul Allen were –
was a prerequisite for being a world-beating computer genius. Gladwell, born
1963, was hired by the Post in 1987. Which happened to be their most
profitable year ever. “They literally hired anyone,” he says. “Honestly,
there was no rational reason for them to hire me. I wrote about business and
science, and I knew nothing about either. There is no way they would hire
someone like me today. But that’s what you can do when you’re flushed.
That’s my equivalent of being born in 1955.”
3) YOU DON’T HAVE TO BE A GENIUS
High IQ is all very well, but it’s not a great guide to creativity, nor to the
sort of social skills that great achievers need. Gladwell has no idea what
his IQ is. “I grew up in an era in Canada where we never tested anyone. But
I know I’m really bad at proxies for IQ tests like Scrabble and logic
puzzles . . . my family always trounced me at those.” Outliersargues
that, beyond a certain point, differences in IQ don’t greatly matter. “I am
one of those people,” he says, “who are ‘smart enough’. It’s pointless to
speculate beyond that.”
4) STORE YOUR NUTS
Outliers begins with the story of Roseto – a town in Pennsylvania
with incredibly high levels of health, despite its inhabitants’ ostensibly
iffy life-styles. It’s a remarkable story. But it’s one that Gladwell first
read about more than ten years ago. He then drove there, having arranged to
meet the author of the study on the town. “I just couldn’t believe that here
were these overweight, chain-smoking, pizza-eating people who didn’t die. It
was human curiosity but also journalistic curiosity. I make a habit of
accumulating things long before I know what I can do with them. A journalist
is a chipmunk, you need to store up your nuts for the winter.”
5) PERFORM!
His pair of London shows, Gladwell insists, won’t be readings – but
nor will they be flashy. “It will just be me talking. And telling the
stories from the book, hopefully in a vivid way.” And performance isn’t just
a promotional tool for Gladwell – it’s part of how he writes too. This
most lucid of writers often tries out his articles as talks before he puts
them into print. “It’s really, really easy to tell what works and what
doesn’t when you have to read it out to an audience. When you have to say it
out loud, you realise what’s clumsy and awkward. It forces you to simplify.”
6) FIND YOUR CROWD
How have Gladwell’s potentially arcane books become so popular? Is it just his
talent and nous? Or has he hit upon some change in the culture that has made
us receptive not only to his books, but also to the likes of Freakonomics or
The Undercover Economist? “One important sociological transformation
of the past 25 years is the kind of person who goes into business,” he
suggests. “They are better educated, they have MBAs, and business itself
strikes me as being more intellectually curious than it was. The dot-com
boom was sort of crazy, but was also densely intellectual. And even as the
giddiness of that era faded, the notion that you could use ideas to make
sense of what you’re doing has stayed with us.”
7) ACT GLOBAL, THINK LOCAL
Gladwell’s father is an English academic, his mother is a Jamaican writer.
They brought up their three sons in remote Elmira in Ontario, Canada.
Whatever his parental influences, Gladwell feels Canadian. “My writing is
Canadian: it’s practical-minded and optimistic. A Canadian would say that
you should look at everything around you when analysing your success, it’s a
self-effacing attitude. And Canadians are perennially outsiders.”
8) WATCH DADDY AT WORK
The lessons we learn from our parents about work, argues Outliers–
is it drudgery? Is it fun? – don’t easily fade. Gladwell, who’s single,
enjoys watching sports and reading airport thrill- ers. But he doesn’t dread
hitting his desk. “When I saw my father at work I saw focus and
concentration. And he always gave the impression that effort was fun. That’s
a really powerful lesson to learn. Most of my friends’ parents were either
farmers or blue-collar workers, and you didn’t get the sense from them that
their parents were thrilled at the prospect of getting up for work.”
9) DON’T GIVE UP THE DAY JOB
Has success changed Gladwell? “I guess,” he says cautiously. “I have a car, I
rent . . .” He catches himself. “I mean, I don’t worry about money any more,
which is a very very large change.” Even so, Gladwell never wants to leave
his job at The New Yorker. He hopes to stay there until he retires.
“Being forced to do smaller articles keeps you in the game. And I get
so much pleasure out of it. I don’t know what I would do with my time
otherwise.”
10) WRITING IS REWRITING
“Achievement is talent plus preparation,” Gladwell writes in Outliers–
but he’s out to show just how much more important preparation is than
talent. The thing I keep coming back to, after 18 months on this book, is
the work thing. I always say to young writers who are struggling, well, how
many drafts do you do? And then I say, what, you only do three drafts? I do
ten.
“What’s surprising is how much work it takes. Ten thousand hours is a long
time. It’s both a daunting and an empowering lesson. It says that, if
you haven’t made it, it may not be because you don’t have what it takes. It
may just be that you have misunderstood how extraordinarily long it takes
for everyone. When you see how long the Beatles put in before they arrived
in the USA in 1964 . . . There’s not a shortage of talent in the world.
There’s a shortage of people willing to go to Hamburg to play eight-hour
sets.”
Outliers (Allen Lane, £16.99) is reviewed in Books.
Malcolm Gladwell: Live in London, Lyceum Theatre, London WC2 (www.malcolmgladwell-live.com
0844 4121742), Mon (5.45pm & 8.30pm)
Can't wait to see/hear Mr. Gladwell when he comes to Houston next month. His 'Outllier's' should be required reading. Cheers!
Jim Black, Houston, Texas