Gladwell glibly reveals the long-sought secrets to success
Why were the Beatles such good musicians? How did Bill Gates get so smart? Why do kids with birthdays in the first few months of the year make standout hockey players?
In short, why are some people so outrageously successful, when others, who seem as though they should be, are not?
Malcolm Gladwell sets out to answer that question in his new book, and answer it he does — entertainingly, engagingly and, at first blush, convincingly.
The New Yorker magazine writer has a name for these extremely successful people. He calls them “outliers,” a mathematics term that refers to something that is statistically apart from the norm.
Based on what’s happened with Gladwell’s past coinages, “outliers” may soon become a household word; his two earlier books, “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” brought those title words, and others (the “stickiness” of ideas, for example), into Americans’ everyday lexicon.
People who are outliers, Gladwell argues, succeed not because they’re so innately talented or brilliant. In fact, being a genius is a poor predictor of unusual success, and talent often goes nowhere.
What does matter are often uncontrollable (downright lucky, in fact) elements of upbringing or circumstance.
And, just as importantly, what matters is the opportunity in early life to spend enough time — 10,000 hours will do the trick, Gladwell claims — working on a specialized skill.
The Beatles’ lucky break had to do with their early days of performing in Hamburg, Germany. There, the lads from Liverpool made their living by playing in nightclubs for extraordinarily long stretches of time — eight hours was not unheard of — and for many days in a row.
“It was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play” that honed their musicianship to the level that made them, well, the Beatles.
“By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed an estimated twelve hundred times,” Gladwell writes.
“Do you know how extraordinary that is? Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart.”
Gladwell’s writing is always accessible and attractive, and his ideas — culled from science, brimming with research — are fascinating.
But as glittering as the concepts may be, they’re far more gilt than gold. The moment you start to scratch their shiny surfaces, they begin to fall apart.
One might ask: What about the other groups who played in Hamburg at that time? Why have we never heard of them? And what about the hugely successful rock bands who didn’t play until their fingers bled?
Gladwell skips from one example to another, devoting a chapter at a time to each facet of his theory: Bill Gates’ success was based on his early exposure to high-level computers at a time when few high school students had even heard of computers; Canadian junior hockey players are most successful when they’re born in the early months of the year because they get off to a better start as bigger, stronger kids and then continue to get more expert training and more hours of practice as they progress; a whole generation of Jewish lawyers prospered because their immigrant parents were in the New York City garment business.
There’s no question that this makes for fascinating reading. A reader may want to believe in Gladwell’s simple and superficial formulations, even wondering how to adapt them to one’s own life or that of one’s children.
But in the end, they don’t hold up.
Gladwell seems to reason backward. He finds an example and goes out to marshal the evidence to back up a related theory.
He bills all this as an interpretation of data, but it’s about as solidly verifiable as those call-in “public opinion polls” offered by local TV newscasts. There’s probably some truth in them; just not enough.
His books, in fact, seem to be getting progressively less valid. “The Tipping Point” really did seem to be a well-developed idea, based in solid research; “Blink” probably less so. And now “Outliers,” which may well be the weakest of the three.
At this point, Gladwell’s adaptation of difficult science for popular consumption is more distraction than revelation. Read it for fun, read it for the pleasure of poking holes in it (an easy but satisfying sport), or read it for cocktail party conversation.
Just don’t make the mistake of taking “Outliers” too seriously. This is entertainment, not enlightenment.
Margaret Sullivan is the editor of The News.
