The recession has caused a significant economic adjustment, including a realignment of assets and the demand and supply of talent. Along with these adjustments has been renewed debate over issues such as the distribution of wealth, the disappearing middle class and the belief in meritocracy. Some recent experts have reaffirmed a perception that both the belief in the “self-made man” and the benefits of meritocracy are largely myths and don’t serve society well.
Movies, TV shows and popular media, and many politicians are reinforcing these myths by arguing and promoting the notion that anyone can be wealthy or make it to the top by virtue of their hard work and positive attitude and that’s how successful people did it in the past. If this were true, we wouldn’t see a virtual explosion of people buying lottery tickets, and governments using lotteries as a significant source of revenue.
Some of the wealthiest entrepreneurs in North America say there is no such thing as the “self-made man.” With more millionaires making, rather than inheriting, their wealth, there is a false belief that they made it on their own without help, a new report published by the Boston-based non-profit United For a Fair Economy, states. The group has signed more than 2,200 millionaires and billionaires to a petition to reform and keep the U.S. inheritance tax. The report says the myth of “self-made wealth is potentially destructive to the very infrastructure that enables wealth creation.”
The individuals profiled in the report believed they prospered in large part to things beyond their control and because of the support of others. Warren Buffet, the second richest man in the world said, “I personally think that society is responsible for a very significant percentage of what I’ve earned.” Erick Schmidt, CEO of Google says, “Lots of people who are smart and work hard and play by the rules don’t have a fraction of what I have. I realize that I don’t have my wealth because I’m so brilliant.”Malcolm Gladwell, in his book, The Outliers, attacks America’s myth of the self-made man. Gladwell’s meticulous research has shown that enormously successful people like Bill Gates, The Beatles, and professional athletes, scientists and artists, all had people in their lives that helped them get there.
1. Your book is actually going to be a collection of essays drawn together by a loose thread. The thread really doesn’t have to be drawn very tight. In all three of his books there’s a vague connection between essays.
2. Each of your essays is going to revolve around a single idea; e.g. in Outliers there’s a whole chapter about the fact that when athletes are picked based on a calendar this means that children born close to the cutoff date are favored or disfavored depending on whether their birthdate is before or after the date.
3. Illustrate the idea with stories about real people. In Outliers, Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule (basically to be good at something you have to do it a lot) is illustrated by talking about Bill Gates, The Beatles, and others you will have heard of.
4. Get a professor. If you are illustrating a complex point (such as the facial expressions in Blink) you’ll want a professor to interview and quote from. You will need to spend quite a bit of time talking about the professor’s background and establishing his long credibility to drive home the point you are making. This ‘professor credibility’ is a substitute for the idea actually being established scientific fact. For example, in Blink Gladwell reports on the micro-facial expressions of British double agent Kim Philby. It’s hard to read that passage without thinking “confirmation bias”, but Gladwell passes it off as fact.
4. Best to have some sad stories to illustrate your points well. The story of Christopher Langan, an autodidact that Gladwell portrays as a genius who has failed to succeed, appears in Outliers.
5. Give things names and remember Douglas Adams’ rule of capital letters. Capital letters make things important. For example, in The Tipping Point, Gladwell conjures up the following important concepts: The Law of the Few, The Stickiness Factor, and The Power of Context. In Outliers, there’s The Matthew Effect and The 10,000-Hour Rule.
6. Don’t fret too much about accuracy, concentrate on telling a good story. In The Tipping Point, Gladwell makes much of Stanley Milgram’s experiment sending letters across the country (which is where we get the six degrees of separation idea), and part of the book relies on the idea that certain people are ‘hubs’ (with many connections) through which messages are likely to pass. Unfortunately, more recent work suggests that this isn’t true.
7. Don’t worry about the new, new thing. Gladwell’s books often talk about relatively ancient ideas. In Outliers there’s a chapter about cockpit dynamics and how different cultures deal with respect within hierarchies differently. The result is that in some cultures the captain’s decisions might be respected even when erroneous (leading to crashes). The critical paper for that chapter is Cultural Diversity and Crew Communication which dates to 1999.
The perfect Gladwell chapter is the section mentioned in 7: The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes. The stories are great (plane crashes, heroic pilots, cockpit transcripts) and set the scene for the idea. There are enough statistics to keep it looking grounded in hard facts. There’s a simple idea: those Asians are too respectful of hierarchy. There’s even the Qantas Effect: those unruly Australians don’t have plane crashes because they don’t respect hierarchy. Simple, easy to digest, grounded in some facts, illustrated by scary and heart-warming stories.
Though I believe Michael Lewis has enhanced and improved this formula…
An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “saggital plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong. Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective ☀
We are so caught up in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world allowed only one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success—the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history—with a society that provides opportunity for all. Malcolm Gladwell ☀
He recently had a column in the NY Times vainly attacking Chris Anderson’s take on the free economy and then he has a piece in the New Yorker saying the current depression is mostly about psychology, not necessarily about unregulated markets, scammers, and profiteers. Whatever he writes about — the tipping point, the outliers, and other catchy sounding phenomena — Gladwell manages to start out with a false analogy, comparing one event to a completely unrelated event that did exactly what he uses to describe what the event he is discussing, like the depression, is doing. I can’t even recall the analogy with the current decession because it was so far fetched; perhaps it was something that happened in the Middle Ages. It doesn’t really matter what it was, because Gladwell is so skillful at manipulating an argument, he could have compared the current decession with the First Crusade into Jerusalem and made it seem that they were both all about faith. Malcolm Gladwell Doth Metastasize ☀
Outliers follows the same formula. Here, Gladwell challenges the conventional notion that success comes from being “self-made.” He shows how the rise of certain people to success is never a one-person affair. Culture, family, community, and hard work all contribute to one individual’s success.
I highly recommend that pastors, preachers and teachers read Malcolm Gladwell. You might think that a book like Outliers is a waste of time. Not so. The illustrations and stories here make for powerful sermon examples.
For example, consider the first chapter in Outliers - a story about the Roseto community. Gladwell shows how this unusual community had virtually no cases of heart disease among people below the age of 65. The doctors and scientists were stumped. No answer seemed to make sense of the data… until they realized that the community itself was acting as a sort of vaccine against heart attacks.
Now think of the ways a Christian teacher can use this material. What does the power of community teach us about the church? How does an example like the Roseto community help us as church leaders to emphasize the importance of community?
Gladwell also speaks of the ”10,000 hour rule”. Those who succeed are generally those who worked the hardest and longest. It is not talent or innate giftedness, but perseverance that ultimately counts in working up the ladder to success. And he uses the Beatles as proof! (No more details. I don’t want to spoil the story.)
Or take the case of Bill Gates. Gladwell cites a body of research finding that the “magic number for true expertise” is 10,000 hours of practice. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good,” Gladwell writes. “It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Gladwell shows how Gates accumulated his 10,000 hours while in middle and high school in Seattle thanks to a series of nine incredibly fortunate opportunities—ranging from the fact that his private school had a computer club with access to (and money for) a sophisticated computer, to his childhood home’s proximity to the University of Washington, where he had access to an even more sophisticated computer. “By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own computer software company,” Gladwell writes, “he’d been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past 10,000 hours.” Yes, Gates is obviously brilliant, Gladwell concludes, but without the lucky breaks he had as a kid, he never could have had the opportunity to fulfill the true potential of that brilliance. How many similarly brilliant people never get that opportunity? Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers ☀
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