Gladwell’s Secrets of Success

Speak­ing of socially sit­u­at­ing a book, I had been avoid­ing Mal­colm Gladwell’s Out­liers: The Story of Suc­cess pre­cisely because the con­sen­sus from a smat­ter­ing of reviews told me that this book is well-written but thinly argued. This isn’t hard to believe. Mal­colm Glad­well is an über-consultant who man­ages to trans­form dusty, impen­e­tra­ble research into sticky, appeal­ing themes like tip­ping points, thin-slicing and blink. Even if it all feels a lit­tle glib, who can resist a mas­ter sto­ry­teller? Not me. Out­liers are men and women who do some­thing out of the ordi­nary. They may seem to have done it through indi­vid­ual grit and tal­ent, but in fact they are invari­ably the recip­i­ents of advan­tages bestowed by priv­i­leged class and for­tu­nate tim­ing. Out­liers makes an oppos­ing claim to that pro­posed by The Bell Curve, the con­tro­ver­sial book that claimed, essen­tially, that IQ was hered­i­tary and pre­de­ter­mined your suc­cess. On the con­trary, Gladwell’s book claims that IQ isn’t nearly enough, and that it is too sim­ple, too waste­ful, to dis­miss peo­ple with­out under­stand­ing the con­text in which they devel­oped. Even if the qual­ity of The Bell Curve’s nature research trumps Gladwell’s nur­ture research, it is dif­fi­cult to doubt we could do bet­ter than iden­ti­fy­ing tal­ent and nur­tur­ing it. For that, I’m grate­ful for his efforts to por­tray genius, not as some­thing that is august in the few, but rather some­thing that we might cre­ate in the many.