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A review of Malcolm Gladwell's new book: "Outliers." I would also recommend his previous books, "Blink" and "The Tipping Point."
Malcolm Gladwell’s elegant and wildly popular theories about modern life have turned his name into an adjective—Gladwellian! But in his new book, he seeks to undercut the cult of success, including his own, by explaining how little control we have over it.
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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?

And then there are the math geniuses who, as anyone can’t help noticing, are disproportionately Asian. Citing the work of an educational researcher at the University of Pennsylvania, Gladwell attributes this phenomenon not to some innate mathematical ability that Asians possess but to the fact that children in Asian countries are willing to work longer and harder than their Western counterparts. That willingness, Gladwell continues, is due to a cultural legacy of hard work that stems from the cultivation of rice. Turning to a historian who studies ancient Chinese peasant proverbs, Gladwell marvels at what Chinese rice farmers used to tell one another: “No one who can rise before dawn 360 days a year fails to make his family rich.” Contrast that legacy with the one derived from Western agriculture—which holds that some fields be left fallow rather than be cultivated 360 days a year and which, by extension, led to the creation of an education system that allowed students to be left fallow for periods, like summer vacation. For American students from wealthy homes, summer vacation isn’t a problem; but, citing the research of a Johns Hopkins sociologist, Gladwell shows that it’s a profound handicap for students from poor homes, who actually outlearn their rich counterparts during the school year but then fall behind them when school lets out. “For its poorest students, America doesn’t have a school problem,” Gladwell concludes. “It has a summer-vacation problem.” So how to close the gap between rich and poor students? Get rid of summer vacation in inner-city schools.
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This time, he’s talking about a very serious academic concept, devised by the psychologist James Flynn (“One of my heroes,” Gladwell says, swooning), called the human capitalization rate, or “cap rate,” which, Gladwell explains, “refers to the rate at which a given community capitalizes on the human potential of those in its midst.” In the United States, Gladwell is sad to report, “cap rates are really low” owing to poverty, stupidity, and culture. He tells the story of an inner-city neighborhood in Los Angeles where the boys must cross gang lines to go to high school, so none of them go to high school. “We have a cap rate for that community in Los Angeles, one of the richest cities in the world, that is zero,” Gladwell says, disgust creeping into his normally tranquil voice, “because if you don’t go to high school, you basically can’t achieve anything in our particular society.” For about eighteen minutes, Gladwell goes on in this vein, thoroughly depressing an audience that was already feeling pretty glum after the stock market had taken another nosedive.

But then, with a light flashing yellow to let him know his allotted twenty minutes are almost up, he suddenly pivots. It’s time to let the gloom and doom give way to some Gladwellian optimism. “We have a scarcity of achievement in this country, not because we have a scarcity of talent,” Gladwell says, his voice taking on an urgent tone. “We have a scarcity of achievement because we’re squandering that talent. And that’s not bad news, that’s good news, because it says this scarcity is not something we have to live with. It’s something we can do something about.” Gladwell’s new idea may not be profound, it may not even be big, but it’s certainly welcome.