Written by Malcolm Gladwell, author The Tipping Point and Blink and dubbed the most influential thinker by GQ, Malcolm Gladwell puts into perspective the reasons some people are exceptionally successful in their fields. He also explores the reason behind failure and the possible lessons gained from them.
- Exceptionally successful people don’t rise from nothing and success is not always based on individual merit.
People become successful based on a set of circumstances which happened to be in their favour, at the right time. It may be ‘hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard to make sense of the world in ways others cannot’. Gladwell used age as an example, with empirical evidence, that physical maturity has an enormous difference on the ability of two persons, ceteris paribus. Being born at the end of the year may actually affect your performance in sports (as in his book), as compared to your January-born peer. - Success is a result of cumulative advantage.
Because of these circumstantial differences, what happens from there plays a huge role in your success determination. Gladwell puts it clearly that ‘The professional…starts out a little better than his peers. And that little difference leads to an opportunity, which makes the difference a bit bigger, and that edge in turn leads to another opportunity, which makes the initial difference bigger still — until he becomes an outlier. But he didn’t start out as an outlier. He started out just a little better.’ - The system of talent identification is flawed.
In most modern societies, early-education gifted programs and star programs aim to sieve out the brighter ones from a young age, thinking that this is the best way of ensuring no talent slips through the cracks. However, from Lesson 1, students born later in the year might not stand a chance when put in the same class as those born in the same year, but earlier. Canadians who play hockey well are usually born in the months January to March, as empirically shown in his book. The explanation, from Gladwell is that in Canada, the cut-off for enrollment into age-class hockey is January 1. In preadolescence, month gaps in age presents a great difference in physical maturity. Back to the point, with the current system in place, those who possess innate talent, but are born at the end of the year may not stand out in the talent identification process because of the lack of development opportunities their ‘older’ peers have during those gap months. Because of the way we perceive success, which is so individualised, we ‘miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung’. - Chinese children test better in math because of their language structure and rice-agriculture past.
Chinese numbers are all single syllabic and logically constructed. As a result, Chinese-speaking toddlers can easily count to 100 while English-speaking toddlers can only count to the twenties. Math is also a subject that requires persistence, and persistence is a highly-valued Chinese trait, taught by Confucianism as evidenced by folklore and poems throughout its long and illustrious history. Gladwell postures that the importance of persistence was a construct of rice-agriculture, which requires heavy management and rewards the harder working farmer. These two features of Chinese culture, emphasis on persistence and a simple and logical language for numbers, gives Chinese children a distinct advantage when it comes to mathematics. - Disasters are most often caused by a series of micro-events rather than one large event.
This was the case for airplane crashes, which are usually caused by some combination of poor weather, tired pilots, decreased visibility, equipment failure on the plane, equipment failure on the airport, and bad communication. At the managerial level, we ought to identify possible areas in which errors may be present and eliminate these seemingly small individually, but lethal threat when they all add up, as soon as we can. - There is an intelligence threshold, and a magic number.
You don't need to be the smartest, you just need to practice for 10,000 hours. Those who succeed are all smart enough, but not necessarily geniuses. At some IQ mark, increased genius has a diminishing return. Rather, the saying of ‘practice for 10,000 hours’ has a real impact, and is what differentiates the winners. This is true in musical "geniuses," computer "geniuses" or even science "geniuses." 10,000 hours is an enormous amount of time, and it is simply not possible to do it all by yourself. You need support from your family, you can’t be poor because a part-time job would hinder you from clocking in 10,000 soon enough. These people are fortunate enough to be in a set of circumstances which allow them to do what they do best. Often, they are also enrolled into some sort of program that provides them with the kind of training they require. Again, lesson 1.
In conclusion, our time and place of birth, cultures in which we live in, the amount of time spent working all affects the final outcome. It is all but a set of circumstances that we happen to exist in, that will greatly impact our chance to succeed — to be an outlier.
