How Do You Spell Success?

The third book I read in 2009 was Mal­colm Glad­well’s Out­liers. I have not read Glad­well’s first book, The Tip­ping Point, but I was very impressed with Blink. When I saw Out­liers on sale and read the infor­ma­tion on the dust cov­er, I snapped it up and brought it home.

Glad­well is a high­ly engag­ing writer. His work is well researched and replete with sup­port­ing anec­dotes as well as a few illus­tra­tive charts and graphs. His style is con­ver­sa­tion­al with­out being casu­al or breezy. He writes like a lec­tur­er who takes his sub­ject seri­ous­ly and wants it to be understood.

Here it is impor­tant for me not to mis­rep­re­sent what Glad­well wrote. A cur­so­ry skim­ming of the book might well cause offense, as he pur­ports to explain (among oth­er things of course) why Asians are good at math. His the­o­ry makes per­fect sense, but with­out read­ing it through it might be easy to jump to con­clu­sions about his agen­da. In fact, his greater the­sis is one that at first glance seems to fly in the face of the myths of genius and inge­nu­ity that we Amer­i­cans hold so dear.

I found myself wry­ly think­ing as I read that this is exact­ly the kind of book that Ayn Rand par­o­died in her writ­ing when lam­poon­ing the sor­ry state of lit­er­a­ture. No, almost exact­ly. The dif­fer­ence is that Glad­well uses log­ic and research to sup­port his the­sis, exact­ly what Rand claimed her oppo­nents were loathe to do.

Rand espoused con­scious and inten­tion­al thought, and derid­ed those who rely upon intu­ition and feel­ing as «mys­tics» and «sav­ages». Glad­well by con­trast wrote Blink, the book that explained the role of implic­it assump­tion in the mind’s work­ings and showed that con­scious thought is often poor­ly suit­ed to see the truth with­out the assis­tance of the sub­con­scious aware­ness of the con­texts of a ques­tion. I doubt that Rand would actu­al­ly argue against Glad­well; he does not reject rea­son, but rather sup­ple­ments inten­tion­al rea­son with pas­sive under­stand­ing. On the sur­face though, it does sound as though they are at odds.

Out­liers, sim­i­lar­ly, may not real­ly be at odds with those who say hard work and genius are the for­mu­la to suc­cess, but it might appear to be with­out read­ing in depth. Glad­well shows how cir­cum­stances out­side the indi­vid­ual con­tribute to suc­cess, and how lit­tle genius may have to do with it. This is where a read­ing of this book could lead to the assump­tion that Glad­well believes that suc­cess is pos­si­ble with­out hard work and intel­li­gence. Clear­ly these things are nec­es­sary, and Glad­well says so while point­ing out the oth­er fac­tors at play.

First his premise (which might tru­ly be offen­sive to Ms Rand) that beyond a rea­son­able thresh­old intel­li­gence does not help to bring a per­son­’s suc­cess. A cer­tain lev­el is nec­es­sary, but sta­tis­ti­cal­ly the super-genius is no more like­ly to be suc­cess­ful than the per­son who could only be described as «sharp» or «quick-wit­ted». In prac­ti­cal mat­ters, a per­son must work hard and spend a great deal of time exper­i­ment­ing and devel­op­ing a deep­er under­stand­ing of a sub­ject in order to become suc­cess­ful with it.

Sec­ond, the envi­ron­ment and acci­dents of cir­cum­stance play great roles in suc­cess. Bill Gates was born at the right time and the right place to get where he is today. This is where Rand is rolling over in her grave. Yet it is true — if he had been born a few years ear­li­er or lat­er, he would­n’t have had access to the time-shar­ing ter­mi­nal he logged thou­sands of hours on start­ing at eighth grade. It either would not yet have arrived when he reached eighth grade, or he would have already been out of high school and off in col­lege or working.

Not that there would­n’t be oth­er oppor­tu­ni­ties for a bright and ded­i­cat­ed young man like Bill Gates in the ear­ly sev­en­ties, but the same appli­ca­tion of time and ener­gy would not have put him so far ahead of the game if he did not have access to the com­put­er sys­tem in eighth grade that most col­leges would­n’t see for anoth­er five years.

It’s said that bril­liance and hard work cre­ates oppor­tu­ni­ties and I have no doubt that it does. But anoth­er thing that bril­liance and hard work does is find and expose exist­ing oppor­tu­ni­ties. If the oppor­tu­ni­ties aren’t there to begin with, the bril­liant thing to do would be to move one’s atten­tion to a field with greater poten­tial rather than sim­ply work harder.

The rugged indi­vid­u­al­ists may not like it, but it’s real­ly com­mon sense. Look at any mur­der mys­tery and you’ll see the three things need­ed: motive, means, and oppor­tu­ni­ty. We flat­ter our­selves to say that motive will suf­fice with­out means or oppor­tu­ni­ty. That in itself is hum­bling for any of us who have achieved some degree of suc­cess: yes, we’ve earned it, and yes, we got lucky.