Intersting, thought-provoking book by Malcolm Gladwell about what makes high-achievers different. The factors include opportunity (right place), 10,000 hours (yes, the time needed to become an expert within a subject was coined in this book), timing (Rockefeller & Co were riding an industrial wave), upbringing (involved parents), meaningful work (with real purpose, work that is fulfilling – common from immigrant families where hard work is valued and practiced. Which can explain why immigrants in the US contribute disproportionately to innovation – responsible for 16 percent of the inventor population but 22 percent of the total patents, and roughly the same number if we’re looking at citations.
Memorable quotes
That late-born prodigy doesn’t get chosen for the all-star team as an eight-year-old because he’s too small. So he doesn’t get the extra practice. And without that extra practice, he has no chance at hitting ten thousand hours by the time the professional hockey teams start looking for players. And without ten thousand hours under his belt, there is no way he can ever master the skills necessary to play.
But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary oppor tunities. The Beatles, for the most random of reasons, got invited to go to Hamburg. Without Hamburg, the Beatles might well have taken a different path. “I was very lucky,” Bill Gates said at the beginning of our interview. That doesn’t mean he isn’t brilliant or an extraordinary entre preneur. It just means that he understands what incredible good fortune it was to be at Lakeside in 1968.
But there are very clearly patterns here, and what’s striking is how little we seem to want to acknowledge them. We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.
The particular skill that allows you to talk your way out of a murder rap, or convince your professor to move you from the morning to the afternoon section, is what the psy chologist Robert Sternberg calls “practical intelligence”
When we talk about the advantages of class, Lareau argues, this is in large part what we mean. Alex Williams is better off than Katie Brindle because he’s wealthier and because he goes to a better school, but also because—and perhaps this is even more c r i t i c a l—the sense of entitle ment that he has been taught is an attitude perfectly suited to succeeding in the modern world. This is the advantage that Oppenheimer had and that Chris Langan lacked. Oppenheimer was raised in one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in Manhattan, the son of an artist and a successful garment manufacturer. His childhood was the embodiment of concerted cultivation. On weekends, the Oppenheimers would go driving in the countryside in a chauffeur-driven Packard. Summers he would be taken to Europe to see his grandfather. He attended the Ethical Cul ture School on Central Park West, perhaps the most pro gressive school in the nation, where, his biographers write, students were “infused with the notion that they were being groomed to reform the world.” When his math teacher real ized he was bored, she sent him off to do independent work.
On ce I said to him, ‘What’s the rest of the country like, Uncle Al ?’ And he said, ‘Kiddo. When you leave New York, every place is Bridgeport.’ “) He gives the sense that the world is his for the taking. “I’ve always been a big risk taker,” he says. “When I built the cable company, in the early stages, I was making deals where I would have been bankrupt if I hadn’t pulled it off
There is no doubt that those Jewish immigrants arrived at the perfect time, with the perfect skills,” says the sociologist Stephen Steinberg. ” To exploit that oppor tunity, you had to have certain virtues, and those immi grants worked hard. T h ey sacrificed. T h ey scrimped and saved and invested wisely. But still, you have to remem ber that the garment industry in those years was growing by leaps and bounds. T he economy was desperate for the skills that they possessed.
The Beatles didn’t recoil in horror when they were told they had to play eight hours a night, seven days a week. They jumped at the chance. Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.
What was the cause of the Appalachian pattern? Over the years, many potential explanations have been exam ined and debated, and the consensus appears to be that that region was plagued by a particularly virulent strain of what sociologists call a “culture of honor.” Cultures of honor tend to take root in highlands and other marginally fertile areas, such as Sicily or the mountain ous Basque regions of Spain. If you live on some rocky moun tainside, the explanation goes, you can’t farm. You probably raise goats or sheep, and the kind of culture that grows up around being a herdsman is very different from the culture that grows up around growing crops. The survival of a farmer depends on the cooperation of others in the community. But a herdsman is off by himself. Farmers also don’t have to worry that their livelihood will be stolen in the night, because crops can’t easily be stolen unless, of course, a thief wants to go to the trouble of harvesting an entire field on his own. But a herdsman does have to worry. He’s under constant threat of ruin through the loss of his animals. So he has to be aggressive: he has to make it clear, through his words and deeds.
T he “culture of honor” hypothesis says that it matters where you’re from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even where your great-great-great-grandparents grew up. That is a strange and powerful fact.
Of all of Hofstede’s Dimensions, though, perhaps the most interesting is what he called the “Power Distance Index” (PDI). Power distance is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particu lar culture values and respects authority. To measure it, Hofstede asked questions like “How frequently, in your experience, does the following problem occur: employees being afraid to express disagreement with their managers?” To what extent do the “less powerful members of organizations and institutions accept and expect that power is distributed unequally?” How much are older people respected and feared? Are power holders entitled to special privileges.
Why is the fact that each of us comes from a culture with its own distinctive mix of strengths and weaknesses, tendencies and predispositions, so difficult to acknowledge? W ho we are cannot be separated from where we’re from—and when we ignore that fact, planes crash.
No one who can rise before dawn three hundred sixty days a year fails to make his family rich.
The Chinese students graduating at the top of their class at MIT are the descendants, chiefly, of people from the Pearl River Delta. He also points out that the lowest achieving Chinese Americans are the so-called Sze Yap people, who come from the edges of the Delta, “where soil was less fertile and agriculture less intense.” There is actually a significant scientific literature measuring Asian “persistence.” In a typical study, Priscilla Blinco gave large groups of Japanese and American first graders a very difficult puzzle and mea sured how long they worked at it before they gave up. The American children lasted, on average, 9.47 minutes. The Japanese children lasted 13.93 minutes, roughly 40 percent longer.
The wealthiest kids come back in September and their reading scores have jumped more than 15 points. The poorest kids come back from the holidays and their reading scores have dropped almost 4 points. Poor kids may out-learn rich kids during the school year. But during the summer, they fall far behind.
Cultures that believe that the route to success lies in rising before dawn 360 days a year are scarcely going to give their children three straight months off in the summer. The school year in the United States is, on average, 1 80 days long. The South Korean school year is 220 days long. The Japanese school year is 243 days long.
To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine suc c e s s—the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of his tory—with a society that provides opportunities for all. If Canada had a second hockey league for those children born in the last half of the year, it would today have twice as many adult hockey stars.