Malcolm Gladwell on Outliers: The Story of Success

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Wanted to share this article I read in the Reader's Digest. The most interesting comment is highlighted in red.

Kim

http://www.rd.com/your-america-inspiring-people-and-stories/malcolm-gladwell-on-outliers-the-story-of-success/article104648-1.html

Malcolm Gladwell on Outliers: The Story of Success

In his new book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell maps the secrets of successful people.

By Hochman

From Reader's Digest

Also, read exclusive extras to the Malcolm Gladwell interview.

He has a knack for upending conventional views, in prose more like a novelist's than a researcher's. In his runaway bestseller The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell showed how ideas and products catch fire; in Blink, he explained why gut decisions are often better than well-thought-out responses. In his new book, Outliers: The Story of Success (Little, Brown), Gladwell probes what separates the highly successful from everyone else. How did the Beatles become the greatest rock band of all time? What makes Bill Gates so extraordinary? "I've always been drawn to those who are exceptional or weird in some way," he says, "and the book is about people whose achievement exceeds every expectation."

What matters: Talent, yes. Timing and opportunity—crucial. And not surprisingly, good old-fashioned hard work and discipline. "What surprised me most were the ordinary methods successful people use to achieve all they achieve," he says.

Gladwell himself is intimate with hard work and discipline. He grew up in rural Elmira, Canada, a place best known for its maple syrup festival. When his dad, a civil engineering professor, refused to drive young Malcolm 20 miles each morning to swim practice, the boy turned to running and became a high school champion. "Sometimes constraints actually create success," Gladwell says. "Not being able to swim made me run. And running taught me the discipline I needed as a writer."

RD: You write that talent and IQ don't matter as much as we think they do. What do we really need to become successful?Gladwell: An innate gift and a certain amount of intelligence are important, but what really pays is ordinary experience. Bill Gates is successful largely because he had the good fortune to attend a school that gave him the opportunity to spend an enormous amount of time programming computers-more than 10,000 hours, in fact, before he ever started his own company. He was also born at a time when that experience was extremely rare, which set him apart. The Beatles had a musical gift, but what made them the Beatles was a random invitation to play in Hamburg, Germany, where they performed live as much as five hours a night, seven days a week. That early opportunity for practice made them shine. Talented? Absolutely. But they also simply put in more hours than anyone else.

RD: How does a kid become the next Bill Gates or Tiger Woods?Gladwell: Both of these men had parents who allowed their children to focus almost exclusively on what brought them joy and what they were good at. And both of them were able, as children, to invest an extraordinary amount of time in pursuing that particular passion. Again, not just a little time. The magic number for them, for Mozart, and for so many outliers, as I call them, appears to be 10,000 hours.

RD: Is it ever too late to become a success?Gladwell: Hitchcock began making his best movies in his late 50s. Cézanne had his first one-man show at 56. Frost, Wallace s, and many others did their best work very late in life. Sometimes success isn't recognized until late in life. That's not uncommon. Success is not an automatic function of individual talent. It's bound up in so many other broader circumstantial, environmental, historical, and cultural factors.

RD: What about your own life story?Gladwell: Success is the steady accumulation of advantages. In my case, you can't understand me without understanding my family, which means going back to 18th-century Jamaica.

I am the descendant of an African slave and a white plantation owner. Unlike in the American South, the offspring of such relationships were allowed to be free. So [while] my great-great-great-grandmother was a slave, her son was a preacher. That gave our family an extraordinary advantage, which persisted for generations and put my grandmother in a position to achieve great personal and professional success, which in turn helped my mother. I am the inheritor of that legacy. This was a revelation: I hadn't known my true story until I started researching this book. It was profoundly humbling.

RD: Is there such a thing as an overnight success?Gladwell: No. And that's my concern with a show like American Idol. It encourages the false belief that there's a kind of magic, that you can be "discovered." That may be the way television works, but it's not the way the world works. Rising to the top of any field requires an enormous amount of dedication, focus, drive, talent, and 99 factors that they don't show on television. It's not simply about being picked. Which, by the way, is why very few of the anointed winners on American Idol have gone on to true success. Most have flamed out and gone away. That should tell us something.

Gladwell's Five Steps to Success

1. Find meaning and inspiration in your work.

2. Work hard.

3. Discover the relationship between effort and reward.

4. Seek out complex work to avoid boredom and repetition.

5. Be autonomous and control your own destiny as much as possible.

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