Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”
Edit: a bit of background. Malcolm Gladwell is the author of the hugely successful Blink and The Tipping Point which you might have heard about..? His new book is about what makes some people like Bill Gates rise to the top and others who don’t make it. It’s also just about generally exceptional people, professional classical musicians, CEOs, famous actors, etc. etc. hence the title, “Outliers.” It’s poised to be another bestseller regardless of whether it’s actually good or not.
New York Times critic Michiko Kakutani on Malcolm Gladwell’s success:
Malcolm Gladwell’s two humongous best sellers, “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” share a shake-and-bake recipe that helps explain their popularity. […] “The Tipping Point” promotes the notion that ideas and fads spread in much the same way as infectious diseases do, while “Blink” theorizes that gut instincts and snap judgments can be every bit as good as decisions made more methodically.
Which really puts it far nicer than I ever could. (full article) I read Blink, and thought it was decent- It really did have a solid core of an idea, but as far as it’s execution it was really kind of lacking. Its flyaway bestseller popularity really makes me think that it’s fairly overrated, but at least it’s more palatable than other bestseller crap.
But where Blink was OK, and the Tipping Point probably is too, Outliers just seems poorly reasoned and poorly executed. Kakutani puts it better:
“Outliers,” Mr. Gladwell’s latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. Much of what Mr. Gladwell has to say about superstars is little more than common sense: that talent alone is not enough to ensure success, that opportunity, hard work, timing and luck play important roles as well. […] [His] hypotheses not only rely heavily on suggestion and innuendo, but they also pivot deceptively around various anecdotes and studies that are selective in the extreme.
And I totally agree. In the passage I read, he’s constantly arguing against himself- both trying to portray genius (itself never defined, and often confused with “success”) as something anyone can obtain with hard work (his 10,000 hours=expert rule) but at the same time trying to avoid the fact that even “only 3 hours a day” is a luxury denied many in the lower and middle classes. Ultimately, I think this kind of convoluted reasoning really says nothing profound about genius or success, just a disparate set of observations that don’t really add up to a whole.
(If you would like you can read the free except here)
