Malcolm Gladwell Explains Success: It's Nurture, Not Nature

Posted by: Cathy Arnst on December 05

To everyone who is convinced that an Ivy-league education will guarantee their child’s bright future, relax. Where you go to college is no signifier of later success. Nor is the level of intelligence, or even being to the manor borne. What really matters is hard work, persistence, patience, cultural background, and most of all, pure dumb luck.

So says Malcolm Gladwell in his newest bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success. I recently reviewed the book for BusinessWeek, and the timing couldn’t have been more fortuitous for me. I’m in the process of looking at middle schools for my fifth grade daughter (in New York City you apply for public middle and high school). Many of the parents in my Brooklyn neighborhood are convinced that their child will suffer mightily if they they don’t get into the right middle school—one that is ranked at the top, only takes honors kids, or, for those in the money, a private school that weeds out the riffraff based on their ability to pay.

Gladwell, an outlier himself thanks to the huge success of The Tipping Point and Blink, explains why he wrote his latest:

The book grew out a frustration I found myself having with the way we explain the careers of really successful people. You know how you hear someone say of Bill Gates or some rock star or some other outlier—”they’re really smart,” or “they’re really ambitious?’ Well, I know lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and they aren’t worth 60 billion dollars. It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude—and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations.

As he did in his previous books, Gladwell pulls together all kinds of disparate research to prove that Bill Gates, The Beatles, top NY lawyers, professional hockey players, Asian math whizzes and many others got to the top because they had the ability and the opportunity to work very, very hard at their chosen field—and because they were in the right place at the right time. Birth date has a lot to do with it. The vast majority of professional hockey players, as well as college and high school stars, were born in January and February. When they started playing as kids they were the oldest on their teams, which were organized by calendar year, and therefore the biggest and most coordinated. They got more ice time, more coaching, and more chances to advance. Bill Gates and most of the other Silicon Valley pioneers were born between 1953 and 1955 — placing them at just the right age to take advantage of the birth of the personal computer revolution in 1975.

Gates did go to Harvard (and dropped out). That must count for something, right? Well, Gladwell looks at American Nobel Prize winners over the last 25 years and finds that very few went to top colleges. Most matriculated at small, unheralded schools or state universities. In chemistry, two of the laureates went to Harvard, two went to MIT and two went to City College of New York, a cheap commuter school favored by the children of immigrants. He also found that after a certain point, intelligence does not confer any advantages. You need to be fairly smart to reach the top, but no genius.

Hard work and persistence, though, can really take you far. Gladwell posits the 10,000 hour rule: You have to put in 10,000 hours of practice at anything to become a star. Gates was lucky enough to have access to a time-sharing computer, one of the first, in high school, and started putting in his 10,000 hours of programming time as a teenager. The Beatles played several shows a night, every night for a few years, in Hamburg, Germany, perfecting their style in obscure clubs before live audiences. Jewish lawyers in post-war New York, barred from the elite Wall St firms, spent years toiling away in esoteric areas of corporate law that the big firms wouldn’t touch, such as unfriendly takeovers. When corporate raiders came into their own in the 1980s, these lawyers became masters of the universe along with them.

For me, the parent of an adopted daughter from China, the most interesting parts of the book were those dealing with cultural background. So many of us want to believe that our genetic heritage makes us what we are. Smart parents must mean smart kids. Thus, people regularly assume my daughter is a math whiz because she comes from a nation of math whizzes. In fact, she struggles with math but loves dance and drama, much like her white, protestant Midwestern mom (she is the only Asian kid in her dance class).

The Asian children that do dominate the world’s math contests come from rice-growing cultures that revere really hard work and persistence. Sticking to a tough task, never taking the easy way out, is second nature to these kids, because their families have lived by those rules for generations. I don’t know of any so-called “gifted” children in my neighborhood who are being raised with the same work ethic.

The book is worth reading, if for no other reason than it makes you ponder the cultural and happenstance circumstances that litter your own path to success (or lack of). But it’s also worth considering Gladwell’s larger point: If we gave a lot more children opportunities to succeed we could have a lot more successes. Sports-minded children could be placed in age groups separated by only six months instead of 12 months; more schools could have access to the latest technologies; low-performing children could stay in school year round (as they do in Asia).

So, back to the middle school search. I’m trying to decide between a public school that will only take honors kids who have a certain score on their standardized tests, and a smaller school that will take low-performing kids as well as high. This second school doesn’t even consider grades and test scores when considering an applicant; admission is based on the willingness to learn, as displayed in a personal interview and school attendance. Interestingly, both schools are top-ranked on the city’s scoreboard. One got there by taking the smartest kids, one by believing that any child can be taught to excel. Which would you choose?

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