Sunday April 12, 2009 on CNN - "Global Public Square
ZAKARIA: Malcolm Gladwell is probably the best-selling nonfiction writer in America. He's sold many millions of books based on very simple ideas.
"Blink." Should you trust your first impression? "The Tipping Point." How does a fad become a sensation?
His new book, which is my favorite, is called "Outliers." In it he explores what makes a person successful. Why do some talented people flame out early while others go on to brilliant careers?
His main point is this. Success doesn't have much to do with talent. Instead, he says, it's almost always a product of hard work and of the culture in which one lives.
Malcolm Gladwell, thank you.
MALCOLM GLADWELL, AUTHOR, "OUTLIERS": Thank you for having me.
ZAKARIA: One of my favorite examples is actually your first example, where you talk about hockey players.
And the reason I think you talk about them is because, what could be more meritocratic than sports? You just -- you know, it's not who your parents are. It's just a question of raw talent and hard work, it would seem.
But what do you find?
GLADWELL: Well, you find -- there's some lovely work by a series of psychologists. What you find is that an overwhelming majority of hockey players are born in the first three months of the year -- elite hockey players.
And the same is true, by the way, of soccer around the world.
And the reason for that is that the system -- the system under which age class hockey and age class soccer are organized has as a cutoff date January 1st. And so, from the very beginning when we pick young kids to pull them out and put them on all-star teams and give them special coaching and special encouragement, we're looking at groups of children who are all nine years old. And we're saying, those three are the best. Let's pull them out.
Well, who is the best at nine years old? Well, it's children who are the eldest in their class, those born closest to the cutoff date.
ZAKARIA: So, the ones who are nine years ten months, nine years 11 months and nine years 11.5 months, tend to be the best.
GLADWELL: Are the best. When you're nine years old, 11 months can be four inches in height. It can be 25 pounds. It can be the difference between being a klutz and someone who's incredibly coordinated.
And so, we think there that what we've done is identify people who have extraordinary individual talent. We actually haven't. We've created a system that confers a special benefit on children born in a certain part of the year. And that benefit persists.
And those kids are the ones who end up 10 years later being in, playing all-star, playing in the NHL or playing professional football or soccer around the world.
ZAKARIA: Do you think this applies to, I don't know, finance? That there were some kids who seemed, at a young age, a little bit more talented at math, and that they get a certain amount of attention by teachers and parents?
GLADWELL: And it snowballs.
ZAKARIA: And they're told they're smart, and then it's reinforced.
GLADWELL: Yes. This is -- this principle in psychology is called Matthew Effect, after the line in the Bible, "To he who has, much more will be given." Right?
It's this idea that -- it's called cumulative advantage, which is, small initial advantages mushroom over time.
The best data we have is on reading. A very, very small difference in reading ability at a very young age quickly mushrooms into a large difference. Why? Because if you're a little bit better at reading at the age of six, you'll read more. Right? Because reading is easier and more pleasurable.
And that little extra increment of reading that you do causes you to read even better than the person behind you. And the cycle reinforces itself until you have, by the time kids are -- when kids are six, the difference in the amount they read is like this. When they're 12, the same kids, the difference is this. And it's because of this snowballing effect that happens with small initial advantages growing.
ZAKARIA: Tell the story of the Beatles with regard to practice.
GLADWELL: The Beatles are a lovely example, because we think that their story begins with the invasion of America in 1964. Right? These four, fresh-faced, practically teenagers who burst on the scene.
You know, nothing could be further from the truth. They spend the really critical periods -- they spend two years in Hamburg, Germany, as the house band in a strip club playing eight-hour sets, seven days a week, for months at a stretch.
They have one of the most extraordinarily intensive apprenticeships in rock 'n' roll. And if you think about what it takes to play -- I mean, the typical set for a rock band is what, an hour, an hour-and-a-half. They did eight-hour sets, day in, day out.
If you think about that you realize, if you force a group of young musicians to play together over that -- in that way, for months at a stretch -- you're forcing them to master all kinds of different genres, to learn how to play together well, to write songs.
I mean, everything you need to do, particularly at the dawn of rock 'n' roll, to be the most dominant band of your generation requires some kind of apprenticeship. And lo and behold, they have it.
And I would argue, and many agree with me, that no Hamburg, no Beatles. You know, they're just not the band that we remember unless they had that kind of intensive training.
ZAKARIA: But of course, it raises an interesting question to me, which is, you could imagine a lot of other bands being told, "I've got good news for you. You've got a great gig in Hamburg, Germany. The bad news is you're going to have to play eight hours a day, seven days a week." And they would have said, "No way. We're not going to do it."
So, something about that group made them relish the opportunity...
GLADWELL: Yes.
ZAKARIA: ... to do enormous amounts of practice. And presumably, that's true of some of these sportsmen and true of other people.
That is, yes, it takes practice. But you need a certain mentality to want to practice...
GLADWELL: To want to practice that much.
ZAKARIA: ... the hell out of it. You know, the...
GLADWELL: What you have described is what I believe talent is.
Talent is the desire to practice. Right? It is that you love something so much that you are willing to make an enormous sacrifice and an enormous commitment to that, whatever it is -- task, game, sport, what have you.
When people use that word, we usually talk about something inherent in you. And we think of something very specific. I don't think that's what talent is. I think talent is simply desire.
It's what you said of the Beatles. Their talent consisted of their ability to see Hamburg as an opportunity, whereas 99 out of 100 bands would have seen Hamburg as a nightmare -- which, by the way, it was.
I mean, you could argue that the Beatles talent was also an act of delusion. You know, to be able to see opportunity in Hamburg in 1959 required, at the very least, an extraordinary imagination.
ZAKARIA: But there is no such thing as a certain inherent talent? I mean, there are people who clearly are just great at math. There are people who are -- you know, who clearly have a way with poetry.
Was Shakespeare not talented?
GLADWELL: Well, see, this is a surprisingly active debate among psychologists. So, does Shakespeare have something in him, separate from the desire, to write poetry and plays that explains his genius? All right. I'll grant you that.
But the question is, is it this big, or is it this big? I think it's this big.
Same thing when you say someone has a talent for mathematics. I would say that much of the talent for mathematics is that they like numbers. My father is a mathematician. What is his talent? He genuinely loves numbers in a way that you or I would find unfathomable. Right? That's 90 percent of why he's a mathematician. He just -- and so, as a result, from the very youngest age he was drawn to this, and has put in -- put in by the age of 21, 100 times more time in math than I did by the age of 21.
It starts with love.
Now, does he have some separate facility with numbers that I don't have? Maybe. But I'm not convinced it's significant.
You know, I mean, I think any reasonably intelligent human being has the intellectual firepower to do calculus. But only a small fraction of us make use of it. And it's the "make use" part that I'm interested in.
ZAKARIA: Malcolm, when you talk about what succeeds, some of what you talk about in terms of success and failure is not just the individuals -- because, as you say, that doesn't seem dominant. It's the environment around them, the culture around them. And some cultures -- I mean, national cultures -- seem better and worse.
GLADWELL: Yes.
ZAKARIA: You found that, by and large, Koreans were very bad at being pilots.
GLADWELL: Yes.
ZAKARIA: Explain that.
GLADWELL: To be a good pilot we think is a matter of technical skill. It isn't really.
ZAKARIA: But what about Sully Sullenberger?
GLADWELL: Well, he's such a -- he's such an outlier, to the theory of "Outliers." That's a very rare kind of plane crash. In fact, I don't know if there'd ever been a successful water landing in the last 50 years.
Most crashes are of a very different form. The overwhelming majority of crashes are the result of a breakdown in communication between the co-pilot and a pilot. Something comes up, a situation emerges that requires those two pilots to be in open and honest communication, and they fail to do that. One person withholds information. One person doesn't share. Whatever.
There are invariably social failures.
So the question is -- this is why there's a cultural component -- is it easier in some cultures for a subordinate to speak openly and honestly to his superior than in other cultures? And the answer is, absolutely.
In fact, this is one of the dimensions on which cultures vary the most. It's called power distance. It is the respect for hierarchy. And there are some cultures that have zero respect for hierarchy, and some cultures for which that is the dominant paradigm of social interaction.
Korea, as it happens, is a culture which has enormous respect for hierarchy, where power distance is a -- in fact, the entire linguistic structure of the Korean language is infused with this sense of, how do I treat you if you are older and superior to me? I use specific pronounal forms. I mean, it goes on and on and on. Right?
Well, that is, in 99 percent of cases, a beautiful and wonderful thing. In the cockpit, it's a problem.
And so, you see -- whenever you see cultures, if you overlay the list of cultures in the world by their respect for power distance with the list of cultures in the world by their plane crashes per capita, it's basically the same list.
ZAKARIA: So, it's the ones that hierarchical that have the most plane crashes.
GLADWELL: That have the most plane crashes.
So, you'll see -- so a classic, you know...
ZAKARIA: And what does Korean Airlines do?
GLADWELL: Well, this is the second part of this argument, which is, this is not to say that certain cultures are incapable of doing that task. It just means that, if they want to get better, they have to address the cultural component of their interaction.
And that's exactly what Korean Air did. And they fixed their problem. Today, Korean Air -- Korean Air was, through the '90s, one of the most dangerous airlines in the world. I mean, it was almost shut down at the end of the '90s by international aviation authorities.
The Canadians told them at one point, you can't fly over Canada any more. I mean, which is a real problem if you're trying to get from one end of the world to the other.
And they fixed it. And they fixed it by bringing in people who have a different cultural attitude, and essentially re-educating the pilots in Korean Airlines.
ZAKARIA: And they made them speak in English...
GLADWELL: Made them speak in English.
ZAKARIA: ... because they said it's a non-hierarchical language.
GLADWELL: It's a non-hierarchical language. They want them to think like, you know -- I mean, non-hierarchical cultures are America, Israel, Austria, Australia. They want them to think like Australians, essentially.
What do you do? Well, you make them speak English, right? And it works.
I mean, and this is the sort of hopeful lesson at the core of my book, which is that, when we acknowledge how much of success is embedded in culture, that's a hopeful thing, because culture is malleable. It's something we can address if we put our minds to it.
ZAKARIA: So, when you look at America today, what elements of our culture are producing the kind of problems we see -- with a bad education system, for example?
GLADWELL: I think that we are -- we have carried -- in the educational realm we have carried our obsession with individualism too far. And paradoxically, we have an enormous amount to learn, I think, from Asian cultures like Korea. I mean, just as they can learn from us on flying planes, we can learn from them on education.
If you go to Korea or China or Hong Kong, and you ask them, what does it take to be good at math, their answer would be, being good at math is a function of how hard you work.
Now, hard work is something that is available to all students regardless of intellectual ability. So when you come in with that perspective, your expectation is everyone can work.
The dull child can work as hard as -- in fact, the dull child may find it easier to work harder than the smart child. That work-based perspective on achievement allows you, I think, to serve the needs of a much broader pool of students than our -- we have an ability-based approach. Right?
We're constantly segregating kids according to their aptitude, whatever on earth that is. I think we would do well to banish that word and simply -- I think we should separate kids according to how hard they want to work.
The kids who want to do their homework ought to be one. And if you don't want to do your homework, I think we should say, then, you have a problem. And we should -- I don't care if you have an I.Q. of 150, you have a problem.
You know, you have to -- a work-based culture is, at the end of the day, a far more effective means of raising the middle.
ZAKARIA: Malcolm Gladwell, thank you very much.
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