Husband and I often have heated debates about Gladwell’s premises. Do you think he gets it “right” or “wrong” and why…
Which ones in particular?
which premises?
Mostly his last book and how it relates to the idea of exceptionality. He takes the elite schools to task for not doing a better job of finding candidates from lower-socio economic communities (I tend to agree in a general sense) but it seems a over simplification of the complexities of the whole process. I’m probably wrong but hoping to get other’s take.
There are a few long discussions about that dumb book.
Gladwell in general: At his best, he makes banal truths seem like novel understandings. At his worst, he smugly leaps to conclusions based on a shallow understanding of actual experts’ actual findings and theories.
He’s a very fine writer and editor, though.
Old joke:
Malcolm Gladwell walks into a bar.
Bartender: What’ll you have?
MG: The opposite of whatever you think I’l have.
You may be interested in this previous discussion:
One of his premises that he gets partly right and partly wrong was his attempt at debunking the concept of natural talent - that the “talent” of champions really consists of 10,000 hours of practice, not natural gifts.
He’s right that it takes the 10,000 hours of work to get to the very top, but he’s wrong to suggest that in great champions there is not also a platform of natural talent underlying all that work. To get to the very top it takes both the talent AND the endless hours of practice.
A very simple study easily disproved the notion that work alone produces the champions. They asked a bunch of Olympic sprinters when they first found out they were fast. And every one of them said it was way back when they were little kids - that all through school they were always the fastest kid in the class, the fastest kid in the whole school. And this was way back at the beginning, long before they had spent even a single hour in practice.
They became great enough sprinters to make it to the Olympics by taking that natural speed and perfecting it through good coaching and Gladwell’s 10,000 hours of practice. The kids who finish back in the pack in those grade school races are not going to get to the Olympics no matter how many thousands of hours they work.
So Gladwell was right about the need for all that work but he was wrong that the work is pretty much the whole story and that natural talent does not play a significant role.
If the topic is simply “Malcom Gladwell”, and the options are only “right or wrong”, then the answer is “wrong”.
But that in itself seems a Gladwellistic way of looking at things.
@Scipio, a better counter to Gladwell’s “10,000 hours” notion is Michael Phelps. It is almost impossible that he had anything like 10,000 hours of real practice before his first Olympics.
He began swimming at 7, which means he spent 61,320 hours (roughly) alive from his first day in the pool to his first day in the Olympics. I won’t do the math, but if you assume he went to school, ate for a couple of hours every day, got a reasonable sleep, and had a practice commute of an hour per day, he could have done nothing else but swim to get his 10,000 hours. Seems unlikely.
If you are interested in this topic I highly recommend the book “The Sports Gene”. Different people respond differently to training and Phelps was almost certainly a high floor (had exceptional natural gifts) and a high responder (got more out of training than an average person) athlete.
One of my professors used to call Gladwell’s books “anecdata”: taking an interesting anecdote or data point and generalizing it into counterintuitive and reasonable sounding (but untested) hypotheses.
Gladwell cribbed (and twisted) the 10k hours theory from Anders Ericsson.
He’s very good at taking interesting ideas and packaging them, but often losing the truth in the process. He’s doing a podcast right now (and spent some time on the Freakonomics guy’s podcast hyping it), but I just couldn’t keep listening to it, it kind of drove me batty.
Actually, an even better counter is actual science which is measurable. Sprinters have fast twitch muscle fibers in contrast to distance runners.
Who spends multiple hours a day eating? Nobody I know. French people, maybe?
^A meal at a nice restaurant can easily be a hour plus in addition to any time to drive there and back.
Back to the broader point, 10000 hours over eight years is about the same amount of time a kid spends in school over that same time period. It seems extremely unlikely Phelps spent that much time swimming before his first Olympics.
I remember being annoyed at that 10,000 hours thing when he used the Beatles as proof. As though just by being one of the many house bands playing tons of hours in Hamburg, somehow the Beatles were born. Which begs the question of why were they the Beatles? And I’ll answer that it’s not because of their musicianship, though they were/are competent at their craft, but because of the genius of Lennon and McCartney, which, sorry, they were born with.
What was utterly amazing was that two musical geniuses met by chance at such a young age.
I think that 10,000 hour rule was pretty much debunked in a study coming out of Princeton a few years back. Don’t recall the exact conclusions, but believe how much practice mattered was shown to vary dependent on what activity was involved.
Yes, like most Gladwellisms it was as perniciously reductive as it was seductively intuitive.
Then there is the claim about Asian languages’ structure for number words and math skills.
http://gladwell.com/outliers/rice-paddies-and-math-tests/
He generalize from Chinese to Asian, but most other Asian languages do not have the simple number word structure of Chinese.
He uses anectdotes, not data. So more often “wrong” than “right”.
If you’re a 6 ft tall woman and you spend 10,000 hrs training in gymnastics you still wil never make it to the Olympics.
The 10,000 hours to master a skill is an interesting concept. I can certainly say that in watching my son in his sport and his teammates practice on a daily basis (sometimes with double practices) the application of time plus effort does not always yield a more skilled and talented end product. I’ve watched very dedicated athletes give it their “all” and still not attain their goal while some athletes apply the least effort and reach a very high level of competition. I have to think there is something to the idea of “natural ability”.
So the bottom line seems to be identifying these “natural ability” kids early on regardless of their demographics and providing them the environments to succeed. Problem is many talented kids won’t have access to great schools with supported programs in the arts and athletics.
Part of my “beef” with Gladwell is in order to really get a better representation of talented and “exceptional” students to the forefront you need to overhaul primary and secondary education.
I do find his discussion of atypical traits of LD students fascinating and I agree we need to broaden our understanding of what makes people successful. But, at the end of the day, society still expects you know how to read and write irregardless of how charismatic you may be.