March 2009

Some Reflections on Reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers
by Nancy Jane Moore

Nancy Jane Moore is part of the consortium of writers on Book View Café,where she is posting a new piece of flash fiction every Thursday. Her collection, Conscientious Inconsistencies, is published by PS Publishing, and her novella, Changeling, is available from Aqueduct Press. Her stories have recently appeared in Spanish on Quimicamente impuro and Breves no tan breves. She serves on the Broad Universe Motherboard and coordinates rapid fire readings.

Ten thousand hours.

That's how long it takes to get really good at something, according to Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Outliers. And that's ten thousand hours of playing the cello or practicing yoga or writing and rewriting fiction — it doesn't include all the extraneous tasks that go along with those activities.

Ten thousand hours. If you have a job where you work 40 hours per week, it takes about five years to reach ten thousand hours. Of course, if you have a job, you know you don't actually spend all 40 of those hours in direct work. There are distractions: meetings, administrative tasks, dealing with your boss (especially if you've got Dilbert's boss), playing spider solitaire.

Gladwell isn't a scientist — I'd call him an acute cultural observer and unique thinker — and his evidence is anecdotal, though he cites studies backing up the ten thousand hour minimum for achieving excellence. But it's compelling, nonetheless. Hard work matters.

The book discusses another intriguing idea: You don't have to be born a genius — or a world class athlete, musician, poet, etc. — to succeed. You need some talent or ability, yes, but as long as you cross some base line of "good enough" and work hard enough, you can still become a master in your field. As one of his examples, he quotes from psychologist Liam Hudson, "A mature scientist with an adult IQ of 130 is as likely to win a Nobel Prize as is one whose IQ is 180." [p. 80] Good enough, of course, will vary from field to field. A woman with a solid mesomorphic build who tops 6 feet in height and is physically coordinated might have a shot at being a professional basketball player if she puts in the time, but it's unlikely that any amount of work will let her become a ballerina.

And there is another rub: You need to get the opportunities to do the right kind of study and work and you need to know what to do with those opportunities.

Gladwell's major point in the book is that no world class athlete, acclaimed artist, successful business leader, etc., gets there alone. For example, he shows how Bill Gates was able — through opportunities provided by family and school, plus the luck of timing — to spend enormous numbers of hours programming computers while he was in high school, so that by the time he quit Harvard he knew more about computer programming than virtually anyone in the country. He also had the advantage of being brought up in a family well-acquainted with how the world works — his father is a lawyer and his mother came from a family of bankers. Gates was smart, he had advantages, and he worked hard.

Advantages matter and advantages can be odd. One of the parts of the book most discussed in reviews and other articles is Gladwell's look at how the junior hockey rules in Canada favor children born early in the year. Since the cutoff point for age groups is December 31, the kids born in January have a huge advantage — they're almost a year older (and bigger and stronger, given how fast children grow) than those born in December. That's an advantage, just like growing up upper middle class is an advantage.

We can't do much about advantages individually. As a society, we can work to change rules that limit some at the expense of others, but as individuals, we have to work with what we have. And, because this is not a review of Outliers, but rather an essay on what I thought about while reading it, I am most interested in figuring out how to apply Gladwell's ideas in our individual creative lives.

So what do Gladwell's speculations mean for writers?

First off, it means writers don't have to be born super-talented to succeed; they just have to be good enough. Good enough, in this context, likely means that both reading and writing come fairly easily and are enjoyable activities.

Secondly, it means that hard work pays off. A writer with enough talent who puts in the time will eventually produce great work. It's no accident that most writers of renown say they started writing stories as children. But even those who start later in life can achieve some success if they are willing to put in the time. After all, writing, unlike ballet or football, is not an activity limited by age and physical health.

Thirdly, it's important to recognize that people don't succeed by themselves. They have lots of help along the way. That's Gladwell's thesis, and it's an important one. But not everyone is born into perfect circumstances for success. Those who aren't need to build their own community of support — not a cheering section, but teachers, mentors, and people whose opinion they can trust whether it's positive or negative.

Fourth, advantages aren't distributed equally and while complaining about unfairness may work on the societal level to give the next generation a better shot, it rarely fixes the problem of the individual who got shortchanged. I think the solution here is for people first to recognize the advantages they did get, and use them. Then they need to recognize the barriers to their success, and figure out some workarounds.

Working around the disadvantages isn't easy: Gladwell tells some sobering tales of people who had talent and worked hard, but got nowhere due to accidents of birth. And figuring out exactly what constitutes an advantage or disadvantage isn't an exact science. As I wrote this, I was listening to Dolly Parton sing "Coat of Many Colors," a song drawn from her childhood, which was dirt-poor. She's certainly a success, and it's possible that some of the things that made her a success were a result of that same disadvantaged childhood.

People cannot control the advantages and disadvantages they were born with, but they can make every effort to find a community of support and to take advantage of the opportunities that come along (and to seek out those opportunities). Even so, success is not guaranteed.

But if Gladwell's right, one thing is guaranteed: Anyone who is good enough to write, and who puts in thousands of hours of hard work writing and rewriting and learning from mistakes, can write something great. Those writers may never make much money or win the Nobel Prize, but they will produce something worth reading, and perhaps even something that outlasts them.

So I challenge my fellow writers, and myself: Put in the time and become great. I hope success will follow — and I certainly believe we should all strive to be read far and wide and paid for our work — but great writing really is its own reward. And the only thing standing between us and greatness is hard work.

Go forth and write.

About the book: Gladwell, Malcolm, Outliers: The Story of Success, Little, Brown & Co., New York, 2008.