William: I'm persuaded that there's a lot of "mine is bigger than yours" on
the list; Cheerskep isn't alone .....
It's all OK with me, as I'm not competitive.
Gladwell et al.: My amateur psychologist interest (or psychologist with
passing interest) in achievement has led me to conclude that there are a few
recipes for success. If the area of activity is academic, high(er)
intelligence is a help; in entrepreneurship street smarts are more
important; breaks (luck) helps; contacts, perseverance, focus (to quote a
recent submission to the list) , a supportive relationship with mother (see
JFK and Churchill). I doubt that there will be a definitive recipe for the
components of achievement much beyond submissions we've read already on the
list.
Geoff C
----- Original Message -----
From: "William Conger" <[email protected]>
To: <[email protected]>
Sent: Monday, December 29, 2008 8:38 PM
Subject: Re: Malcolm Gladwell
Somehow Cheerskep always comes out on top. Everyone is dumber than he is
or can't say what they are claiming to say. Skepticism is a noble
condition but it easily slips into vanity. And vanity goeth before the
fall.
Yet I suspect Cheerskep might be more right than wrong about the Gladwell
fellow. After all, what could be more fraught with error or oversight
than to guess at what made so and so "great"? What, in fact, is
greatness? However it's defined it must include a huge percentage of
societal approbation. The psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi has
published a lot on creativity and "greatness" and he insists that such
honorific titles are always assigned by others and cannot be defined
according to innate attributes or personal "achievement". In other words,
no one can be great until society says so and society (in some form,
generalized or specialized) sets the terms, not the recipient.
High IQ is too hard to define and impossible to use as a guide for
practice. (See Gardner's Multiple Intelligences) and "talent" is even
more vague. Gladwell's ten thousand hours and the early age head start
are measurable, I suppose, but as Cheerskep points out, no rule seems to
apply there either.
Among the many pieces I've come across in my life regarding genius,
greatness, creativity, etc., aside from the convincing argument that it's
mostly societal approval, a consensus seems to be that enormous
concentration, very clear goals, and perserverance -- even in the face of
repeated failure -- are more or less common attributes. Yet there enough
exceptions to those attributes in any era to raise serious doubts about
their validity.
Another less mentioned but common attribute is influence. We tend to say
the great people have had great influence in their fields or in some
socially approved activities. Nevertheless, all of the efforts to come up
with a recipe for greatness or genius or superior creativity are really
slightly more than star gazing, a sort of astrology.
One thing we might say is that while it's probably impossible to say what
makes a person great, it is far more likely to say what makes a person a
failure, both personally and in societal terms. But even then we can find
many examples of the chap who was a total failure becoming a great success
in another era where other standards apply.
Even as late as the Renaissance, people tried to figure out what genius
was. It was decided that it was a kind of divine quality (neo-Platonism),
God given, beyond ordinary human capacity. Thus Michelangelo, for
instance was accorded the honor "The Divine Michelangelo" or Dante's
Comedia became the "Divine Comedy". (Both societal approbations, of
course).
Maybe the ancient and medieval kings had the right -- most useful and
least questioned -- notion that they ruled by Divine Right (with God's
personal approval) or actually were gods. This led to the "Great Chain of
Being" where each person had his or her fixed place and role. It became a
class thing. Only those of a certain elite class could dare aspire to
greatness, let alone genius, or creativity. Becoming an artist, after
around 1400, was one way to scoot up the chain and become a member of the
right class and thus eligible for greatness.
So while some of us may have met all of Gladwell's benchmarks for
greatness, none of us can claim the status. It must be given by others,
even if from Nature or God.
I think Gladwell's notion belongs to the dustbin of phrenology and similar
ungreat ideas
WC
--- On Mon, 12/29/08, [email protected] <[email protected]> wrote:
From: [email protected] <[email protected]>
Subject: Malcolm Gladwell
To: [email protected]
Date: Monday, December 29, 2008, 2:46 PM
Malcolm Gladwell writes very winningly, but his thinking is
not nearly as
good as his writing. In "Outliers", Gladwell
purports to tell us what
distinguishes the great accomplishers from all others. His
emphasis is largely on two
factors: good luck, and, beginning at a very early age,
spending "10,000 hours"
of work and study in the field of later achievement. The
necessity to start
very early means that effective parenting is crucial.
Conjoined with this is his stated position that innate
gifts like talent and
intelligence are insignificant elements in achieving
success. Don't worry, he
is saying, you don't have to be born gifted or very
smart to succeed; and, if
you don't succeed, it's not your fault. You can
blame it on your parents who
did not see to your putting in those 10,000 hours, or you
can blame bad luck.
Gladwell's is a very popular, pandering message.
Gladwell is already getting a reputation among his critics
for selecting only
the evidence that supports his thesis. It appears that
Gladwell's research
for "Outliers" was this simple: He made a list of
great achievers, and, with
his theory already in mind, he examined their lives. No
surprise -- each
person finally chosen for inclusion in the book reflects
the 10,000-hours and
good-luck thesis, and each had no overwhelming innate gifts
or intelligence.
He does not name any achievers he researched but left out
of his book. We
have to wonder: did he discover no great achievers who
didn't put in those 10,000
hours and ten years of apprenticeship, who didn't have
helpful parents, who
didn't enter their fields until their late twenties or
after?
Moreover, you will look in vain for any evidence that he
made an effort to
uncover people who HAD put in those 10,000 hours but still
never achieved. I
guarantee there are legions of such hard-working
non-achievers. The reason is
that no amount of hours and practice will make a Michael
Jordan or a Pavarotti or
a Steven Spielberg if innate gifts are not also there.
From the time I was very young, I was struck by how many
would-be artists,
athletes and scholars put in far, far more hours but
couldn't begin to match the
performance of guys who far, far out-performed them.
Granted, intensely
dedicated "failures" live and die in obscurity.
It's hard to find and research
them. But it was Gladwell's duty to hunt for them.
Discerning what is common to great performers tells us
nothing unless you can
also show that factor is lacking in non-achievers. Gladwell
would need to
reveal "if and only if" factors, or his claims
are merely comforting reading for
the vast audience of average folk who never made it big.
Gladwell cites some people with high I.Q scores who never
amounted to much.
