Paradigm Shifter

This is a book that makes one reevaluate one's assumptions about personal success.The authors skill in pulling apparently extraneous examples into a powerful whole and a truly moving ending provides an extrordinary reading experience.Upon completing the reading of this book, I immediatly ordered the author's two other books.

[Friday, January 09, 2009]

Interesting read, as always, BUT...

First, let me start by saying that I admire Malcolm Gladwell. He is a talented and engaging writer, and he has found a formula that works: He picks an interesting topic and creates a readable, anecdotal book around it. However, I was onto him when I read "Blink" (or TRIED to read it; I couldn't finish it) after I had read "Sources of Power" by Gary Klein. Both books deal with the way we make decisions based on our instincts, which is another word for the knowledge we accumulate. Mr. Klein's book is academic, well researched, filled with good examples and ultimately instructive. "Blink" is mostly fun and interesting. The difference between them is the same difference between a fine gourmet meal with quality ingredients and drinks and ribs with your friends at Houlihan's. Both are good experiences, but they serve different purposes.
Many of Mr Gladwell's examples are fascinating, such as how star hockey players tend to be born on a certain date or how an entire generation of lawyers schooled in hostile takeovers came from similar ethnic and economic bacgrounds. And his final chapter on his family's history and how the luck of the draw combined with seizing an opportunity gave them good lives. In the right hands, that chapter alone would make a fine mini-series on TV.
But in the end, "Outliers" is about serendipity. It does not teach the readers how to rise above their circumstances. In fact, I would suggest that the book can be divisive, as it makes successful people seem only lucky.
If you want a fun and entertaining read, full of anecdotes that you can use at your next cocktail party, then I heartily recommend "Outliers." In the meantime, I will soon be checking Geoff Colvin's new book, "Talent Is Overrated: What Really Separates World-Class Performers from Everybody Else." He has been writing on the topic of success for some time in Fortune magazine, and I suspect his book will be much more insightful and useful.

[Friday, January 09, 2009]

Read it, but keep an open mind.

This book is an excellent read if you've ever posed the questions about success and upbringing that the author has on his mind. It's entertaining in this way, and makes some truly excellent points.

I'd like to make a couple of points about the presumptions of the book, though:

First, the importance of success in our culture is obvious, and of course, Gladwell never questions it. Success in career, and to a lesser extent money, is simply treated as everyone's ultimate goal. Obviously people want this for their kids, and the books best audience is the huge number of parents who want to raise their infantren in such a way as to grant them success. It's not exactly a secret to me that pure analytical intelligence isn't the only key to success, and Gladwell illustrates this extremely well.
Because success is so crucial to the material, the author could've spent a chapter or so really getting into the price of it. Many successful people simply aren't happy in my experience. They may feel that they are more important than others because of their value to the communities they inhabit, but whether or not that attitude is really beneficial to society isn't discussed. I love the opening story of the town of Roseta, and what it says about community involvement and health. Does it ever occur to Gladwell that, in a town made up mostly of slate mine workers and textile people, that the importance he places on success is irrelevant there, and probably better off for it?
This is America, and we truly live to work here. 'Community' in the sense of a place where we all can belong is an outdated concept, unfortunately. The desire for success that Gladwell exhorts so strongly is responsible for lots of great advances, and fulfillment to those who have greatly contributed to it, but it can also be seen as a blight on neighborly behavior, a personality defect for some that discourages modesty, self-sacrifice, and balance. Families of successful people fail at about the same rate as other families, if not greater, depending on what profession we're discussing. Raising infantren to be self-interested success machines isn't necessarily in the interest of our communities at large, and Gladwell completely disregards that concept with his glowing praise for KIPP schools. I understand why, but I can't agree. In this light, the book is geared at the type of family that already is, or is trying very hard, to raise their infantren in the manner of "concerted cultivation".

Second, and this is arguable I know: Chris Langan's views on authority and institutional policy are basically treated as the ravings of a depressed lunatic who doesn't understand the system he failed to manipulate in his favor. I know Gladwell thinks more highly of Langan than that, but Gladwell was treated better by the system, and so he naturally thinks that Langan is simply wrong.
He's not, as least not like Gladwell implies.
The higher education system has it's problems, and some people who've been deeply involved in it's inner workings know it. Gladwell, as a positive product of that system, should be a bit more balanced when he writes about it.
The problem isn't simply that Chris Langan was a failure in a fair system due to his people skills. Why should a student have to be such a charmer simply to do something as basic as switching a class or getting the forms for his scholarship reviewed? Why would any professor tell a student that some people "just don't have the intellectual firepower" to succeed at their subject? These types of behaviors on the part of teachers are disciplinary problems for them more than Langan. That great freedom and love of knowledge the author appreciates so much about universities is certainly lacking in some places and with some teachers, and it is completely beyond the control of most students. The system isn't fair to everyone, and not schmoozing properly shouldn't decide one's educational future.
In a way, Langan is right. Manipulating, Oppenheimer-style, the system in your favor guarantees that someone operating in that system will be in favor of preserving it, because it works for them. Truly rebellious types, those who have a real problem with authority, ARE frequently dismissed by that system, or are told to change their attitude. This is a natural way of preserving order. I just wonder how many insightful (but rude) rebels who would have made some real and necessary changes to the system at large have been dismissed due to that mindset in education.

On that note, lets remember something else about all of this: Genius shouldn't necessarily be exalted above everything else anyway. Smart people are just as screwed up as the rest of us, and they shouldn't necessarily have all of the opportunities and advantages we can possibly bestow on them. This is especially true anywhere that morality comes into play. Gladwell did say, when discussing the two prominent methods of raising kids, that neither was morally superior to the other, and what I'm trying to say is that our society's way of bestowing rewards on the different types of people those methods create has some inherent flaws that will eventually demand our attention.

There's only room for a certain number of true outliers in society, by definition. Someone needs to start a discussion on finding ways for the rest of us to live better lives. If Gladwell writes THAT, then I'll read it, and I'd love it if he started with the town of Rosetta.

[Friday, January 09, 2009]

Customers who bought this item also bought: