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[Gene GeRue <genegerue AT ruralize.com>]

Lost in the Crowd
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: December 15, 2008
All day long, you are affected by large forces. Genes influence your  
intelligence and willingness to take risks. Social dynamics  
unconsciously shape your choices. Instantaneous perceptions set off  
neural reactions in your head without you even being aware of them.

Over the past few years, scientists have made a series of exciting  
discoveries about how these deep patterns influence daily life. Nobody  
has done more to bring these discoveries to public attention than  
Malcolm Gladwell.

Gladwell’s important new book, “Outliers,” seems at first glance to be  
a description of exceptionally talented individuals. But in fact, it’s  
another book about deep patterns. Exceptionally successful people are  
not lone pioneers who created their own success, he argues. They are  
the lucky beneficiaries of social arrangements.

As Gladwell told Jason Zengerle of New York magazine: “The book’s  
saying, ‘Great people aren’t so great. Their own greatness is not the  
salient fact about them. It’s the kind of fortunate mix of  
opportunities they’ve been given.’ ”

Gladwell’s noncontroversial claim is that some people have more  
opportunities than other people. Bill Gates was lucky to go to a great  
private school with its own computer at the dawn of the information  
revolution. Gladwell’s more interesting claim is that social forces  
largely explain why some people work harder when presented with those  
opportunities.

Chinese people work hard because they grew up in a culture built  
around rice farming. Tending a rice paddy required working up to 3,000  
hours a year, and it left a cultural legacy that prizes  
industriousness. Many upper-middle-class American kids are raised in  
an atmosphere of “concerted cultivation,” which inculcates a fanatical  
devotion to meritocratic striving.

In Gladwell’s account, individual traits play a smaller role in  
explaining success while social circumstances play a larger one. As he  
told Zengerle, “I am explicitly turning my back on, I think, these  
kind of empty models that say, you know, you can be whatever you want  
to be. Well, actually, you can’t be whatever you want to be. The world  
decides what you can and can’t be.”

As usual, Gladwell intelligently captures a larger tendency of thought  
— the growing appreciation of the power of cultural patterns, social  
contagions, memes. His book is being received by reviewers as a call  
to action for the Obama age. It could lead policy makers to finally  
reject policies built on the assumption that people are coldly  
rational utility-maximizing individuals. It could cause them to focus  
more on policies that foster relationships, social bonds and cultures  
of achievement.

Yet, I can’t help but feel that Gladwell and others who share his  
emphasis are getting swept away by the coolness of the new  
discoveries. They’ve lost sight of the point at which the influence of  
social forces ends and the influence of the self-initiating individual  
begins.

Most successful people begin with two beliefs: the future can be  
better than the present, and I have the power to make it so. They were  
often showered by good fortune, but relied at crucial moments upon  
achievements of individual will.

Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously  
focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as  
diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks  
that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to  
rewire their brains.

Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can  
do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose  
from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. This  
individual power leads to others. It leads to self-control, the  
ability to formulate strategies in order to resist impulses. If forced  
to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control  
than rich without it.

It leads to resilience, the ability to persevere with an idea even  
when all the influences in the world say it can’t be done. A common  
story among entrepreneurs is that people told them they were too  
stupid to do something, and they set out to prove the jerks wrong.

It leads to creativity. Individuals who can focus attention have the  
ability to hold a subject or problem in their mind long enough to see  
it anew.

Gladwell’s social determinism is a useful corrective to the Homo  
economicus view of human nature. It’s also pleasantly egalitarian. The  
less successful are not less worthy, they’re just less lucky. But it  
slights the centrality of individual character and individual  
creativity. And it doesn’t fully explain the genuine greatness of  
humanity’s outliers. As the classical philosophers understood,  
examples of individual greatness inspire achievement more reliably  
than any other form of education. If Gladwell can reduce William  
Shakespeare to a mere product of social forces, I’ll buy 25 more  
copies of “Outliers” and give them away in Times Square.

http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/opinion/16brooks.html?_r=1&em