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.