Malcolm Gladwell argues that we as society respect the most successful among us i.e. Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Mozart, Einstein, professional athletes, virtuosos, etc. because of their innate talent and hard work. However, Gladwell explains such fame and fortune as results happenstance and being in the right place at the right time. Thus, an individual's trajectory in life is as much due to personal perseverance as environmental circumstances and opportunities available to he or she starting from a young age. For example, the first case Gladwell describes is that of pro hockey players in Canada: an overwhelmingly majority of are born in January, February, and March, more than can be explained by chance alone. The skewed birthday distribution arises because the cutoff age for playing in an elite junior hockey league in Canada is Jan 1; thus, kids that born earlier in the year are older and therefore larger and stronger. These kids who are more physically mature are recruited to enter, get more attention and training , and thus become more technically skilled than those initially rejected from the elite leagues. Gladwell suggests that becoming a pro hockey player is more an issue of timing than talent.
Gladwell's debunking of "successful" individuals is refreshing in that he attributes achievement less to character qualities than childhood environment, but I think he minimizes too much the personal traits that facilitates the careers of moguls such as Gates. Of course, having supportive parents, money, and access to computers propelled his programming ventures, but Gates deserves a huge amount of individuals merit, too. Instead of describing opportunities as having simply fallen across Gates' path as a teenage boy, it is equally valid to state that his extreme passion for coding led him to seek out those opportunities that allowed him to revolutionize the world later in life.
Gladwell writes on a wide variety of topics. He argues that Chinese are good at math because of the language, unlike English, is structured so that math is very logical. He reasons that airplane crash rates are in part due to the "power distance" in different cultures. Korean Air had a history of high crash rates because assistant pilots would not be direct enough with their superiors when expressing the danger of emergency situations. There are a number of good discussion topics in his book that provide a different perspective on the most "successful" among us.
No comments:
Post a Comment