The blatant good fortune of highly effective people

Strolling through Dublin recently, Malcolm Gladwell found himself taken slightly aback. “It’s like no other city I’ve ever seen,” the New Yorker writer says, adjusting his bottled-rim spectacles. “There are so many young people here. It’s astonishing. It blows you away, actually.”

We’re sitting in the lobby of the Fitzwilliam Hotel, where 45-year-old Gladwell, one of the leading trend chroniclers of the era – not to say the closet thing in contemporary journalism to a rock star – is staying during a fleeting visit to promote his new bestseller, Outliers. The book is a dissection of the genius myth; in it, Gladwell seeks to explain why certain individuals – John Lennon, Bill Gates, say – are so far ahead of the curve as to seem virtually superhuman to the rest of us. His conclusions are startling – indeed, they challenge the idea, so deeply embedded in the western consciousness, of the ‘self-made’ individual.

HOW THE ENGLISH GOT THE BLUES
But right now, we’re talking about Dublin and Ireland’s recent (and increasingly mirage-like ) economic transformation. Writing in the New Yorker two years ago, Gladwell ignited controversy when he cited a Harvard university study which suggested the Celtic Tiger was, at least in part, a result of the legalisation of contraceptives in the ‘70s. As the birth rate declined, went the theory, society had fewer dependants to look after, leaving people in their 20s, 30s and 40s – the engine room of the economy – better positioned to lift the nation up via its bootstraps.
“It was a theory I found interesting – and which deserved to be put into the mix,” says Gladwell. “Since coming to Dublin, it’s so obvious that there is something to the theory – there are so many young people. It’s incredibly obvious if you’re not from here. There is a missing generation – someone was telling me last night about the people who left in the ‘80s. You only see it as an outsider.”
He fiddles with his glasses as he warms to the topic. “It’s a privilege to be an outsider if you’re going to be a writer. It’s like walking around Dublin and being stunned by all the young people – you see things you wouldn’t see otherwise. For instance, so much of black American music was re-interpreted by English white musicians of the ‘60s and ‘70s and there’s a reason for that. They’re not doing it despite their Englishness – they’re doing it precisely because they are white and English. They saw that music in a whole different way. Good lord, the number of possibilities that Led Zeppelin saw in Mississippi blues was endless – they saw more than the guys in Mississippi saw.”
With his thin features and soft voice, Gladwell could be a Hollywood scriptwriter’s idea of what a public intellectual should look like. He’s reserved and, at first, seems aloof – though this may owe something to exhaustion (he spoke at UCD the previous evening and has already given five interviews today). Certainly, Gladwell wears his fame lightly – he admits to being rather uncomfortable with his ‘journalist-as-superstar’ status.
“It’s rather odd for writers to be public figures,” he avers. “I’d rather be anonymous. It [fame] is so unexpected.”
Of mixed ethnic heritage – his father is English, his mother middle-class Jamaican – Gladwell grew up in rural Canada but has spent all of his career in the United States, working at the New Yorker since 1996. Eight years ago, he became a publishing sensation with his first book, an analysis of how trends morph into inevitable change entitled The Tipping Point – the title has since entered the lexicon and arguably made Gladwell a modern equivalent of the populist non-fiction writers of the 19th century, a disseminator for public consumption of the grand ideas of the age.

OBAMA AND THE LUCK OF THE DRAW
If The Tipping Point was a fascinating but apolitical piece of pop economics Outliers is altogether more provocative. One of the aims of the book, says Gladwell, is to repudiate the widely held notion that genius is a gift from the heavens, bequeathed on a lucky handful, whose success is thereafter a matter of inevitability. He argues that far from being born with god-given talent, the wildly successful – “Outliers” in Gladwell parlance – owe their success to hard work and, often, serendipity.
He offers as a case-study The Beatles’ residency in Hamburg, during which they played four to five hour sets almost nightly. After six months they had honed their craft to the point where their musical abilities started to outshine those of their rivals. This is an example of what he calls the “10,000 hours rule” – Gladwell’s pet theory that it takes 20 hours of practice each week over 10 years to truly master a discipline. Similarly, the rise of Microsoft founder Bill Gates owes as much, says Gladwell, to the fact he was in his early 20s when home computers started to become widely available. Were he a little older, chances are he would have already had a job programming mainframes for IBM. Thus, he would have been co-opted into an establishment about to be rendered anachronistic. But had Gates still been in high-school, he would have been too young to take advantage of the zeitgeist. If you’re not a genius, I say, it makes for optimistic reading.
“One of the big intentions was to combat the notion of the self-made man – an idea that won’t die, that’s been part of the conversation for 150 years and persists in the most odd ways,” Gladwell expands. “An interviewer in London said to me that the book is very Calvinistic in terms of how I talk about the importance of hard work and practice. If you think about it, it’s quite a liberating message. If we are just born the way we end up and are doomed to stay in the same position, well, that’s a message of futility. If you realise the degree to which effort is a component of success – it opens the door in all sorts of ways.”
Some might regard Gladwell himself as a classic ‘Outlier’. Did his own success inform the book? He shakes his head. “Not really. I don’t think about my books in that way. I’m sure on some Freudian or unconscious level it’s something I thought about. However, it’s really more of a reaction to the times.”
What about Barack Obama, at first glance the essence of the self-made success? “It’s funny – I don’t think of Obama as self-made at all,” he proffers. “He has been the beneficiary of so many factors in his life. He has this remarkable grandmother – the school he goes to in Honolulu is an extraordinary place, it’s turned out so many successful people. And then he’s the product of the finest education in Columbia and Harvard, helped along the way by affirmative action programmers, to which he is freely, openly and honestly grateful. He’s what I’m talking about in the book: he’s someone with a good chunk of ability, who was allowed to develop because of a favourable set of circumstances and a helpful system.”

MONASTIC FIGURE... OR NOT?
Gladwell may be one of our leading public intellectuals but he’s certainly not universally loved. In America, Outliers has stirred contention over its analysis of the Asian propensity towards overachievement at maths. As descendants of labour-intensive rice-based agrarian communities Asians, Gladwell contends, are predisposed towards hard work (maintaining a paddy field requires four times the number of man hours it takes to tend a typical western crop such as wheat). In the West we give up too easily at maths because we think it's something you are ‘good’ or ‘bad’ at, Gladwell posits. In Asia, people believe you can master maths if you simply work at it. Some commentators have accused him of clunky stereotyping.
“I was aware that the general topic is sensitive and that lots of Korean people resent being described as hard workers,” he says. “I thought there was a way to handle that discussion that was not hurtful. Also, we would not be using that as a put-down – we should be so lucky in the West to be described as hardworking. It’s fine to use cultural generalisations if you have a specific purpose in mind. And I was just talking about math, not about anything else. If we keep our aims specific, I think it’s fine to use those kinds of stereotypes.”
It’s hard to imagine Gladwell going out of his way to generate controversy. In a recent US magazine profile, he was painted as a solitary, almost monastic figure, a workaholic who did little other than write, jog and drink coffee. Sitting opposite him, it’s certainly tempting to buy into this portrayal of the author as a number-crunching aesthete.
“I think I know the article you’re referring to,” he smiles. “It wasn’t accurate. I’m pretty normal. I watch an insane amount of sports on TV. I read trashy novels. I go out with my friends. People of my generation who are in a job they like work really hard, especially in New York.Lots of my friends work much harder than I do.”

Outliers is published by Penguin