He started with the lawyers. “Why do they all have the same biography?” he wondered. “We take it for granted that there’s this guy in New York who’s the corporate lawyer, right? I just was curious: Why is it all the same guy?” It takes a special kind of brain to be curious about New York City lawyers. Such a brain belongs to Malcolm Gladwell, 45, author of The Tipping Point and Blink, the founding documents of the now best-selling genre of pop economics, which together have sold more than 4.5 million copies.
Slender, with elfin cheekbones and a distinctive bloom of spirally brown hair, Gladwell is one of those clever people who actually looks clever. His curiosity about high-achieving lawyers was the germ of his third book, Outliers, which will be published Nov. 18. It’s a book about exceptional people: smart people, rich people, successful people, people who operate at the extreme outer edge of what is statistically possible. Robert Oppenheimer. Bill Gates. The Beatles. And yes, fancy lawyers.
Gladwell’s goal is to adjust our understanding of how people like that get to where they are. Instead of the Horatio Alger story of success — a gifted child who through heroic striving within a meritocratic system becomes a successful (rich, famous, fill in your life goal here) adult — Outliers tells a story about the context in which success takes place: family, culture, friendship, childhood, accidents of birth and history and geography. “It’s not enough to ask what successful people are like,” Gladwell writes. “It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.” Outliers is, in its genteel Gladwellian way, a frontal assault on the great American myth of the self-made man. (And they mostly are men. There aren’t a lot of women outliers in Outliers.)
In some ways, Gladwell himself is, if not an outlier, then at least an outsider. He is both the son of a Jamaican woman in overwhelmingly white Canada and an academic kid from a working-class town (Elmira, Ont.). But the outsider had an in: his father, a mathematician, brought him into the rarefied world of the university. That context is not unconnected to his later success. “As a kid, 11 or something, we would go to his office, and I would wander round,” he says. “I got that sense that everybody was so friendly, and their doors were open. I sort of fell in love with libraries at the same time.” Now Gladwell, a New Yorker staff writer, specializes in milling crunchy academic material — psychology experiments, sociological studies, law articles, statistical surveys of plane crashes and classical musicians and hockey players — into prose so silky and accessible, it passes directly into the popular imagination in the form of memes. The most obvious candidate for memification in Outliers is a little gem Gladwell calls the 10,000-Hour Rule. Studies suggest that the key to success in any field has nothing to do with talent. It’s simply practice, 10,000 hours of it — 20 hours a week for 10 years.
Outliers is a more personal book than its predecessors are. If you hold it up to the light, at the right angle, you can read it as a coded autobiography: a successful man trying to figure out his own context, how success happened to him and what it means. Gladwell is asking, as he puts it over lunch, “whether successful people deserve the praise we heap on them.”
See the 100 best novels of all time.
See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.
After all, it’s not as if Gladwell is a genius in any measurable sense. In spite of his patrimony, he had no particular gift for math. He entered college two years early but got lousy grades. (“College was not an … intellectually fruitful time for me,” he says, with the air of a man euphemizing strenuously.) He was fired from his first job in journalism, at the American Spectator. It wasn’t until he wound up at the Washington Post that he really bore down and learned his craft. “I was a basket case at the beginning, and I felt like an expert at the end,” he says. “It took 10 years — exactly that long.” There you have it: the 10,000-Hour Rule in action.
According to Outliers, genius isn’t the only or even the most important thing. Gladwell’s weapon of choice when assaulting myths is the anecdote, and one of the book’s most striking, and saddest, is the strange story of Christopher Langan, a man who despite an IQ of 195 (Einstein’s was 150) wound up working on a horse farm in rural Missouri. Why isn’t he a nuclear rocket surgeon? Because of the environment he grew up in: there was no one in Langan’s life and nothing in his background that could help him capitalize on his exceptional gifts. “He had to make his way alone,” Gladwell writes, “and no one — not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses — ever makes it alone.”
You get the feeling that Gladwell feels a little guilty about his success — that on some level he thinks it should be Christopher Langan’s face on the opposite page, not his, and the fact that it isn’t says something about a world that isn’t as meritocratic as it claims to be. You could read Outliers in many ways — as a brief for affirmative action; as a critique of political correctness (some stereotypes, like Asians being good at math, turn out to be true); even as a defense of Big Government. But it also explains why genius isn’t enough. It makes geniuses look a bit less special and the rest of us a bit more so. Outliers wasn’t intended as autobiography, Gladwell says. “But you could read it as an extended apology for my success.” Apology accepted.
See the 100 best novels of all time.
See TIME’s Pictures of the Week.
