Malcolm Gladwell knows a thing or two about success.
His previous books, The Tipping Point and Blink, have sold more than three million copies combined in North America alone. He reportedly commands fees of $40,000 (U.S.) per speaking engagement and, in 2005, Time named him one of the 100 most influential people in the world.
Not bad for a kid from Elmira, Ont.
Now, Mr. Gladwell - whose trademark blend of social science and storytelling appears regularly in The New Yorker - is out to reveal the secret of success. Outliers, due out next week, looks at everyone from hockey players to lawyers and software billionaires to make the case that success has less to do with merit or psychological makeup than with arbitrary factors such as when and where you were born and what your parents did for a living.
Mr. Gladwell discussed his findings at his home in New York.
Outliers is subtitled "The Story of Success." How did you define success?
It was very, very consciously a narrow definition. I was interested in occupational success in the work that we do. Obviously, that's not the full definition of success. I'm not interested in happiness: This book is squarely about what happens when you go to work in the morning.
The book thoroughly demolishes the myth of the self-made man or woman. Was that something you consciously set out to do?
Very quickly, as it became clear the kind of themes that I was interested in, that's what I was running up against: There was a kind of existing narrative of success. ... It's had so many mythical expressions - Benjamin Franklin and Andrew Carnegie and Horatio Alger - and in the 19th century it took hold so strongly. I feel like it's become part of the architecture of American society. We haven't taken a step back and challenged it, which I was trying to do.
Can you explain why it's no coincidence Wayne Gretzky was born in January?
Hockey players and soccer players are overwhelmingly born in the early part of the year - hugely disproportionately - and the reason is that the cutoff date for hockey and soccer around the world is Jan. 1. When people start recruiting for all-star teams and rep squads, when kids are 8 and 9 years old, they pick the kids they think are the most talented. But at that age, the most talented kids are simply the ones born closest to the cutoff date because they're bigger and more mature. And then you give them special coaching and they play more games and they practise more, so by the time they're 17, 18 years old, they actually are better. ... Kids born in the second half of the school year also underachieve - which is why [parents] hold their kids back. What's curious is that it persists - that you see, if you have a cutoff date for school eligibility at Jan. 1, the December-born kids are underrepresented in college admissions 15 years later. So it's not trivial - it makes a lasting difference.
You also assert that you need 10,000 hours, or about 10 years of practice, to be a world-class expert in virtually anything.
Anything that is cognitively complex seems like it requires at least 10,000 hours. ... It's deliberate practice, so it's focused, determined, in environments where there's feedback, where there's a chance to really learn from mistakes. What's fascinating about this notion that expertise arises only after 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is that it seems to apply incredibly broadly to an astonishing array of different professions - from playing chess to writing classical music to being a brain surgeon to playing hockey.
Bill Joy, co-founder of Sun Microsystems, jokingly refers to himself as a "no-date nerd" who cared only about computers growing up. So, being an obsessive loner can actually help you become successful?
Absolutely. Getting 10,000 hours is so hard that the only way to do it is to be obsessive in a certain way. It might be a bad thing to be obsessive-compulsive in normal life, but if you're a research scientist, it actually could be a really good thing.
