>> Kirsten Wiley: Okay. So Mr. Gladwell is here today to discuss his new book,
Outliers. Outliers is a book about success. It starts with a very simple question: What is
the difference between those who do something special with their lives and everyone
else? The book explores this question by examining the lives of the remarkable among
us: the brilliant, the exceptional, and the unusual.
Through his book we learn that the way we think about success is all wrong. Malcolm
Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of two best selling books:
The Tipping Point and Blink. Please join me in welcoming Malcolm Gladwell to
Microsoft.
[applause]
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Thank you. It's a real pleasure to be here. You know, I don't
work in an office, I work at home, and I forget what offices are like, and I was around the
corner and I saw this big, open refrigerator with all kinds of soft drinks. I was like, how
cool is that?
So I'm going to talk about my new book, which, you know, there are many things in it,
and I can say all kinds of things about it, but I thought I would talk about an idea that is
actually not in the book but that I've been thinking about a lot since writing it and which
encapsulates a lot of what the book is about. And it's this idea that's called capitalization.
And it is a concept that a very brilliant psychologist named James Flynn has written a lot
about. Those of you who know something about IQ research would have heard of the
Flynn effect. That's James Flynn's idea. And he's written a lot about this concept of
capitalization, which is what is the rate at which a society capitalizes on its potential?
And it was what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end
up doing that thing, right? How efficiently do we make use of the talents within a given
group of people.
So let me give you an example. I don't know how many of you read Michael Lewis's
book, The Blind Side, which is this extraordinary book about a young man in east
Memphis, a teenager who's 6'6" and 350 pounds and he's discovered by and adopted by a
wealthy white family and they realize that he's an extraordinary athlete and they work
with him until he becomes one of the finest offensive linemen in the country. And, in
fact, he's about to be drafted into the NFL, this is many years later, and make a kajillion
dollars.
And they -- it's this extraordinary story, but the part of it that always stayed with me
when I read it was right at the very end, the kid, whose name is Michael Oher, says that
he's from the slums of Memphis, east Memphis, and he says "if everyone who I grew up
with who was into football, who had a real ability in football actually ended up playing
football, they'd need to have two National Football Leagues."
And what he was saying was that east Memphis did not do a very good job on
capitalizing on its athletic ability. And so Lewis actually follows up on this and he talks
to some people in the east Memphis school system and he asks them what percentage of
kids in east Memphis who get a college athletic scholarship actually end up going to
college. And the answer was 1 in 6. Which absolutely floored me because I would have
thought that when it comes, if there was one thing in America that we were really good at
doing, it would be exploiting the athletic ability of our youth, in particular of our
African-American youth.
I would have thought that in an inner-city area, the capitalization rate for sports would
have been 90 percent. But, in fact, what we learn in east Memphis is that the
capitalization rate is 1 in 6. It's 16 percent.
So now think about it. If in something that we care about as much as sports, something
that we -- there's possibly nothing in American society that we devote more time and
attention and intellectual resources to than the maximization of the professional sporting
experience. In something that we care that much about, our cap rate is 16 percent. So
how high must it be in things that we don't care that much about.
That's a very sobering notion. And it says that as a society we have an awful long way to
go towards properly maximizing the human potential of our members.
And so I realized when I thought about that book that Outliers is really about that
question. It's about identifying sources of constraints on capitalization rates and figuring
out how to remove them.
So what I thought I'd do is just talk about a variety of these constraints, what are the kinds
of things that lower cap rates in any number of different areas of human endeavor.
So one obvious one is poverty. When that kid, Michael Oher who grows up in east
Memphis, talks about what a tiny fraction of the kids he grew up with who had athletic
ability actually end up going to college, what he's talking about is poverty. East
Memphis is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States, and we know that that
kind of poverty makes it very, very difficult for those who have an ability to do
something to actually end up doing that very thing.
And that's sort of an obvious constraint on capitalization. But one of the things I think is
true of poverty is that we tend -- even as we acknowledge its importance in constraining
capitalization, we underestimate just what is powerful constraint it is.
And let me give you an example. In the book I talk about the famous Terman study that
was done in California. And this is a study done in the '20s, began in the '20s in
California. And Terman, who was this psychologist at Stanford -- in fact, the Terman
who was the first dean of engineering at Stanford -- in fact, isn't there a hall called
Terman Hall at Stanford? How many people went to Stanford? That's this guy's son.
Anyway, a little side fact for those of you who went to Stanford.
He does this thing where he gives an IQ test to 250,000 California schoolchildren and he
basically identifies the top .1 percent, so kids with IQs of 140 plus. Genius level,
essentially. And he tracks those kids for the rest of their lives, for 50 years, and he's
trying to figure out what happens to them.
And it's his notion starting out that he thinks -- because he's so invested in the notion that
IQ is the single most determinant of life's success, he thinks what he's done is identified
the cohort who will turn out to be the leaders in academia, in industry, in the people who
will end up running all the organizations and being the top politicians and the top
intellectuals, right?
So he follows them and follows them for over the course of 20 and 30 years, and 20 and
30 years in he realized actually it's not true at all, and that these kids turn out -- when they
turn out to be adults, they have a variety of strikingly different fates.
There is a small group that does very well. The top 15 percent do actually occupy
positions of real prominence in society. Then there's a big group in the middle who have
pretty average lives. And, remember, these are kids with -- adults with genius-level IQs.
And the majority of them do -- they're kind of like -- have moderately successful
professional lives.
And then there is a chunk at the bottom who have -- who are by any measure failures,
who have -- whose lives turn out by any kind of occupational yardstick to be massively
disappointing, who make -- who do not seem to make use of their extraordinary human
potential at all.
And the question that Terman has to wrestle with is why did that group fail? What's the
difference between this group who did beautifully well and this group who did so poorly
at the bottom?
And he runs through. I mean, this question obviously obsesses him and he runs through
every conceivable explanation for that difference. And he says is it their personalities?
And it's not. And he says is it their -- is it their habits? Is it their -- and it goes on and on
down the list.
And he realizes in the end that the answer is really, really simple, and that is that the kids
who did best, these genius kids who ended up succeeding in the world, were the ones
who came from wealthy households and that the genius-level kids who ended up utter
failures in life were the ones who were born into poor families, born into families where
parents hadn't gone to college, where there weren't books in the home, where there wasn't
the kind of cultural and institutional support for a habit of learning and a habit of
intellectual activity.
What he was saying, in other words, that even if you endow a child with a brain that is a
one-in-a-billion brain, that is not sufficient to ensure the success of that child; that
poverty is such a powerful constraint on capitalization that it can reduce that genius child
to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity, a lifetime of really profound disappointment.
So that's the first constraint. Like I say, it's the obvious constraint. But I think it's
important to impress on for all of us to understand that poverty is probably a bigger
constraint than we think, particularly those of us who are not intimately connected with it.
We may tend to underestimate what an extraordinary impact that has on limiting people's
ability to do well.
So let's talk about some other constraints that are maybe less obvious. I got really
interested in this book in looking at the composition of elite sports teams. And if you do
that, you find out all kinds of strange things.
So at one point I looked at the roster of the 2007 junior Czech hockey team. Now, I did
not pick that team for any -- I picked that team at random. I just was interested in that's
an elite team, it was the second or third best junior hockey team in the world, after of
course the Canadians. I'm Canadian. And so it's a really elite team. These are the kind
of kids who go on to play in the NHL or in the elite adult leagues in Europe.
So I'm going to read to you the birth dates of the members of that National Czech team
2007: January 3rd, January 3rd, January 12, February 8th, February 10th, February 17th,
February 20th, February 24th, March 5th, March 10th, March 26th, April 22nd, May 5th,
June 6th, July 2nd, July 19th, July 20th, August 15th, August 25th, August 31st,
November 29th, and December 31st.
Now, what's strange about that list? Did you notice? Eleven of the twenty names are
born in January, February, and March. It is a massively skewed distribution of birth dates
towards the first three months of the year.
Now, that is not something idiosyncratic to the 19 -- to the 2007 Czech junior hockey
team. In fact, if you look at any elite hockey team anywhere in the world, and for that
matter any elite soccer team anywhere in the world, you will see the same skewed
distribution. You will see that an overwhelming number of the members of those teams
are born in January, February, and March. Now, why is that?
[multiple people speaking at once]
>> Malcolm Gladwell: The answer is that the eligibility cutoffs for age class hockey and
soccer throughout the world is January 1st. And in both those sports we very, very
aggressively recruit the best and the brightest kids at a very early age. So we go and we
look at a group of 10-year-olds, we watch them play hockey or soccer and we pick the
best. And we select them out and we put them on all-star teams and we give them special
coaching and extra practice time and more games and encourage them and encourage
them, right, thinking that is the best way to capitalize on the talent pool in that particular
sport.
But think about it. When you're 10 years old, who's going to be the best at a particular
activity, physical activity? The oldest kids. Right? The kid who was born in January has
10 months of maturity on the kid born in October. And when you're 10 years old, 10
months is an extraordinarily long period of time. It can be three or four inches in height.
It can be a difference of being clumsy and being massively coordinated.
So we think we are picking the best, and we're not. We're picking the oldest. Right?
And then we take the oldest and we give them special coaching and all kinds of extra
opportunities and all kinds of extra games and, lo and behold, 10 years later they really
are the best. But it's a self-fulfilling prophesy. We created the conditions that made them
the best and foolishly thought we were actually identifying real talent.
Now, you only have to look at that and realize what an extraordinary constraint on
capitalization that is, right? Logic would tell us that the distribution of hockey ability or
soccer ability should be even throughout the year, there by rights should be as many great
soccer players or hockey players born in December as January.
But when we look at these teams and we see they're overwhelmingly weighted for the
first three months of the year, that suggests that we are -- that the capitalization rate for
hockey, it must be less than 50 percent. Right? We are leaving all of the talent born in
the second half of the year on the table.
Now, there's clearly a very easy solution to that problem. And that is that when we put
together leagues of -- for soccer and hockey and any other sport in the age class arena, we
should have different streams for kids born in different months. We should have three
parallel leagues: one for kids born in the first four months of the year, one for kids born
in the middle four months, and one for kids born in the last four months, right, and have
them develop independently until they're in their mid-teens and then select. It's a really
simple way. And if we did that, we would double or triple our capitalization of talent in
that particular realm.
Now, why don't we do that? Because we refuse to admit that our own rules, arbitrary
rules constrain capitalization, and we cling to a naive belief that these meritocracies that
we have constructed in this particular realm are entirely rational and efficient and fair.
So this is a second constraint on capitalization. It's the stupidity constraint. Right? It is
our inability to understand that there is something deeply arbitrary and unfair in the way
we have written the rules on which meritocracy exists.
Now, for those of you who think that that is a minor issue and that so what if those kids
can't play hockey, you know, why can't they just play another sport, let me remind you
that this is true of many sports. I'm going to -- I'll -- I'm going to give you the birth dates
of the 2007 Czech junior soccer team. Ready?
January 1st, January 3rd, January 5th, January 12th, January 26th, January 27th, February
1st, February 14th, February 20th, February 21st, February 24th, March 15th, March
26th, March 29th, April 16th, May 20th, May 26th, June 22nd, June 26th, August 18th,
and September 26th.
If that's not a stupidity constraint on capitalization on football ability -- on soccer ability
in a country, by the way, that cares more about football than, you know, perhaps any
other, I don't know what is. And we need to take, in other words, very seriously the
question of how we choose to structure systems of meritocratic systems.
And this also -- you can apply this exact same logic to educational opportunity. If you
look at how well kids do in school based purely on their birth dates and whether they fall
into the youngest, oldest, or middle age cohort in their class, you see exactly the same
patterns.
In fact, there was a beautiful study done recently that tracked thousands and thousands of
kids across the West and tracked them all the way through to their university level and
found that kids born in the relatively youngest cohort of their age class were 11 percent
less likely to go to college than kids born in the relatively oldest cohort of their age class.
11 percent is a huge difference.
And it says that we are -- that is 11 percent of kids whose opportunity is being -- whose
human potential is being squandered, right, completely foreclosed. Why? Because we
are so stupid as to organize our elementary school education without reference to the
obvious fact of biological maturity. It is another -- it is a glaring example of how
stupidity constraints dramatically limit the capitalization of human potential.
So third constraint. And I can go on and on about constraints, but I'll stop with the third
one. This is in many ways the most fun one and the most controversial one, but I think
it's worth digging into. And it's what I would say is an attitudinal constraint on
capitalization.
So one of the -- I have a whole chapter in my book which is about this question of why it
is that Asian kids do so much better at math than their Western counterparts.
Now, the numbers here are irrefutable, and they're extraordinary, the differences in
mathematics performance between kids in Singapore, Hong Kong, South Korea, Japan
and kids in America, Germany, England, or what have you.
We just got a round of results from these International Math Test comparisons I think a
couple weeks ago. And we're talking -- the difference is not this. The difference is that.
And if you look closely at trying to figure out why, it seems to be the case of the
difference, the reason for that different has to do with attitudes, it has to do with what is
the attitude with which the child in those two sets of cultures approaches a math problem.
And it seems to be the case when Asian kids sit down and face a high school math
problem, they have a different expectation of what solving that problem entails. They
have an expectation that if they apply effort to the problem the problem is solvable.
Whereas when we look very closely at the attitudes of Western children, they seem to
have the attitude that their ability to solve that math problem is a function of their ability,
of their innate ability, something they either have or they don't.
And that attitudinal difference seems to make a -- have a profound effect on the ability of
kids to do well at math. Because as it turns out, the Asian approach to mathematics is the
correct one.
When I say correct, let me give you an example. So international math tests that we give
to kids around the world, they're called TIMSS. We give the TIMSS every four years.
It's the same test to kids all over the world. And that's how we come up with these
rankings of how countries do.
Well, when we give the TIMSS to kids, at the same time we give them the math test we
give them a questionnaire. And the questionnaire is really long. It's 120 questions long.
And it asks them all kinds of questions about -- that it will be useful to researchers: So
how many hours do you study? Do your parents encourage you? Do you like -- you
know, all those kinds of things. But it's really, really long. And it's so long, in fact, that
most kids don't finish the questionnaire. It's just too long, right?
So a couple of years ago this really brilliant guy called Erling Boe at Penn decided he
would rank the countries of the world by what percentage of questions on the
questionnaire their kids finished. And you know what he found when he did that ranking
and compared it to the ranking of countries on the world by what percentage of questions
on the math test their kids got right? The two ranks were exactly the same. And when I
say exactly the same, I mean it was a correlation of .9. .9. In the history of social
science, there has never been a correlation of .9 between two. It's the same thing.
If you want to know how good a country does at mathematics, in other words, you don't
have to ask that country's kids any math questions. You just have to make them do a task
that requires them to sit down at a seat for an extended period of time and focus on a task.
And if they can do it, they're good at math. Really, really fascinating.
In other words, what we're saying is, when we look at Asian cultures, what we're seeing
is this difference in mathematical ability. What we're seeing is not some underlying
difference in talent or aptitude for mathematics, but a difference in capitalization. The
Asian cultural attitude about work has the result of being a far more efficient way of
capitalizing on math ability than Western attitudes toward work.
And that tells us where the deficit in our mathematical education in the Western world
lies. It's not in our curriculum, it's not in the quality of the our teachers, it's not in the size
of our classrooms, it's not in the amount of money we spend on schools; it is the attitude
in the head of the child as he or she sits down in 11th grade and does algebra or calculus.
And, by the way, nor is it a problem in our genes, as some people would like to say, of -there's a whole bizarre argument that Westerners have an inferior set of genes when it
comes to mathematics than Easterners. You know, a totally ludicrous and unnecessary
step in this argument. No. It's about culture. It's about a difference in attitude and about
their ability to far more efficiently capitalize on the abilities of their kids.
Now, why is this the case? I mean, this is a -- I'll just digress for a moment. A really,
really interesting question is, okay, if Asian cultures have profoundly different attitudes
towards effort when it comes to mathematics, why? Where does that come from? And
nobody knows.
But in my book I venture what I think is a plausible explanation. And that is that I think
it has to do with patterns of effort laid down in historical agricultural practices. That
when you look -- what is the thing that Hong Kong, South China, South Korea and Japan
all have in common? And that is they are historically rice-growing cultures. And what is
distinctive about rice growing? It is the most labor-intensive and cognitively complex
form of agriculture known to man.
We know -- so my -- my father's European ancestors in the Middle Ages in Northern
England probably worked a thousand hours a year as peasant farmers. So what that
meant was that they work from dawn to noon five days a week. On the weekends they
drank themselves silly. And during the winter they slept basically.
And they got lots and -- I don't know if you know this, but a peasant in medieval England
got lots and lots and lots of holidays. That peasant's counterpart in South China or Japan
in the same period would not have worked 1,000 hours a year; they would have worked
3,000 hours a year. For the simple reason that rice farming is just a whole -- it is not
difference -- not just a difference in degree from wheat farming, it is a difference in kind.
It's a whole different way of working. It demands that you wake up at dawn and work all
the way until dusk. It demands that you work on the weekend.
In fact, there's a wonderful Chinese proverb that I quote in the book, which is: A man
who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry. Which is -- encapsulates
the difference between Eastern and Western agricultural practices. No -- my peasant
ancestors in Northern England, it would be inconceivable if they could call that a
proverb. They would have said: The man who works 175 days a year, dawn to eleven
may or may not be hungry.
Well, my argument is if your culture does that, if that's what you do for a thousand years,
that attitude is a deeply rooted part of your makeup. And when your kids -- even if they
didn't themselves work in a rice paddy, when they sit down and face a calculus or an
algebra problem, that legacy, that attitude towards effort and persistence translates
beautifully to that most modern of tasks. It means that your culture will do a far better
job of capitalizing on its innate ability.
Now, is that the whole story? I don't know. Probably not. There are probably all kinds
of other explanations as well, and I get into some of them. But I think it is important
when we look at things from this perspective to try and answer questions using history
and culture as our guide.
When you think about problems, in other words, from the perspective of capitalization, I
think you look for answers in different places than when you have a far more simple or
more reductive approach to these kinds of things.
Now, why is this capitalization, discussion of capitalization so important? Because I
think when we look at why certain people or groups succeed in the world, our default
explanation is always that those differences in success reflect underlying differences in
ability. And we forget about how much poverty, stupidity and attitudes are far more
important constraints on capitalization.
You know, I remember -- I'm a runner. And I have observed, like most runners have,
over the last 25 or 30 years how utterly dominant the Kenyans and the Ethiopians have
been in long-distance running. And this has prompted all kinds of people to say that this
must represent some fundamental difference in underlying levels of ability, that there
must be something peculiar about the genetic makeup of East Africans that makes them
better runners than the rest of us. That's a talent explanation, right?
But a far more elegant and persuasive and simpler explanation for them is that they have
a higher level of capitalization than we do. Alberto Salazar, who's the great American
marathoner, he recently pointed out that in Kenya there are probably a million schoolboys
between the age of 10 and 17 years of age who run over 10 -- around 10 to 12 miles a
day. A million boys running 10 to 12 miles a day between the ages of 12 and 17.
The same number in the United States is probably 5,000, if that. So our capitalization
rate when it comes to distance running, what is it? Is it -- it's surely less than 1 percent.
It's probably .5 percent. How many kids who are capable of being great long-distance
runners in the United States ever discover whether they have that ability? They never do.
Because they never actually do the work necessary to find it. But in Kenya, how many
great distance runners do they miss if they have a million schoolboys running 10 miles a
day? Almost none. They're capitalization rate is probably 95 percent.
That's the difference. The difference has to do with what does the culture value and
where does it spend its time and attention and how good is it at finding and exploiting the
kind of human potential? They're really good at that when it comes to distance running
and we're not.
And I think when you think about things that way, it powerfully clarifies how you go
about improving our use of human potential. It means that you don't give up. It means
that you don't say -- look at a group that's not succeeding and say they are incapable of
success and say that the problems that they face are too powerful, too innate, too
ingrained for us to do anything about.
The capitalization argument I think enables us, it empowers us. It tells us that we can
actually make a profound difference in how well people turn out, if we choose to pay
attention to the constraints imposed by poverty, by stupidity, and by attitude.
So that's a little glimmer of the kinds of things that I'm wrestling with in this book.
There's many more. But I'd be happy to answer any questions that any of you have.
[applause]
>>: I hate that you didn't mention the Beatles one, because I really liked that one
[inaudible]. I don't know if you mentioned people who are over 40 or 50 can't spend
10,000 hours doing something, what do you suggest to us to become outliers?
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Oh, this is a -- the question is in reference to -- I talk in the book
at one point about how long does it take to be good at something. And this observation
by many psychologists that to master a cognitively complex task, whether it's playing
chess at an elite level or being a brain surgeon or a classical music composer or a good
computer programmer, requires seemingly without exception 10,000 hours of deliberate
practice. So 10,000 hours is roughly four hours a day for 10 years. So you need to put in
that kind of time before even the most talented of people, innately talented people can
ever achieve elite status.
But I would actually -- I don't think this argument, that observation suggests that people
who are older in life, that this is closing doors to people who are older in life. On the
contrary, I think it suggests the opposite; that it says that at any point in our lives, if we
are in a position to apply ourselves in a formal and rigorous and intensive way to a
problem, we should be able to see fruits of that.
It says, in other words, what is special about people who do highly extraordinary or
creative acts is not that they are -- there's something special -- something inherent in their
minds, some particular genius, or that there is some magical property associated with
youth. On the contrary, it says that, no, what sets them apart is that simply that what we
are seeing is the necessary and predictable outcome of applying one's self rigorously to a
task, something that can -- that is available to anyone at any point in their life if they
choose to apply themselves in that way. So I think it's a liberating observation.
>>: So Little League baseball has a cutoff date May 1st. And I wonder what is the best
[inaudible] strategy for a boy who wants to play T-ball but is born on April 27th.
>> Malcolm Gladwell: So the question was about Little League baseball. Little League
baseball has a cutoff in midsummer or early summer. And, in fact, if you look at the
distribution of birth dates of baseball players, professional baseball players in America,
you will see that they are a highly clustered in the late summer months. Most baseball
players are June, July, August, or July, August, September. I've forgotten exactly where
the -- so we see the same effect very clearly with baseball. What does the kid who was
born on April 27th do?
Well, in a certain way, nothing. There's nothing you can do. This is -- I mean, this is -one of the things that I in writing this book was objecting to was this strain in American
thinking that says that all obstacles are ultimately overcomable by individuals if that
individual simply chooses to be determined enough.
I think that's very true and persistence and determination are incredibly important
components of success, but we also have to understand that when it comes to stupidity
constraints, there is very little that individuals can do. That's the reason -- that's why we
call them stupidity constraints, because they have been stupidly imposed on a collective
level and are powerful enough to overcome even really, really determined individuals.
There are certain things that can only be done at the society level. And it is only our
naive -- like I said, only our naive faith in the efficiency and fairness of meritocratic
systems that prevents us from seeing this.
The only thing you can do for the kid born April 27th who wants to be a baseball player
is do what I talked about: is create parallel leagues based on physical maturity. That's
the way you do it. And it is a -- if you look, when I read that roster list for those Czech
teams, you know, there are lots and lots and lots of kids in the Czech Republic who want
to be successful soccer or hockey players but who happen to be born at the end of the
year, and you can see, there's the evidence, they're not getting it, they're not making it.
It's not enough to ask the individual to try harder.
>>: I was kind of wondering as I read through the book if -- you know, given that it's
kind of about constraints placed somewhat arbitrarily and if you came across any
examples in your research of sort of outliers of those theories; in other words, people that
managed to succeed at certain things despite those constraints.
>> Malcolm Gladwell: So this is a very interesting question. So this is something I
thought about a lot subsequent to this. So the book identifies -- I'm really interested in
this book in advantages that are advantages; meaning, the kinds of opportunities and
advantages that end up putting you further ahead than you would have been otherwise.
But that's clearly only one of four conditions. There are also advantages that are
disadvantages. So if your father is worth a billion dollars, do you think that you would be
as a kid better off or worse off today than you would be if your father made a hundred
thousand dollars? I would rather have a dad who made a hundred thousand than a billion.
I think that having a father with a billion dollars would actually be quite crippling to your
motivation. So that's an advantage that's actually a disadvantage.
So then there's also disadvantages that are disadvantages. So that would be -- that's
condition three, and that would be to grow up the child of a single mother who's addicted
to drugs in east Memphis is a disadvantage that's a disadvantage. You really -- almost no
one overcomes that, right?
But what you're asking about is the fourth condition, which is are there disadvantages that
are advantages. Now, that is the most fascinating one of all. So, for example, one of the
most fascinating observations that's been made in recent years is that -- someone did a
study recently that pointed out that 30 percent of American entrepreneurs have been
diagnosed at some point in their life with a profound learning disability. And you only
have to -- the list of people who fall into this category. So the dyslexics, you know,
Branson's a dyslexic, Charles Schwab is a dyslexic, the guy who founded Kinkos is a
dyslexic. I could go on. I mean, the list is like this long.
So why is that? Well, the argument is that it's not a coincidence; it is in fact -- it is a
direct function -- their entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability.
So how do you succeed if you cannot read or write from the very earliest stages in your
elementary education? You compensate for that. If you're -- the ones who make it. A lot
of kids don't make it. But those who do compensate. How do they compensate? Well,
from the very earliest age you learn how to delegate. So kids who make it through school
who can't read or write, you know how they do it? They do it by having others do their
reading and writing for them.
You learn, you compensate by being a really good oral communicator. You can't write or
read so you're a talker. You learn how to problem solve. Because your life is one big
problem. You're in an institution that asks you to do two things and you can't do either of
them. And you learn how to be a leader. You have to do all these things: problem solve,
delegate, oral communicate. You learn how to lead.
And, in fact, there's a beautiful study that was also done that said -- that pointed out that
of dyslexic entrepreneurs, 80 percent of them were a captain of a high school sports team
versus 30 percent of nondyslexic entrepreneurs. That's the character type, right? So
when you get into the real world and what is required of an entrepreneur? That they be a
good leader, that they delegate, that they be a problem solver, and that they be good oral
communicators. These people have been spending their whole life practicing the very -the four skills that are at the cornerstone of entrepreneurial success.
Now, if you talk to those people and you ask -- John Chambers, dyslexic, right, has
difficult reading his own e-mail -- you ask all those guys what did you -- you know, what
role did dyslexia play in your success, they would say: It wasn't an obstacle that I had to
overcome; it was -- it is in fact the reason I'm successful. It is a disadvantage that ended
up being an advantage.
Now, I am actually -- this category to me is the most fascinating one of all. So let me
give you another example. One of the most striking findings in educational research is
that there's almost no payoff that we can find to reducing class size. Even though all
parents are obsessed with class size. Irrationally so. Your kid is in a class size of 25 and
hear that at some other school it's 19 and so you pay $25,000 a year to get your kid at the
school with the 19 kids instead of the 25 right?
In fact, reams and reams and reams of academic studies have failed to show any
advantage to smaller class sizes except for really disadvantaged kids in very, very early
grades. For everyone else it's a total wash. Why is it is wash? Because it makes no
sense. Why would you do just as well in a class where the teacher's not paying you
enough -- as much attention? Shouldn't there be a correlation between teacher inputs and
student performance? Yes. But only if there aren't -- there is no such thing as a
disadvantage that can be an advantage.
What if the disadvantage of being in a large classroom is something that you compensate
for, what if it's like dyslexia, what if you're one of 30 kids? You compensate and learn
self-reliance and that self-reliance in the end is just an important a trait as the thing that
you would get from a heavy amount of teacher feedback.
We are resolutely uninterested in the category of benefits that fall into that fourth
category. We can't even talk about them. No one wants to talk about what are the things,
what are the kind of customized disadvantages that we might introduce into our school
system that might have a positive effect? And we operate under the extraordinarily
psychologically naive notion that the only thing that matters in school are advantages that
are advantages. As if everything else didn't exist.
Like I would love to see, for example -- I'm not ranting on and on and on, but it is not -- I
live in Manhattan. In Manhattan we have these super, super, super fancy private schools.
The most advantaged private schools in the world, right, that cost 30 grand a year, high
school. I'm not convinced that that -- that those schools don't fall under the category of
advantages that are disadvantages.
I would love to see -- I would love to know on a kind of systematic analysis of whether
you're helped -- why is it the case that you're better off going to that school than learning
how to cope in a far more heterogeneous, rough-and-tumble public school environment?
I don't -- it's not obvious to me why that's -- in fact, most of the successful people who
send their kids to those schools went to rough-and-tumble, heterogeneous public schools.
So it is this massive act of cognitive dissidence that you turn on the very thing that clearly
made you successful and deny it to your child. Right? In the name of what? The same
grandfather who says that he walked seven miles to school every morning barefoot drives
his grandchild in the SUV two blocks to school because it's raining out. If it worked for
you, Grandpa, why doesn't it work for me?
>>: [inaudible] other possible cultural explanations for success? Like you compared
Asian to Western, but even within Western [inaudible] I read a lot of studies that try to
explain, for example, if it's genetic or cultural that, you know, there are more Nobel
prizes amongst Jews or [inaudible] Eastern European Jews and is there any way to
debunk that, per se?
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Yeah. So a lot of advantages, Jewish advantages are shared by
either ethnic groups who have -- who are in a similar sociological position. So the Parsis
in India, the Lebanese throughout the world, the Ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia, in
Malaysia and Vietnam, and I could go on. But there's a whole series of groups that if you
look closely at the roles they have played and the success they have achieved, they're all
doing the same thing.
So Jews are not anomalous -- they're not anomalous at all. They are part of the pattern of
accomplishment that is common to these discrete ethnic minorities within larger
countries.
And a lot of that has to do with the kind of extraordinary set of -- there are series of
disadvantages that come with being in that position, but there are also a set of advantages,
so outsiders status, being this kind of minority outsider group is incredibly useful if you
would like to play any sort of middleman role, right, which is what all those groups do -Lebanese, Parsi, Ethnic Chinese and Jews -- always play -- invariably end up playing this
entrepreneurial middleman role, which is something that is uniquely available to the
outsider because the outsider as an outsider is allowed to do things that you can't do if
you're a member of a majority.
You can be tough. You can say no. If you're going to be a banker, right, where your -this does not apply to the bankers on Wall Street over the last 10 years, but historically, if
you're a banker, your success depended on your ability to say no, right, and to be mean,
to say to someone who is not paying, You got to pay. It's really hard to do that if you're a
member of the majority culture, because you risk your social standing when you stand up
to someone and put your foot down.
But if you're a member of a minority group that's outside the general culture, you can be
tough, you can say no. So that's why you see banking is always dominated by those four
groups throughout the -- my mother grew up in Jamaica. The Jamaican -- it's funny,
actually. Jamaica is a perfect example of this. The entrepreneurial commercial class of
Jamaica is ethnic Chinese, Jewish, and Lebanese. So it's an exact indication of this very
thing.
So we could play with that idea. And I've come to an understanding of all kinds of
patterns of accomplishment in those groups. Because all those groups also have
disproportionate professional success and disproportionate intellectual -- to some extent a
disproportion of intellectual success as well. I feel like I'm discriminating against the
back of the room.
>>: Referring to the 10,000-hour idea, in your opinion, what is it -- how difficult is it to
be successful in today's time period, where we're at right now, as opposed to [inaudible]?
>> Malcolm Gladwell: As opposed to?
>>: Maybe the Great Depression or other recessions.
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Well, that's an interesting question. I mean, the I think it's easier
in the sense that there are just so many other -- there are so many -- such an array of
things to be good at now. Right? Success was narrowly defined in the '30s as being a
doctor or a lawyer. Today we have 25 different things that we would give -- accord that
same status to, or at least after the meltdown on Wall Street, 24. Sorry. Can't resist.
So in that sense, if you think about the kinds of things that are available to those who are
willing to put 10,000 hours of practice in, the list is just longer now. So in that sense, I
would say we're at an advantage.
>>: But in referring to how Bill Gates worked towards his achievement and [inaudible]
programming, and that -- seeing that success before it actually became what we're all here
doing now ->> Malcolm Gladwell: Oh, I see. If I was going to be -- yeah. Well, we're in this -- that
kind of question is unanswerable, because it requires us to know what the next -- the
thing about people of Bill Gates' generation was that they were getting their 10,000 hours
in in a discipline before the rest of the world realized that that was the discipline that
mattered.
By definition we do not know what that discipline is today, only the 15-year-old
equivalent of Bill Gates does. So those of you with 15-year-old children should ask
them. But, you know, I'm not going to know.
>>: [inaudible] find that really fascinating.
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Yeah. So I have a -- in the culture section of the book I talk
about -- I try to come to -- I talk about -- I try to sort of concern -- it's a -- I'm trying to set
up the discussion of Asians and math, because the hard thing to understand about the kind
of cultural explanation I give for Asian mathematic superiority is this notion that the kids
who are doing well in math today in South Korea or Singapore or where have you, Japan,
are not themselves rice farmers nor are their parents nor in some cases are their
grandparents. So why -- how is it possible that rice farming could be the explanation for
the way they are?
Well, in order to buy that, you have to buy the idea that cultural models and codes and
rules persist, that long after the circumstances that created them have gone away, those
things are still in the air. They don't peter out or vanish; they actually stick around.
And so I describe -- I give an account, an explanation for why Appalachia in America has
always been the most violent part of the United States. And the explanation for that is
not in the particular immediate conditions of Appalachian life; it has to do with where the
ancestors of those living in Appalachia come from.
And they all -- many of them -- they -- that -- Appalachia was settled by people -- by the
Scotch Irish, people from the borderlands of the United Kingdom who had developed in
their time, their hundreds of years there in that most kind of lawless and dangerous and
barren existence -- had developed this thing called a culture of honor, which was a culture
where your honor was everything and where you would do anything to defend it. And
that is precisely the kind of culture that leads to lots and lots and lots of violence.
But it was that whole section of the book is preparing us for the notion, for the seemingly
counterintuitive notion that what your great-great-great-great-grandparents did for a
living can make a difference in how you see the world, which is not an obvious -- it's a
difficult point I think for many people to grasp.
>>: You made a great case for the 10,000 hours of work it takes to become exceptionally
good at something. And then also for the people that are basically at a disadvantage. But
I'm wondering [inaudible] the loss to society, we only have so many slots. So, for
instance, if you have a better pathway from the Czech team so [inaudible] the people
were equally distributed, would they have a better team.
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Yeah. I think it stands to reason that the Czechs -- so supposed
the Czechs have or the Canadian -- let's use the Canadians since I'm Canadian. Suppose
the Canadians did -- had three parallel leagues. Then their denominator of kids that
they're choosing from I think -- if you look at the distribution now, you can make a
reasonable inference that they are -- the cap rate is 40 percent. If we can raise the
capitalization rate to 80 percent, we have doubled the number of -- the available pool of
kids that we're choosing from for the most elite level.
So it doesn't change -- the same number of people are -- there's only a limited number of
slots in the National Hockey League, but it stands to reason if the pool that you're pulling
from is twice as big, the average level of talent should be higher; that you should, in other
words, be able to raise the median level of talent in the league if you've increased your -if you've increased the pool you're fishing in. Okay? I know I'm about to get like totally
smoked, but go ahead.
>>: So then you would expect that the people that were born later in the year on the
Czech team or all these teams were possibly better than the ones that are born earlier.
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Yes. Here's where it starts to get really, really interesting. You
might. So they have overcome -- but there is several things. Remember, they may
simply be maturational anomalies; that is to say, not all -- if you look at the group of
seven-year-olds, they don't all mature at the same rate. It is mostly the case that the kids
born in January are going to be bigger and stronger than the kids born in December. But
some of the December borns at the age of 10 or eleven are going to be as mature as those
born in January.
I think what you're seeing is that those are the kids who end up making the NHL, they're
just ones whose growth curve was a little bit accelerated. I think that's the -- although, I
don't know. It's a very good question. It'd be worth looking into. But I did look at the
list of like the greatest hockey players ever, and, you know, they're almost all January,
February, March. So...
>>: Didn't it play into the ability -- the cap rate, the ability to take advantage of -- like
you were talking about the East African runners, the million they have there, but their
system is not able to do anything with that. So, yes, the quality of the ones who make it
through -- there's a great conversation that's happening here at Microsoft around
innovation, and the idea is how do we dig in and find innovation where it is; it's not
always just coming out of MSR, there might be -- we're bad at finding ideas, great
innovation, other parts of the company, somebody that's in operations or support who has
a great idea, but if there's not the mechanisms to pull that out and do something with that.
And so we're -- there's this downward pressure on the stupidity factor of not allowing us
to find those ideas, as well as the upward push in trying to share those.
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Yeah. So this is a good point. So to go back to your point as
well. So one way -- imagine, you know, as a thought experiment, let's just use hockey,
for example. Suppose we wanted to increase the cap rate in hockey in Canada. One way
to do it is to do what I'm talking about, which is not to increase the number of slots in the
National Hockey League, but simply to increase the number of developmental leagues, to
this kind of -- but another way is to increase the slots.
Suppose as a thought experiment we double the size of the National Hockey League, and
we say we're now going to have 30 teams. Would that be -- would the expansion of that
end have the effect of forcing a higher -- a greater efficiency in the capitalization of
hockey teams in -- of hockey in the developmental leagues? I mean, in other words, can
we -- are there two ways to do this, could you do this bottom up or could you do this top
down.
The only -- I would be curious about the top down version, because we have a version of
it in this country right now where you have companies like Microsoft which a whole tier
of high-technology companies which are in perpetual -- have a perpetual shortage of
very, very talented people. You're always complaining we can't find enough people to
fill these kinds of slots, we've got to go overseas, we've got to have all this kind of -- and
so in this case it has not had the -- this perpetual shortage of very talented people has not
really had the effect I think of dramatically raising our capitalization rates when it comes
to math and science.
In fact, over the course of the last 25 or 30 years, the relative performance of the United
States in math and science seems to -- if I had my numbers correctly -- seems to have if
anything eroded, so that suggests that maybe top down that supply side or demand side
approaches. I always get them mixed up. One of them. You know what I'm talking
about. Increase the number of slots at the top may not be the best way to do it. But, I
mean, it's open to -- it's worth thinking about all these various scenarios.
>>: So do you think when companies invest in communities by having math programs
and all this that a lot of that effort is going to be wasted because the societal
underpinnings aren't there, like you described?
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Yeah. You need to have a kind of -- I mean, there has to be -like to go back to the Kenyan runners, for example, so they do have -- there's an awful lot
of -- it's actually incredibly wasteful to have a 90 percent capitalization rate for distance
running. You don't actually want a million of your 12-year-olds running 10 miles a day.
Because you only have four spots on the Olympic team, or whatever, three spots on the
Olympic team. You want them to be doing something that has some kind of ultimate
payoff.
So it's actually -- that's actually not a -- it's not a model we want to emulate. It's probably
a good thing that we have a 1 percent capitalization rate, but we just shouldn't whine
about our performance in long-distance running as a result.
But there are a whole series of -- like here's a -- this is a totally wacky idea that I've been
talking about with some people, which is suppose you rewarded -- suppose you set up a
system that allowed individuals or groups or nonprofits to profit from raising cap rates.
So I go into -- suppose I go into South Central LA and I have a class of -- a first grade
class. Now, I know actuarially speaking looking at the -- those kids and their
socioeconomic background that the amount of federal tax those kids will pay, actuarially,
20, 30 years hence is probably close to zero. You have to join -- you have to really be a
member of the middle class to pay taxes these days. And the number of kids in a -- the
worst part of South Central who end up in the middle class is very, very small.
So suppose I said to -- so the cap rate, if we define capitalization as joining the middle
class and paying middle taxes, the capitalization rate in a bad neighborhood in South
Central is pretty much zero. So what if we said to anyone that if you can raise the
capitalization rate in that group, I'll give you a cut of their federal taxes. So what if you
said -- just like -- it's like a -- you could venture capital groups of kids. I'm just doing this
as a kind of thought experiment.
So we know we're getting -- so why do you -- because we're getting zero federal tax
dollars now, what would be so wrong to say if you, Joe Smith, want to invest in this class
of kids for the next 25 years, I'll give you 50 percent of the tax revenue in perpetuity.
And if you -- so, in other words, if you can get three computer programmers and two
doctors out of this class of 30 kids, you're going to be a very, very rich man. And, by the
way, society will be way better and the kids will be happier, because they will have what
they don't have now, which is someone who is actively interested in and capable of
increasing the capitalization, of getting the rate to from zero to whatever it is, 10, 15, 20,
35 percent.
I have no -- there's all -- when you tell that idea to people they -- very often people think,
oh, that -- it just sounds so -- you know what? It's -- whatever problems [inaudible] that
idea, it's a lot better than what we have now, which is no one caring for the kids.
But the point is that capitalization strategies change the discussion and move us away
from this -- I am so sick of this relentless, absurd, exhausting focus on ability, which is
just beside the point. And they move us away from that and move us towards this focus
on the exploitation of the ability that's already there. And that's just a far more rational
place to start.
If we had -- if we did everything in our power to exploit ability and we still saw
differences in outcomes, then we can talk talent. If we had -- if in America we had 25
million high school kids running 12 miles a day and we still were getting smoked at the
Olympics in the 10,000 meters, I will entertain every genetic argument you want about
the difference between us and East Africans. But until we do that, it's a pointless
argument. That's what I -- so that's why I think we need to be much more inventive in
our thinking about capitalization.
>>: What is that -- runners, playing soccer, hockey, lacrosse, football, baseball,
basketball, right, like we spread our talent pool over many more sports than Kenya does.
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Yeah. I mean, that was my point, that it's apples and -- that
because of those very, very differences -- great differences in the way in which talent -athletic talent is capitalized in these two cultures, you can't draw any conclusions about
innate ability.
>>: [inaudible] have a higher capitalization rate, it's just diverse.
>> Kim Ricketts: Just before Malcolm goes any further, I want to comment that he's
going to have to leave because he has to go do a talk at the Gates Foundation where I
think he's going to be convincing them to make that investment in those kids, I think.
[applause]
>> Kim Ricketts: So I know everybody wants the book, and I did have -- Malcolm has
pre-signed tons of copies of books, so my question to you is we can have Malcolm
answer questions for all of us for the next 15 minutes and then get in the car and get over
the bridge, or he can sign and personalize books for a very few of you.
[laughter]
>> Kim Ricketts: So I'm thinking we're moving towards the questions. Okay.
>>: In the context of the capitalization rate, you were talking before about runners. And
I'm a big track fan in Jamaica, island of only about a million people, I think it's a million
and a half now, produces a disproportionate amount of sprinters, and a lot of [inaudible].
Do you think that falls into the same thing, even though they have a small pool of people
who are available to them?
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Yeah. Well, as you know, I'm half Jamaican, so I'm powerfully
disposed to answer this question in the way that reflects most flatteringly on Jamaica.
Jamaica is -- it's a beautiful example of this, right?
So in this long-running debate about nurture versus nature in running, in sprinting
especially, the, quote/unquote, gene pool of Jamaica isn't any different than any number
of other countries around the world, and yet Jamaica utterly dominates sprinting. This is
a clear case where cap rates for sprinting in Jamaica are -- must be very, very close to 90
percent.
And I have no real evidence of this other than anecdotally. I was just in Jamaica for
Christmas visiting my cousins, and I am a runner, so I go -- I was -- I would go running
around, you know, in the little hills around my aunt's house. And it was this hilarious
thing, this never happened to me anywhere else, that the sight of someone running in
Jamaica just ignites some kind of thing in all passersby.
So here I am, you know, running along down the road, and like people slow down, wave,
and like some guy would be trudging along back from work and he would say -- he
would like -- he would go, Run, run, run [inaudible] run after me and run with me for
like -- it was just like this -- and I realized like this is -- it's an obsession. Right? It's a
complete obsession. And there is so much status associated with the act of running that if
you have any, you know, even remote ability in this area, you exploit it.
And Usain Bolt to this point is a -- not since Bob Marley has there been someone who
has ignited this degree of -- so I think it's a beautiful illustration of what I'm talking
about.
>>: So you indicate that this is all based on [inaudible] society values. So did you look
at how long it would take a societal value change to impact the capitalization of
[inaudible] because we're going to enter a new phase of political life here, I think a lot of
us are hoping that some new values pop up, how long that those might take effect?
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Yeah. So I'm a real optimist in -- I believe these kinds of shifts
can happen really quickly. And let's stick with sports for a moment, because sports is just
an elegant way of -- if you think about what happened after Title 9 -- is it Title 9?
So I was just with -- I saw a friend of mine the other day who has a 12-year-old daughter,
so she's 40-something. And she was talking about the differences between her
upbringing and her daughter's. And my friend is an athletic person in the sense that
she's -- you know, has no -- there's no -- but she did not play any sports at all as a kid. So
she grew up in an upper-middle-class family in Providence, Rhode Island, not some
sticky place, like, you know, eastern seaboard.
It never even occurred to her to do sports. None. And her daughter's life, sports is
everything. I mean, not everything, they do the same amount of schoolwork she did, but
they play so many organized sports she can't keep track of it. That is a capitalization -our capitalization rate for women and soccer or basketball 20 -- only 25 or 30 years ago
was, what, 5 percent? 2 percent? 3 percent? Today it's 50, 60, 70 percent. That's one
generation. That's an incredible shift in what we think of in our kind of priorities in that
particular area.
That makes me profoundly optimistic about our ability to shift our capitalization, the
focus of our interest in other more consequential areas. Because, let's face it, that's not a
very consequential area. But if we can do it with soccer, I feel like we can do it with all
kinds of other things.
>>: [inaudible]
>> Malcolm Gladwell: [inaudible].
>>: So my questions is about sort of the opposite of the positive impact of culture, and
the one you call [inaudible] and I really wanted to explore your thoughts around -- let's
take slavery, for example, and sort of a long-standing impact of slavery. And what are
your thoughts about outliers within that community, the black community, and then sort
of [inaudible] impact [inaudible] and how long [inaudible]?
>> Malcolm Gladwell: So the question was about on the opposite side thinking about
how things like the legacy of slavery have impacted opportunity.
So I -- in the last chapter in my book is a personal chapter, and it's about my -- it's the
story of my mother's family. And it attempts to answer this very question.
So my mother is a brown-skinned Jamaican, and one of the points -- and she has had
this what anyone would consider a successful life. She grew up in a little tiny cottage in
the middle of the hills of Jamaica and ended up an upper-middle-class professional in
Canada, right? And I try to tell her story using the ideas of the book and focus not on her
own [inaudible] intelligence but on the -- what are the kinds of opportunities that allowed
her to do that.
And one of the things that I got into was the peculiarities of being a browned-skinned
Jamaican. And I traced my mother's family history back to -- in the 1700s a plantation
owner from Ireland comes to Jamaica and takes as his concubine, basically I'm sure just
bought and raped an African slave, and that's the beginning of my -- their son, a guy
name John Ford. Was the beginning of my mother's line.
So in Jamaica, the offspring, the milato offspring of a mixed-race union in the 1700s was
not put back into slavery the way that that child would have been in the American South.
On the contrary, the Brits did this very, very different thing, which was if you were
mixed race, you got welcomed into the ruling class.
So John Ford one generation removed from a slave ship was a preacher. He was a
literate, educated man who was a free man in 1790, whatever it was, and whose kids were
free and on and on.
And if you trace my mother's family history down along with the history of all these
other parallel brown-skinned Jamaicans, you see a legacy of privilege that goes back
generation upon generation. You see people who are members of the entrepreneurial and
commercial and professional classes going back to the earliest days of the 19th century.
Now, that has given them a status and a set of opportunities that are denied to people who
were pushed back into slavery, their equivalents in America who weren't plucked out in
1790 and allowed to get education but were pushed back into and enslaved for another
three generations. There is a world of difference between starting from where my mother
started from and starting from where she would have started from if her ancestors had
been in Georgia or Alabama.
You know, interestingly as well and along the same lines, Skip Gates, the professor of
African-American Studies at Harvard, did this really fascinating set of genealogical
studies of prominent and successful African-Americans and discovered that almost
without fail, if you look back several generations into the families of these success
stories, what you find is either someone who was a freed slave, so freed before
emancipation, or a freed slave who managed in the first generation after emancipation to
own land.
In other words, you see this same thing: That success in the present day is a function of
an opportunity that we created two, three, four, five generations previously. And that is
the -- when we're talking about this flip side, it reminds us that -- of how the shadow of
slavery, those who were denied that kind of get-out-of-jail-free card that my mom got or
that, you know, these other people that Skip Gates looked at got, to be denied -- for your
ancestor to be denied that get-out-of-jail-free card matters even today.
So now you asked about Obama. What does the success of Obama tell us about the
continuing significance of that legacy? Nothing. Right? Nothing. I mean, I love him as
much as anyone, I could not be more thrilled about what's going to happen on Tuesday,
right? I mean, a relief of cataclysmic -- I might even become an American citizen now.
[applause]
>> Malcolm Gladwell: But let's be clear. His victory does not mean that this issue is
over. Right? And if that is how we interpret it, then we're making a great mistake.
>>: So then my follow-up question to that, for those people in the room or outside who
are involved in trying to help a population of people who are victims of the very thing
you described, what are some best practices or some things that people should look at to
help create more success [inaudible] and there are people who are not from milato
backgrounds who have been successful, and there's something there. I don't understand
it. But what are some things to explore around creating more success stories?
>>: Yeah. Well, that's the -- you know, I wish I could give you a kind of a -- a complete
and satisfying answer to that. And I don't know. I mean, in my book I talk a little bit
about just on this narrow question of how can you teach math to inner-city kids, and can
you get an inner-city kid to think like an Asian when it comes to math.
And the answer is we think the answer is yes. We've seen extraordinary results with
teaching math by changing attitudes about work. And that makes me think that we have
all kinds of opportunities in other areas. But what that effort looks like, I don't know. It's
sort of -- it's the kind of thing that I hope others will -- I'm sure others are already
pursuing, but that I think we need to know more about as a society. One more question.
>>: What are you going to write about next?
>> Malcolm Gladwell: What am I going to write about next. I have many, many ideas.
One -- I'll give you a little preview of my next New Yorker article, which is -- well,
there's two in the works. One is an attack on To Kill a Mockingbird because it turns out
if you read -- no one has read this book since you were like 12 years old, right? So what
do you know when you're 12? Nothing. Reread it. And you discover Atticus Finch,
monster. Anyway, coming soon.
And another -- the other one which will be even more near and dear to your hearts, and I
can't give you details, but I'll give you the outline, and, by the way, this is such a cool
story. I haven't had one this cool in a long time.
I met this guy from your world, software, entrepreneur, whatever. And you know the
type. He's like came from Mumbai, went to Cal Tech or MIT, you know, $30 in his
pocket, makes a name for himself in Silicon Valley. He has a daughter. And his
daughter wants to play -- she's 12 years old and she wants to play basketball.
Now, he doesn't know anything about basketball. He's a software programer from
Mumbai. But he decides, I want to coach my daughter's basketball team. So he goes to a
basketball game and he observes it as an outsider would, right? We're talking about
outsiders. He's an outsider. You know, he observes it and he comes away shaking his
head thinking, Why do they play this game in such a mindless fashion?
And so he decides to teach his daughter and her teammates to play the game his way.
And what happens? Now, keep in mind, this team is a team of girls taken -- they're all
from like Mountain View and they're fathers are all people like this guy, they're the
children of software programmers, they are not big, huge, hulking mesomorphs with
bulging muscles. They're like little skinny girls with pigtails.
What happens? They almost win the state championship. They don't win the state
championship because they -- actually they get cheated in this outrageous way, which is
one of the great parts of the story, but the whole point of the story -- and it's just so on
every level genius -- it all has to do with what happens when a really, really smart guy
from Mumbai decides to coach basketball. And the answer is nothing that you've ever
seen on a basketball court before.
Now, let me tell you this last little factoid, which is during the games, when he's doing
this thing that he does at his -- these little girls with pigtails -- by the way, they're not
good basketball players, p.s. they're not going to go and play like Division I in college.
They're like little skinny girls who spend -- who are going to -- they're all going to take
physics at Cal Tech. They're not even interested in sports that much. But they're like
under the tutelage of this mass genius, mad genius.
During the games as they're coaching it, the other -- the opposing coaches who are the
ones steeped in the older paradigm of basketball get so enraged by what's happening that
they start by like, you know, just kind of sitting there in a stunned silence, then they start
screaming at their own girls, these 12-year-old girls, start screaming at their own players,
as if it's their fault, right, and then like invariably they challenge this guy to a fight in the
parking lot after the game.
[applause]
>> Malcolm Gladwell: Anyway, so look for that one too. Thank you all.
[applause]