I have friends from very wealthy households who are raised with access to education and resources (particularly economic resources). This has allowed them to fast-track it to financial success.

While we love these rags to riches stories, they are the exception. It’s naive to image that hard work is the only factor in determining upward mobility.

There’s a post on here by a gentleman saying through hard work he was able to find success after a tough childhood in the inner city – I’d like to know how many of his childhood friends had the exact same experience.

“Severely compressed, his explanation goes about like this: Some sixty thousand years ago, when the lee Age descended on the Northern Hemisphere, the Mongoloid populations faced uniquely hostile “selection pressure” for greater intelligence. Northeast Asia during the Ice Age was the coldest part of the world inhabited by man. Survival required major advances in hunting skills. Lynn’s 1987 paper refers to “the ability to isolate slight variations in visual stimulation from a relatively featureless landscape, such as the movement of a white Arctic hare against a background of snow and ice; to recall visual landmarks on long hunting expeditions away from home and to develop a good spatial map of an extensive terrain.” These, Lynn believes, were the pressures that ultimately produced the world’s best visuospatial abilities.”

It’s somewhat obvious that Ashbrook’s impression after reading the book was what you said about the book being a “recipe book to win”. I think Ashbrook gets that Gladwell is trying to say more but he’s frustrated that that’s not how the book translates.

Wow, this is so true. I’ve read pretty much everything he’s written in The New Yorker but the book form of the same writing is lacking. Thanks for articulating that.

Doesn’t mean his ideas are bad, I think they’re fantastic, but maybe his books need to take a different form, like a series of essays talking around a topic without over worry about connecting them.

Regarding Tom Ashbrook…he is one of the greatest interviewers of today. I can’t think of anyone else who is as good at succinctly paraphrasing the responses of the person he is interviewing. However, I think Ashbrook is conflicted about Gladwell’s book because he fears the general public will misinterpret Gladwell’s words, not only as advocating determinism, but that already competitive parents may react to it by pushing their children to succeed at the expense of everything else, including their childhood. I think it’s a legitimate concern, considering America’s obsession with being #1.

In many ways Gladwell is like Obama: both talk to their readers/listeners like adults, not shying away from nuanced complexity. Good thing both of them can think and talk coherently.

I’m quite sure Tom is smart and worldly and this was a case where maybe he could have gone further to take the gist of what Gladwell was saying and expand on it rather than attempt to reduce it to something it isn’t.

Many people want to use Gladwell as a recipe book for how to win, no doubt that’s why he’s popular with so many MBA programs but I don’t read him that way at all. Like Obama he’s simply looking at complex problems from a different vantage point from the norm and I find that fascinating and right on much of the time.

http://www.gladwell.com/archive.html

Lots of kids are smart but not all of them do things with their intelligence. The doing is what expresses the intelligence and without the doing what good is the intelligence?

What Gladwell was talking about with 10,000 hours of practice is the idea that having the raw materials is just the start, you absolutely have to use them, often, to have success.

I would also argue that even without “talent” or genius practice can do quite a bit to get the rest of us numbskulls a lot farther in life than we’d get without it.