The premise of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers is that “talent” is really just the culmination of extraordinary amounts of practice.  Everyone is talking about it. “Put in 10,000 hours doing what you love.”  But what happens if you’re interrupted in the middle of becoming great?  Maybe you just graduated and you’re trying to break into advertising/marketing, maybe you got laid off.  For all my fellow unemployed marketers out there, if you’re like me at all, you’re worried about losing “it”, that creative spark that let’s you know you were made to be a marketer.  How can you prevent this from happening while you’re out of work?

So the big question is how do you hang on to everything when you’re out of work?

1. Exercise

All you have to do is a Google search on “Exercise and Cognition” and you’ll get more than a million results.  I don’t need to prove that from a science standpoint.  But from another perspective, one of the keys to success is confidence, and regular exercise makes you feel great about yourself.

2. Recreational Think Tank (or Get Together and Collaborate with Friends)

Not long ago, I was working a job that provided me virtually know mental challenge.  I was “losing it” even though I was employed!  I got two of my friends together and we met on a regular basis, just to pitch ideas to each other.  We called ourselves a think tank just for giggles.  Most of our conversations were about new business ideas.  We’d go talk to experts on how to best accomplish certain ideas, even wrote marketing plans, and did market research.  None of the ideas ever became businesses, but it kept my mind working.  The more excited I got about our ideas, the more my mind poured over them.  It didn’t matter that I wasn’t employed; I was challenged nonetheless.  All of you know more people like you.  Screw up your courage and ask someone to get together just to pitch ideas around.  Nothing has to come out of it, all that matters is that you keep the wheels turning.

3. Volunteer

Volunteer opportunities abound, and I encourage you to go build a house with Habitat, or hand out blankets to the homeless for the upcoming winter.  But I also encourage you to additionally seek out a very specific kind of volunteering.  Reach out to non-profits and see if they need any help from the marketing side.  Marketing is one of the areas that usually gets neglected in a non-profit’s budget, so chances are they will jump at the chance to bring you in.  Once in, take it seriously and do good work.  You’ll be able to add this to your resume, but more importantly you’ll be gaining real world experience and making contributions that hopefully will continue past your time volunteering.  Talk about building confidence!

4. Read (Duh!)

This one is the most obvious, but also the one I have failed at the most here.  I have Seth Godin’s Permission Marketing and Purple Cow, Zig Zigler’s See You At The Top and Secrets of Closing the Sale, Rich Dad Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki, QBQ! The Question Behind The Question by John G. Miller, and James Collins’ Built to Last.  All gathering dust.  Don’t be like me; do as I say, not as I do.  These are great titles that have been recommended by many people I respect.  You (and I) would benefit from reading them.

5. Mentorship

For some people, this comes easily, but for others it is bloody hard.  I’m in the latter, and still working on it.  However, the glimpses of successful mentorship I’ve experienced have unlocked my creativity and reignited my drive.  In fact, Unemployed Marketers Group is an idea I began developing out of one such relationship.

6. Remember What You Learn

This idea isn’t mine, but comes from a designer named Alan Knox over at a great agency called redpepper.  He has a great process for hanging on to what he learns.  He sums it up with Capture, Process, Categorize.  But that summary doesn’t  do it justice.  Watch his presentation here and get the slideshow here.  Seriously, do it.  I’ve got to start putting this into action.

—

The ante has been upped.  Nowadays, it isn’t enough to have good interview skills and even just networking may be insufficient to get by.  You have to keep growing, keep getting better, even when you’re out of a job.  The Unemployed Marketers Group came out of that very need.  Check out the below post, and if you want to be a part, drop me a line!  Plus, your complimentary or constructively critical comments are always welcome.

Apparently several days off with no planned activities = lots of reading.  So here are a few more readings to add to the list:

First off I finished Starfish and the Spider.  I would recommend this book if you are looking at the attributes of a decentralized organization.

Next I read Tribes: We Need You to Lead Us by Seth Godin.  This is a small book that reads more like a string of catch phrases and parables.  It is thought provoking, but does not add to much to the readings that it references (Godin reference Gladwell’s books, Age of Heretics, and Here Comes Everybody).

Today I finished Blink by Malcolm Gladwell.  Although my least favorite of his three, it is still a worthy read.  I read the acknowledgments before reading the book and I think that made it even more interesting.  Basically, Gladwell had the experience of being stopped by police and questioned about looking a lot like a rapist that they were looking for.  In actuality the only thing he had in common with the rapist was his hairstyle, which he kindly and carefully pointed out to the police officers when they showed him the sketch.  Gladwell uses that experience as a jumping off point for looking at our snap judgements and examining ways in which they serve us well and ways they do us a disservice.

I am also listening to A Whole New Mind by Daniel Pink on CD.  I am interested that Pink defines “knowledge workers” in a different way than they have been described in Mark’s class.  He seems to be making a lot the same main points as Mark, but using a different lens to examine the issues.  He focuses quite a bit on the argument that “knowledge work” (which he describes as left-brained professions such as accounting, law, medicine, etc) is being outsourced or replaced by machines.  He uses that assessment to assert that the new area of job possibilities will be for right-brained professionals in careers that require creativity, emotional intelligence and design.

In addition, I just started Freakanomics on CD as well as Matthew B. Crawford’s Shop Class as Soulcraft: An Inquiry Into the Value of Work, which is a very thought-provoking read by a PhD in philosophy who left a Washington think tank to run his own motorcycle repair business in Richmond, VA.

Igennem de seneste måneder har jeg arbejdet en del med positiv psykologi via mit studie. Dette forløb har inspireret mig til at fokusere på mine styrker – frem for svagheder, som dog falder mig så naturligt. At jeg må forsøge at være mindre fejlsøgende og mere optaget af styrkerne. Det handler måske om, at jeg må til se gennem andre briller.

Dernæst er jeg optaget af, om vi primært arbejder ud fra det, som vi gør bedst? Hvordan oplever du det i din kontekst?

En Gallup undersøgelse blandt to millioner mennesker viser, at kun 17 % bringer sine styrker i spil dagligt. Der er faktisk kun 1 % “chance” for, at du ikke er engageret i dit arbejde, hvis din leder hovedsageligt fokuserer på dine styrker (Positiv psykologi på arbejde). Dermed er der et klart link mellem motivation og evnen til at gøre det, som vi er bedst til.

En af verdens største ledelsestænkere, Peter Drucker, sagde på et tidspunkt: “Most people think they know what they are good at. They are usually wrong… And yet, a person can perform only from strength“. Kan det tænkes, at udfordringen mere er, at vi slet ikke er klar over, hvad vores styrkesider er? At vi måske ikke ved, hvad vi er bedst til?

Vil du sige, at du kender dine egne styrker?

Malcolm Gladwell skriver i “Outliers” at det tager 10.000 timer at blive ekstremt dygtig til “noget”. Om dette er en magisk grænse eller ej, så kræver det uden tvivl tid og hårdt arbejde at nå toppen. Dog tænker jeg, at det starter med, at vi bliver bevidste omkring vores styrker – og får mulighed for at sætte dem i spil – dagligt.

 Hvad tænker du?

Malcolm Gladwell…talks spaghetti! Builds argument about choice and happiness.

Malcolm Gladwell i jego nowatorskie teorie pokazują, że wszystkie pomysły marketingu są stare i należy je wyrzucić do kosza.

Napisanie tej książki z pewnością było punktem przełomowym w życiu Malcolma Gladwella – dzięki niej stał się guru zarządzania oraz zyskał miano jednego z najbardziej wpływowych ludzi na świecie.

Guru nowoczesnego marketingu odrzuca wszelkie nowinki. Wraca do korzeni, do wydarzeń, które miały miejsce na początku wieku XX. Może to wywołać zawał u nowoczesnych speców do wpływania na ludzi – jednak po lekturze Punktu przełomowego każdy będzie chciał stosować właśnie te metody.

Weźmy na przykład prawo garstki. Dlaczego firma, która myśli o zakończeniu swojej działalności – przez niespodziewany (i niewywoływany przez nią) splot przypadków staje się dochodowa. Ba – zyski jej rosną w dużym tempie, a nauka z prostego faktu pozwala wybić jej się na rynek światowy?

Dlaczego Ulica Sezamkowa nie jest dobrym programem edukacyjnym dla dzieci? Dlaczego warto najpierw sprawdzić dokładnie produkt, a dopiero potem wypuścić go na rynek?

Kogo możemy nazwać mawenami rynku i jak wykorzystać ich dla dobra swojej firmy?

Na te pytania nie przeczytacie odpowiedzi w książce Gladwella. On daje tylko doskonałe przykłady, które powinny wywoływać burzę mózgów czy to w małej firmie czy w dużej korporacji. Dzięki pomysłom i analizom autora można osiągnąć wiele – ale i wiele stracić, gdy niedokładnie przyjmiemy jego naukę.

Wszystko to napisane w mistrzowski sposób doskonale łączący historię z teraźniejszością. Widać, że seria Punkty Przełomowe wydana przez ZNAK jest strzałem w dziesiątkę, który uzupełnia lukę na polskim rynku wydawniczym.
Uzupełnia też lukę w myśleniu speców od marketingu, które dopiero teraz może przynosić ogromne korzyści.

Polecam

Malcolm Gladwell
Punkt przełomowy
wydawnictwo Znak
2009

A big welcome to everybody who has discovered this blog via the ‘Freshly pressed’ section of the WordPress homepage and read my post On Writing: The romance of the writer from Hemingway to Gladwell.

It’s been wonderful to have so many new visitors, and so many insightful and thoughtful comments, so thank you all for stopping by. It has been a crazy 24 hours for the blog – there’s been more pageviews in the past day than there had been previously in the total life of this blog, up to the point WordPress kindly gave me a plug.

So, to introduce myself, I’m Steve. I live in London, and have been properly knuckling down with this blog over the past six months or so. If you’ve had a nose about, you’ll see that it has predominantly been a blog focused on sport. However, once I hit 100 posts I decided I’d liked to broaden the subjects I cover here. and really blog about whatever interests me. While I expect there will still be plenty of sporting posts, after my unexpected success (exposure is perhaps a more apt word – but sounds a little icky!) yesterday, I’m definitely going to cover other stuff.

What is on the horizon?

In sport, I’m a big football (soccer) fan, so there will be plenty of coverage and commentary on that. I’ve also over the past few years got more and more into baseball. However, I’ve reached the point where I really want (and probably need) to learn some more. So, I’m planning My Baseball Winter, a series of posts where you can follow me getting to grips with some of the different aspects of the sport, be it the history, the statistics, the culture that surrounds it. We’ll see.

In non-sporting posts, I’m currently reading Kingsley Amis’ Every Day Drinking and have got some fun stuff in mind along those lines on the joys and pitfalls of drinking.

I’m sure to cover music too, be it reviews or more general thought-pieces. I’m sure films, books and other art will get a look in too. You know, the usual stuff.

And finally, after yesterday’s post, more writing on, well, writing. I think it is a fascinating subject and I look forward to exploring it some more.

My biggest aim for this blog is to encourage more and more comments from you guys, so please do feel free to add your thoughts. Any suggestions are very welcome, and your comments so far have certainly enriched this blog no end.

If you fancy subscribing to this blog, here is my RSS feed. Otherwise, I do hope some of you find the time to pop along again at some point, and I’ll do my best to visit every person who has been kind enough to comment.

Thanks again!

Steve

PS Please excuse the dreadful trousers/shorts I’m wearing in the picture. I love the picture as it reminds me of a pretty magical day out. I’m a sentimental old thing, really.

Here are some of the books, that I am reading or have been influential in my development.  Maybe you can add some of these to your own library.  Maybe you have an opinion on one of them. Let me know!

ESV Study Bible (English Standard Version)

This is simply the best study bible out there for people who want to not only read verses out of the bible, but to understand the message of the bible and articulate that message to other people.  Lots of great tools have been included to help one’s study of the Bible. (When you get the Bible, read St. Mark’s Gospel, Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Proverbs, Ecclesiastes,  and Ephesians )

Autobiography of Malcolm X by Alex Haley

This biography was such an amazing tale of a man who through the force of his convictions educates himself and becomes one of the strongest orators and thought leaders of the 60s.  Even if you disagree with his politics, his story is fascinating.

Martin Luther King Trilogy by Taylor Branch (Parting the Waters, Pillar of Fire, and On Canaan’s Edge”

This trilogy I still haven’t finished.  But if you are looking for something on the life and times SURROUNDING Dr. King and the players in that era (e.g. Kennedy, Malcolm X) this is series for you.  The author spent almost 20 years of his life putting the information together and its well worth the read.

Don’t Waste Your Life by John Piper

Piper calls for those of us who are Christian to run after God and get out of boring, safe Christianity, and actually run after Jesus.

7 Habits of Highly Effective People by Stephen Covey

If you are trying to pick up some tools to order your life, there are some here.

Desiring God by John Piper

Piper drops this gem. “God is most glorified in us when we are most satisfied in him.”  Please read!

Destruction of Black Civilization by Chancellor Williams

Mr. Williams spent an inordinate amount of his life tracing the history of the decline of ancient African empires to the modern day neo-colonialism that is Africa’s calling card.

Things Fall Apart by Chinua Achebe

Achebe speaks about a civilization — a way of life — that is killed ironically by “civilization.”  Good book: it gave me perspective.

The Tipping Point by Malcolm Gladwell

I just love anything that Mr. Gladwell writes.  The Tipping Point started the love affair.

21 Indisputable Laws of Leadership by John Maxwell

John Maxwell writes this great one on leadership.

Slide-ology – The Art of Creating Great Presentations by Nancy Duarte

If you are into making presentations and want to understand the art behind great Powerpoint or Keynote slides, pick this one up for your library.

Vintage Jesus by Marc Driscoll

I haven’t read this one yet, I must confess.  However, I hear it is good for those who want to know about the life of Jesus in highly reader-friendly language.

Why We Can’t Wait by Martin Luther King Jr.

Martin speaks to the discontent of the Black America in the sixties.  Some of what he writes is still prescient for today and he is at his poetic best in this book.  The Letter of a Birmingham Jail is included.

*Lists: The 2000’s lists are beginning to come out. According to NPR, these are the 50 Most Important Recordings of the Decade. I didn’t appear on any of them. Though I have recorded a track-for-track remake of “For Emma, Forever Ago.” For personal reasons. In the shower.

*Holidays: Spread the holiday spirit! Santas as H1N1 catalyst. [spin city]

*Life: Will intelligent alien creatures look like us? Dollars to donuts, I am balder than any alien discovered in my lifetime. And I am a man of my word, so please collect if I’m wrong. [marginal revolution]

*Photos: Look at these Re-inhabited Circle Ks. Most of my knowledge of the Circle K franchise comes to me from Bill and Ted’s various cinematic adventures. In a way, that’s a cry for help. [eat me daily]

*Quizzes: I hate quizzes, but I got 10 out of 12 on this one. Is This Music Web Site Real? On a related note, MySpace might now be trying to buy Imeem. (I used to know more about this shit.)

*Literature: Read Moby Dick online. I once read “Crime and Punishment” on Bartebly over a series of unbearably boring work days. I didn’t feel bad about it, either. (Get it? One of the themes of C&P is undeniable guilt? Hello? Ugh.) [ebert]

*Ideas: Gladwell v. Pinker

*Obits: Wow, Ken Ober (former host of MTV’s “Remote Control”) has died at 52.

*Today’s links: F. Though I almost made it to a D- by not mentioning the Word of the Year.

Tongue in cheek reflections on the birth of Jesus, why we unwrap Christmas presents and why Santa Claus is so adored, from Malcolm Gladwell at Vanity Fair.

Thanks to Felix Salmon

An eye-opening review of Malcolm Gladwell’s book “What the dog saw” by Steven Pinker –  I will be much more careful of accepting Gladwell’s conclusions from here on.  From the New York Times:

Malcolm Gladwell, Eclectic Detective

By STEVEN PINKER

Have you ever wondered why there are so many kinds of mustard but only one kind of ketchup? Or what Cézanne did before painting his first significant works in his 50s? Have you hungered for the story behind the Veg-O-Matic, star of the frenetic late-night TV ads? Or wanted to know where Led Zeppelin got the riff in “Whole Lotta Love”?

Neither had I, until I began this collection by the indefatigably curious journalist Malcolm Gladwell. The familiar jacket design, with its tiny graphic on a spare background, reminds us that Gladwell has become a brand. He is the author of the mega-best sellers “The Tipping Point,” “Blink” and “Out­liers”; a popular speaker on the Dilbert circuit; and a prolific contributor to The New Yorker, where the 19 articles in “What the Dog Saw” were originally published. This volume includes prequels to those books and other examples of Gladwell’s stock in trade: counterintuitive findings from little-known experts.

A third of the essays are portraits of “minor geniuses” — impassioned oddballs loosely connected to cultural trends. We meet the feuding clan of speed-talking pitchmen who gave us the Pocket Fisherman, Hair in a Can, and other it-slices!-it-dices! contraptions. There is the woman who came up with the slogan “Does she or doesn’t she?” and made hair coloring (and, Gladwell suggests, self-invention) respectable to millions of American women. The investor Nassim Taleb explains how markets can be blindsided by improbable but consequential events. A gourmet ketchup entrepreneur provides Gladwell the opportunity to explain the psychology of taste and to recount the history of condiments.

Another third are on the hazards of statistical prediction, especially when it comes to spectacular failures like Enron, 9/11, the fatal flight of John F. Kennedy Jr., the explosion of the space shuttle Challenger, the persistence of homelessness and the unsuccessful targeting of Scud missile launchers during the Persian Gulf war of 1991. For each debacle, Gladwell tries to single out a fallacy of reasoning behind it, such as that more information is always better, that pictures offer certainty, that events are distributed in a bell curve around typical cases, that clues available in hindsight should have been obvious before the fact and that the risk of failure in a complex system can be reduced to zero.

The final third are also about augury, this time about individuals rather than events. Why, he asks, is it so hard to prognosticate the performance of artists, teachers, quarterbacks, executives, serial killers and breeds of dogs?

The themes of the collection are a good way to characterize Gladwell himself: a minor genius who unwittingly demonstrates the hazards of statistical reasoning and who occasionally blunders into spectacular failures.

Gladwell is a writer of many gifts. His nose for the untold back story will have readers repeatedly muttering, “Gee, that’s interesting!” He avoids shopworn topics, easy moralization and conventional wisdom, encouraging his readers to think again and think different. His prose is transparent, with lucid explanations and a sense that we are chatting with the experts ourselves. Some chapters are master­pieces in the art of the essay. I particularly liked “Something Borrowed,” a moving examination of the elusive line between artistic influence and plagiarism, and “Dangerous Minds,” a suspenseful tale of criminal profiling that shows how self-anointed experts can delude their clients and themselves with elastic predictions.

An eclectic essayist is necessarily a dilettante, which is not in itself a bad thing. But Gladwell frequently holds forth about statistics and psychology, and his lack of technical grounding in these subjects can be jarring. He provides misleading definitions of “homology,” “sagittal plane” and “power law” and quotes an expert speaking about an “igon value” (that’s eigenvalue, a basic concept in linear algebra). In the spirit of Gladwell, who likes to give portentous names to his aperçus, I will call this the Igon Value Problem: when a writer’s education on a topic consists in interviewing an expert, he is apt to offer generalizations that are banal, obtuse or flat wrong.

The banalities come from a gimmick that can be called the Straw We. First Gladwell disarmingly includes himself and the reader in a dubious consensus — for example, that “we” believe that jailing an executive will end corporate malfeasance, or that geniuses are invariably self-made prodigies or that eliminating a risk can make a system 100 percent safe. He then knocks it down with an ambiguous observation, such as that “risks are not easily manageable, accidents are not easily preventable.” As a generic statement, this is true but trite: of course many things can go wrong in a complex system, and of course people sometimes trade off safety for cost and convenience (we don’t drive to work wearing crash helmets in Mack trucks at 10 miles per hour). But as a more substantive claim that accident investigations are meaningless “rituals of reassurance” with no effect on safety, or that people have a “fundamental tendency to compensate for lower risks in one area by taking greater risks in another,” it is demonstrably false.

The problem with Gladwell’s generalizations about prediction is that he never zeroes in on the essence of a statistical problem and instead overinterprets some of its trappings. For example, in many cases of uncertainty, a decision maker has to act on an observation that may be either a signal from a target or noise from a distractor (a blip on a screen may be a missile or static; a blob on an X-ray may be a tumor or a harmless thickening). Improving the ability of your detection technology to discriminate signals from noise is always a good thing, because it lowers the chance you’ll mistake a target for a distractor or vice versa. But given the technology you have, there is an optimal threshold for a decision, which depends on the relative costs of missing a target and issuing a false alarm. By failing to identify this trade-off, Gladwell bamboozles his readers with pseudoparadoxes about the limitations of pictures and the downside of precise information.

Another example of an inherent trade-off in decision-making is the one that pits the accuracy of predictive information against the cost and complexity of acquiring it. Gladwell notes that I.Q. scores, teaching certificates and performance in college athletics are imperfect predictors of professional success. This sets up a “we” who is “used to dealing with prediction problems by going back and looking for better predictors.” Instead, Gladwell argues, “teaching should be open to anyone with a pulse and a college degree — and teachers should be judged after they have started their jobs, not before.”

But this “solution” misses the whole point of assessment, which is not clairvoyance but cost-effectiveness. To hire teachers indiscriminately and judge them on the job is an example of “going back and looking for better predictors”: the first year of a career is being used to predict the remainder. It’s simply the predictor that’s most expensive (in dollars and poorly taught students) along the accuracy-­cost trade-off. Nor does the absurdity of this solution for professional athletics (should every college quarterback play in the N.F.L.?) give Gladwell doubts about his misleading analogy between hiring teachers (where the goal is to weed out the bottom 15 percent) and drafting quarterbacks (where the goal is to discover the sliver of a percentage point at the top).

The common thread in Gladwell’s writing is a kind of populism, which seeks to undermine the ideals of talent, intelligence and analytical prowess in favor of luck, opportunity, experience and intuition. For an apolitical writer like Gladwell, this has the advantage of appealing both to the Horatio Alger right and to the egalitarian left. Unfortunately he wildly overstates his empirical case. It is simply not true that a quarter­back’s rank in the draft is uncorrelated with his success in the pros, that cognitive skills don’t predict a teacher’s effectiveness, that intelligence scores are poorly related to job performance or (the major claim in “Outliers”) that above a minimum I.Q. of 120, higher intelligence does not bring greater intellectual achievements.

The reasoning in “Outliers,” which consists of cherry-picked anecdotes, post-hoc sophistry and false dichotomies, had me gnawing on my Kindle. Fortunately for “What the Dog Saw,” the essay format is a better showcase for Gladwell’s talents, because the constraints of length and editors yield a higher ratio of fact to fancy. Readers have much to learn from Gladwell the journalist and essayist. But when it comes to Gladwell the social scientist, they should watch out for those igon values.

My thoughts:  some very interesting tidbits, but the least compelling of Gladwell’s oeuvre

I thoroughly enjoyed Gladwell’s previous two books (The Tipping Point and Blink), and I found neither convincing in its central thesis. Gladwell has a flare for making psychology and social psychology research easily digestible and interweaving it with case studies to provide a satisfying mix that is inherently interesting, high entertainment value, and insightful into how we behave. That said, in neither of the previous books did I find that this tapestry of experiments and case studies really convinced me of the central thesis.

The thesis of this newer book is that people who are exceptionally successful – outliers – are a product of their environments much more than they are individually exceptional. First, Gladwell keeps knocking down a straw man that no one really believes anyway. I think we all know that environment matters a lot, and Gladwell never really accounts for the individual elements. Yes, the Beattles got 10,000 hours to practice in Hamburg, but were there other bands that played in Hamburg every year but didn’t go big? Yes, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were born at a special time and had a special set of privileges, but what about Bill Gates’s friends in his same high school computer club? What computer empire did they create? In other words, the individual element which Gladwell seems so excited to downplay still has to play a major role; or at least, Gladwell hasn’t convinced me that it doesn’t.

The most interesting part of the book deals with air plane crashes because it goes back to Gladwell’s successful formula: a mix of social science research (in this case, on cross-cultural hierarchy something something) and case studies – of major plane crashes.

Gladwell still tells a good story, but this one is much less convincing than his previous work.  I listened to the unabridged audiobook, and Gladwell narrates well.  At the end of the audiobook, there is an interview with Gladwell which really belongs at the beginning; it gives an intro to the book that is totally superfluous after having read it.

Note on content: There might be a swear word or two in here; and in the epilogue there is one description of slave treatment which is not pretty (but is historical), but otherwise this is innocuous sailing.

The pros’ clips are below the fold…

New York Times: “Outliers,” Mr. Gladwell’s latest book, employs this same recipe, but does so in such a clumsy manner that it italicizes the weaknesses of his methodology. The book, which purports to explain the real reason some people — like Bill Gates and the Beatles — are successful, is peppy, brightly written and provocative in a buzzy sort of way. It is also glib, poorly reasoned and thoroughly unconvincing.

New York Times Book Review: “Outliers” has much in common with Gladwell’s earlier work. It is a pleasure to read and leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward. It also, unfortunately, avoids grappling in a few instances with research that casts doubt on those theories. (Gladwell argues that relatively older children excel not only at hockey but also in the classroom. The research on this issue, however, is decidedly mixed.) This is a particular shame, because it would be a delight to watch someone of his intellect and clarity make sense of seemingly conflicting claims. … For all these similarities, though, “Outliers” represents a new kind of book for Gladwell. “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” his second book, were a mixture of social psychology, marketing and even a bit of self-help. “Outliers” is far more political. It is almost a manifesto.

Guardian: The trouble with the book is that Gladwell is ultimately engaged in a long argument with nobody but himself. Throughout, he defines his position against a floating, ubiquitous, omnipotent ‘we’; a Greek chorus of predictable opposition and received opinion. ‘There is something profoundly wrong with the way we look at success,’ he writes. ‘We cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don’t matter at all.’ And so he goes on. … However, it’s still fun to follow Gladwell on his meandering intellectual journeys, even if the conclusions he arrives at here are so obviously self-evident as to be banal. Even when he is not at his best he is worth taking seriously. He has a lucid, aphoristic style. His case studies are well chosen, such as when he writes about the birth dates of elite ice hockey players and discovers a pattern: most are born in the first three months of the year. His range is wide, and he writes as well in Outliers about sport as he does about corporate law firms in New York or aviation. Little is beneath his notice.

Entertainment Weekly: A couple of best-selling books (The Tipping Point, Blink) and a forest’s worth of must-read New Yorker articles into his career, Malcolm Gladwell has turned himself into the literary world’s Mr. Wizard. … Expertly versed in not only science but business and psychology, Gladwell is a poufy-haired showman with a knack for explaining anything to everybody, from dog whispering and fads to disposable diapers and snap judgments. His books in particular — written in a noticeably more populist, teacherly voice than his New Yorker articles — are rigged to blow open the heads of even the dimmest of general readers. And his latest, the explosively entertaining Outliers, might be his best and most useful work yet. … There are both brilliant yarns and life lessons here: Outliers is riveting science, self-help, and entertainment, all in one book.

Business Week: 4 out of 5 stars.  The Good: Another ‘Aha!’ book from the best-selling writer, Malcolm Gladwell.  The Bad: One wonders: Did he leave out evidence that contradicts his thesis about success?  The Bottom Line: Challenging common assumptions, Outliers will have readers pondering their own destinies.

The Independent: Time and again, Gladwell writes against a cornball caricature of can-do Americanism. This pure voluntarist dogma figures as a straw man he never tires of knocking down. Not only has no European ever credited it, but I doubt if any of the 67 million US voters who chose Obama has either. “Outliers are those who have been given opportunities,” he repeats, “and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them”.

Christian Science Monitor:  Thought-provoking, entertaining, and irresistibly debatable, “Outliers” offers lively stories about an unexpected range of exceptional people – Korean airline pilots, New York litigators, immigrant garment workers, Asian math whizzes, low-achievers with high IQs, and, for good measure, Gladwell’s Jamaican grandmother.  Overall, it’s another winner from this agile social observer.

Marginal Revolution (the economics blog), links to a few other published reviews

I picked up a new book today. One that I have had my eyes on for some time but not yet come around to reading. Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell.  An “Outlier”, according to Gladwell, is a scientific term to describe things or phenomena that lie outside normal experience. This can for example be people who perform tasks or roles that lie way outside what most of us can comprehend, such as a World Class athlete in a sport. In the first chapter Gladwell hits me with what I kind of already know, but never really would like to admit. He has looked into the background of the most successful players on high performing teams, in the league as well as nationally in a few different sports and a number of different countries. Without a shadow of a doubt he manages to show that what we believe is somebody that has made it to where he or she is thanks to talent, hard work and ambition is actually something completely different. Why would there otherwise be such a huge over representation of people born early in the year in these teams? Gladwell argues that in fact what we see is a classic example of a self-fulfilling prophecy. We pick athletes at an early age because they are better than their peers. More often than not though the reason to why they are better is simple that they are older (=born nearer the cut off date for the applicable age) and therefore more developed. Once these youngsters are picked they are given more opportunities, better coaching and more resources and guess what happens? They leave their peers behind and what we thought was going to be the case is now a reality.

That is some pretty serious stuff to chew. Facts are though that in most sports, as well as in education, we disqualify people because of the time of the year in which they are born. What a waste of talent that is!

I’m starting this at the same time that I’m reading Cantatrix Sopranica L., by Georges Perec, which in addition to giving my blog its tentative title, is a study in the imitation of scientific writing styles. It’s so fun to read because in manipulating these forms, constrictive with their innumerable requirements and formalities, Perec treats them not as so many cages but instead as, shall we say, jungle gyms. Rather than being constrained, he seems to use each rigid bar as a vehicle of fun; as a way to get to swing nimbly to something else. Also I like picturing him swinging around in there, curly hair blowing in the breeze, bare feet in the cedar chips.

Here’s a graph of the neurological reactions in sopranos being hit by 9 tomatoes per sec.

On second thought, I guess constraint was sort of Perec’s thing: writing an entire book with not a single letter E seems like it would be just as difficult, but just as fun, as trying to keep a rubber ball inside the lines in four-square.

Further on imitation: it occurred to me as I scrolled through other people’s blogs, checking for formatting and writing style and tone and font size before I started my own, that I was really just looking for something to copy. Maybe this came to me easily because I’m reading Perec’s imitative work, but perhaps also in part due to recent musings about writing: how much of people’s writing, and my own in particular, is an exercise in imitation – of others’ work, of speech – and does this make it any less legitimate? I think this question applies elsewhere; case in point, a recent New Yorker Out Loud audio I heard in which Malcolm Gladwell points out that the main catalyst for a child prodigy is imitation, while true geniuses are distinguished by their genuine creativity. (Genius? Genuine? Linked? Looked it up; turns out no -

genius – from the root of the Latin gignere – beget [attendant spirit present from one's birth, innate ability or inclination]

genuine – from the Latin genu – knee, having to do with a father’s habit of seating his son on his knee, and later became synecdochized (?!) to represent birth, race, stock; genealogy, if you will.)

I’m sitting in the living room of my apartment, surrounded by windows and looking out at the towering library. The cat, who has recently been started on some sort of sedative pills to keep him from peeing all over the house on the daily, is stretched out beside me, limply. I like to pretend that his complacent responses to my insistent cuddling are a result of real affection for me, and not the result of a drug-induced haze.

Bonne nuit!

Let’s get this shit started!

Hey, I’m only six days late and two books behind…

I love Malcolm Gladwell with every bit of my slightly pretentious, pseudo-intellectual hipster heart. I’ve given The Tipping Point to friends, relatives and co-workers for pretty much every conceivable gift-giving occasion. I read Outliers twice the week it came out. This one just didn’t do it for me. What The Dog Saw should be great. It’s a collection of random articles and pieces from lots of different sources, each on a different subject. It’s basically Gladwell doing what he does best: Having an idea and then finding people who know a lot about the subject and goading them until they talk. He covers everything from the Enron scandal and how that affected management styles to an oddly moving story about the family of Ron Popiel. Weirdly, as a whole, it falls flat on it’s well-versed face.

I think the problem may lay with the fact that Gladwell normally works with an over-arching theme. He’ll  broach a big subject and examine lots of facets of it and how they affect and change the nature of the whole. This reads more like a ‘greatest hits’. Which, to be fair, it can be argued that ‘greatest hits’ is, indeed, the point of the book. The whole thing seemed disjointed to me. It was entertaining, don’t get me wrong, but it didn’t really have much that stuck out in my mind a week after reading it. I can tell you what lots of the articles were about, but I’d be hard-pressed to quote them, unlike Gladwell’s other books.

If you already love Malcolm Gladwell, you’ll be happy with this book. The feeling it gives you is not unlike finding your high-school yearbook: you reminisce about the good times, but you’re still glad it’s over . If you’re looking to read one of his books to see what the big fuss is all about, pick up Tipping Point or Blink instead of this one. Trust me.

i was SO happy when a friend told me the new malcolm gladwell book was out ‘what the dog saw’, and i finally had a chance to pick it up earlier this week.  they guy is just flat brilliant.  he talks about a strength of this, and many writers, is to find anything interesting.  we’ve all heard the adage that there is always a story to tell, but gladwell’s gift for telling that story makes what so many people would consider mundane into something fascinating.  the book is actually a compilation of his articles from over the years but they are organized into a few different areas.  one idea he brings out is the difference between a puzzle and a mystery.  a puzzle is when you don’t have enough information – the example he gives is the whereabouts of osama bin laden.  just one person with the right information could solve that puzzle but right now there are too many bits of information missing.  a mystery, on the other hand, is when you have too much information and the overload doesn’t allow you to reach the conclusion you are looking for.  you need to make the proper judgments given the information you choose to focus upon.  the classroom finds plenty of mysteries and puzzles and depending on the teacher, they know which is which.  isn’t it possible that an inexperienced teacher, or one not used to assessing student work could perceive that a student is a puzzle, when in fact all the information they need is present?  is it possible that a teacher can collect too much data and muddy the water, so to speak, when making instructional decisions?  to be sure, students are often little riddles to figure out, but once you solve that puzzle or untangle the mystery class becomes a lot more enjoyable for everyone.

“What do you want?” Goetz asked.
“Give me five dollars,” Canty replied.
Goetz looked up and, as he would say later, saw that Canty’s “eyes were shiny, and he was enjoying himself……Goetz reached into his pocket and pulled out a chrome-plated five-shot Smith and Wesson .38, firing at each of the four youths in turn.

Malcolm Gladwell, in his fine book ‘The Tipping Point‘ explains the Power of Context’  “is that we are more than just sensitive to changes in context. We’re exquisitely sensitive to them.” Human behavior owes a lot to the context or situation, rather than, say, personality or genetic makeup. And that explains a lot in provoking Goetz, a decent New Yorker, shoot four youths in a graffiti ridden, littered subway train in one cold december day in New York.

Power of context is best summed up by the Broken Windows theory. Gladwell writes 

“Broken Windows theory and the Power of Context are one and the same. …The Power of Context is an environmental argument. It says that behavior is a function of social context….The Power of Context says that you don’t have to solve big problems to solve crime. You can prevent crimes just by scrubbing off graffiti and arresting fare beaters…Once you understand that context matters, however, that specific and relatively small elements in the environment can serve as Tipping points …..”

Broken Windows theory is the brainchild of criminologist James Q.Wilson and George L.Kelling, and in their own words:

“Social psychologists and police officers tend to agree that if a window in a building is broken and is left unrepaired, all the rest of the windows will soon be broken. This is as true in nice neighborhoods as in run-down ones. Window-breaking does not necessarily occur on a large scale because some areas are inhabited by determined window-breakers whereas others are populated by window-lovers; rather, one unrepaired broken window is a signal that no one cares, and so breaking more windows costs nothing. (It has always been fun.)”

Kelling was later hired by New York Transit Authority, who together with subway director David Gunn cleaned up the graffiti. Later William Bratton, hired as transit police head, another disciple of Broken Windows, cracked down upon farebeating. All these attributed in bringing down New York crime radically during the mid-80s.

In order to discover if signs of vandalism, litter and low-level lawbreaking could change people’s behavior, Kees Keizer and his colleagues at the University of Groningen conducted experiments to, say, validate Broken Windows theory.

His group’s first study was conducted in an alley that is frequently used to park bicycles. ..the researchers created two conditions: one of order and the other of disorder. In the former, the walls of the alley were freshly painted; in the latter, they were tagged with graffiti ….In both states a large sign prohibiting graffiti was put up, so that it would not be missed by anyone who came to collect a bicycle. All the bikes then had a flyer promoting a non-existent sports shop attached to their handlebars. This needed to be removed before a bicycle could be ridden. When owners returned, their behaviour was secretly observed. There were no rubbish bins in the alley, so a cyclist had three choices. He could take the flyer with him, hang it on another bicycle (which the researchers counted as littering) or throw it to the floor. When the alley contained graffiti, 69% of the riders littered compared with 33% when the walls were clean.

Do the Broken Windows theory and Power of Context apply to an organization? Can we radically improve the organizational environment to foster professional behavior? Hoarding information, dirty office politics, taking undeserving credit, favouritism, all can be broken windows. Bringing right culture is a lot of fixing broken windows.

Software development is notoriously known for falling quickly into tar pit.

In the book The Pragmatic Programmer, Andrew Hunt and David Thomas look into Broken Windows in software developments:

“There are many factors that can contribute to software rot. The most important one seems to be the psychology, or culture, at work on a project. Even if you are a team of one, your project’s psychology can be a very delicate thing. Despite the best laid plans and the best people, a project can still experience ruin and decay during its lifetime. Yet there are other projects that, despite enormous difficulties and constant setbacks, successfully fight nature’s tendency toward disorder and manage to come out pretty well.”

Bad design, wrong decisions or poor code can be broken windows, which warrants fixing as soon as they are discovered. Agile development framework like Scrum is good in the way that the underlying framework makes fixing broken windows highly desirable. High order of transparency and rapid feedback mechanism with continuous integration, pair programming, daily scrums all encourage fixing broken windows.

Let the windows shine.

Image by Grove Pashley (Photographer's Choice) in Getty Images

“We have, as human beings, a storytelling problem. We’re a bit too quick to come up with explanations for things we don’t really have an explanation for.”

~ Malcolm Gladwell in Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking

Today is the beginning of National Novel Writing Month! I’m very excited because the 3-Day Novel Writing Contest was so much fun and I’m dying to see what happens when it is expanded to 30 days. I know it won’t feel the same. The 3-Day experience over Labor Day weekend was amazing. It was my first time and it was a blast. The most important things I learned were… 1) Turn off the phone, 2) Turn off email, 3) Write. In the end I produced a 26,000 word novel “Any Man’s Death” and submitted it.  So, 50,000 words in the month of November shouldn’t be a problem.

I love deadlines. I love creativity under pressure!

There was a wonderful Think Out Loud that propelled me into the contest. The topic was (surprise surprise) Creativity Under Pressure  and it reminded me what a rush it when you have a strict timeline and have to produce. Also I think that most of us reason that creativity is something outside our selves, something that comes to us like the mythical Muses, and not something that we work at.

Yet I disagree. I don’t think creativity is like a lightning strike – I think it is a process like anything else. Once that can be learned, honed, and strengthened. Truly creative people don’t have one idea – they have gazillions. They try and fail, try and fail, ad nauseum. They aren’t successful because of a lightning strike and luck – but because they worked for it and had timing on their side.

In “Outliers: The Story of Success”, Malcolm Gladwell looks at the “stories” we tell of successful men and women and how that differs from the reality of how they get where they are. The point of most interest for this discussion is how hard you work at your craft.

Get your 10,000 hours in!

If you want to be great at something you have to spend 10,000 hours doing it, if you want to good aim for 8,000, if you want to be okay 4,000. Doesn’t matter if we are talking about a computer programmer, writer, musician, lawyer… you need those hours. Practice, do, practice do… repeat. The harder you work the better you get… but the magic number appears to be 10,000 hours.

Good writers don’t just write – they write obsessively. Good musicians don’t just practice – they practice obsessively.

Now there is nothing wrong with wanting to be pretty good. I’m pretty good at a lot of things – I was a pretty good actor, a pretty good dancer, a pretty good opera singer, scientist, teacher, project manager….and while I was being pretty good I got to experience a lot of life, different people, different professions. It was great! I didn’t have the drive to spend 10,000 hours at one thing. I wanted to be everything.

But that’s changed now – I’m working on my 10,000 hours.

The more I write, the better I write. The more stories I tell, the better I get at telling them. The more ideas I use, the more ideas I come up with.

There are some concepts that you read and they stick with you… for me it was the idea of “Failing Faster”. In Robert Sutton’s book “Weird Ideas that Work: 11 ½ Practices for Promoting, Managing, and Sustaining Innovation” the weird idea that spoke to me the most was failing. In his chapter about “reward(ing) success and failure, punish(ing) inaction” he talks about rewarding intelligent failures and to “remember that innovation is largely a function of productivity”. Later in the book he talks about killing failed ideas quickly but not reducing the rate of failure. Failure is okay and as long as you keep trying it can be the road to success.  

I think of it as throwing things at the wall and seeing what sticks.

So how does this all relate to the 3-Day Novel Contest and National Novel Writing Month? It’s simple really – I think, for me, creativity and productivity are related to assured outcomes. It is incredibly difficult for me to write a story knowing that the odds are against publication. But if the object is the process and the outcome assured (I get certificates for each of the events/contests) then suddenly I’m reveling in the journey not the destination. Ideas flow and are weeded out, pruned back, and harvested. There is pressure, there is a deadline, and there is something I can say I accomplished.

Strangely enough – it is enough.

So I feel that I am working on my 10,000 hours – because I want to be a great writer – and I am failing faster – trying different things, genres, methods, formants and styles. And I’m using contests, events, and this blog to get me there.

Thanks for joining me on the journey!

~ Tess

The government’s decision to reinstate Mr. Umuro Wario to continue serving as the Chief Executive Officer of the Youth Enterprise Development Fund should be highly lauded. It’s a point of victory for public officers who risk their jobs by committing themselves to fight corruption. Kenya’s biggest problem with the war against corruption has always been having the corrupt have their day whenever they fight back. This has happened to so many competent people before. A number of committed and hardworking officers have often lost their jobs whenever they showed determination to fight graft. A few years back it was confirmed that in Kenya, corruption fights back. It happened to Goldenberg whistle blower David Munyakei who lost his job and died in agony after he revealed how Kenyans had lost billions of shillings through the Goldenberg scandal. The same nature of machinations worked so hard to remove true anti corruption crusaders from transparency international. It was such kind of behind the scene political games by some board members that two very competent CEO’s Mwalimu Mati and Gladwell Otieno were consecutively removed from TI Kenya. Transparency International is just one example among many where officers committed to sincerity end up losing their jobs because of the greed and immorality of some of the board members of those institutions. The minister in charge must be lauded for taking a bold action and making the truth carry its day by re appointing Mr. Wario. The minister has shown that if we all work for the truth, the just will always get justice too. The initial sacking of Mr. Wario was like condemning those who fight corruption within the institutions where they work. This is because the ground of dismissal was based on the fact that he didn’t cooperate in the approval of some questionable deals pushed by the board. He must be lauded for standing strong in the interest of Kenyan youth when he refused to approve a ‘loan’ of ksh.300million to a Canadian NGO. Its noticeable that some politically connected board members wanted to use their political influence to blackmail the CEO into approving projects that mattered to their own selfish interests and not in the interest of the Kenyan youth. It’s important that the minister was able to rescind her own earlier move of sacking the YEDF CEO after finding out the truth. As the minister appoints new board members it’s important to ensure that new faces are put on the board to make the YEDF operate without any external coercion from various political interests as it has been before. The minister should now move to ensure that the board is fully reconstituted to include people who will work in the interest of the Kenyan youth and not those who will end up arm-twisting the CEO to give’ loans’ to foreign NGOs. A new board I believe will come up with a new way of implementing the youth projects and also oversee the funding of the youth groups by merit and not through political manipulations. Wario is one of the competent young people who are emerging in providing leadership in different sectors of our economy and it’s wrong for individuals to use tribalism or any other form of bigotry to sabotage such talents. He is also is famed for having rolled out the audit of the Kenya’s free primary education when he worked for the ministry of education. I really wish that other ministers and government officials emulate the youth and sports minister Prof. Hellen Sambili and stand and support the truth always whenever circumstances of this nature arise. Through this, we shall achieve a lot in our war against nepotism and all other forms of corruption. It must be fought from all corners and sacking public officers who help fight it is not one of the methods of ridding our society of graft. FWAMBA NC FWAMBA NAIROBI +254721779445

If you are interested in any of the following topics, please read Malcolm Gladwell’s article from the New Yorker:

Football
Contact Sports
Concussions
Medicine
Gladwell

Let me warn you in advance, the article is not short, and is quite dense material, but you will gain some semblance of what we call “knowledge” by reading it.

Gladwell on Head Injuries in the New Yorker

Malcom Gladwell
OUTLIERS: The Story of Success
FUERAS DE SERIE: Por qué unas personas tienen exito y otras no
TAURUS 2009

256 pàgs., 20€

Aquest llibre intenta explicar els factors que contribueixen a l’èxit personal. Segons Gladwell les persones amb èxit no són les millors, ni les més brillants, ni “persones fetes elles mateixes”, com normalment les seves biografies diuen. Els factors que contribueixen a l’èxit personal són fortuïts: tenir l’oportunitat de passar-se 10.000 hores treballant en un tema que t’apassioni, i l’entorn.

Semblaria que a primera vista, la intel·ligència hauria de ser un factor molt important, i que la gent més intel·ligent hauria de ser la gent amb més èxit. Gladwell demostra amb exemples, que la intel·ligència és un factor no decisiu. Mostra com gent molt intel·ligent, amb IQ superiors al d’Einstein, com per exemple Christopher Langan, han estat incapaços de tenir un títol universitari.

Segons el llibre, l’èxit és un regal. La gent amb èxit és gent que han tingut l’oportunitat. No són la gent més brillant. Són la gent que ha tingut la possibilitat de treballar i esforçar-se. I l’entorn pot ser també important. Una persona sola és molt difícil que aconsegueixi res.

Un factor molt interessant del que es tracta en el llibre és el legat cultural. Sembla que segons les cultures, hi ha una actitud diferent respecte a l’autoritat. Una manera de mesurar-ho és mitjançant la dimensió PDI de Hofstede, que és un index de distància del poder. Mostra l’actitud cultural respecte la jerarquia, i es mesura preguntant a la gent “Quan sovint, segons la seva experiència, s’ha trobat que els empleats mostren disconformitat amb els seus caps”, ” Té la gent amb poder, privilegis especials?”… Curiosament, els països amb PDI més alts són Malàisia, Guatemala, Panamà, Filipines,  Mèxic i Veneçuela. Els països amb PDI més baix són Nova Zelanda,  Dinamarca, Israel i Austria. [Mapa mundial de PDI]. Semblaria que en alguns casos, si els empleats no tenen por de parlar, els caps poden assabentar-se dels problemes i solucionar-los. Posa com exemple, el cas d’un avió colombià que es va estavellar perquè els pilots no es van atrevir, per motius culturals, a dir a la torre de control de l’aeroport JFK de Nova York que s’havien quedat sense combustible, per tal de que no s’enfadessin…

Sembla que l’èxit depèn de l’oportunitat i de l’entorn. Segons Gladwell, si som conscients d’això, potser podem fer canvis, per tal de fer que la gent més brillant també tingui accés a bones oportunitats.

Pekny skok, pred dvoma rokmi este na 18.mieste, po 3 uspesnych knihach predbehol ludi ako Steve Jobs, Bill Gates alebo Richard Branson. No snad dalsia kniha bude lepsia ako Outliers. Malcolm Gladwell nie je len popularizator vedy. hoci jeho ostatna kniha Outliers ma v anotacii napisane „jedna z dvoch najvplyvnejsich knih uplynuleho desatrocia“…..osobne sa mi viac pacil The Tipping Point a Blink.

cely rebricek thinkers je na www.thinkers50.com