Malcolm Gladwell (Part I)
Over the weekend, I have finished 4 books (it has broken my record btw). The reason is simple, I have a deadline upcoming, it is pressurizing me, and instead of binge-watching a series on Netflix, I choose to read. Reading books acts as a comforting escape from it. In this writing, I will give a brief review of those four and it will be divided into two parts. The first part is about Malcolm Gladwell’s most recent books, Outliers, and Talking With Strangers. I choose to write about those two first because for me, personally, they are somehow less interesting than the other two.
Those four books are Blink, Outliers, The tipping points, and Talking to strangers. Each of them has different stories, but they have one common style of Gladwell. He wants to teach us some useful lessons through the unexpected implications of research in social sciences. But he is a master of stories telling, to the point that his books read like mystery novels. He normally starts with one big question, then telling from piece to piece to fit together to captivate readers to solve his question. The interesting part is, despite the popularity of his chosen topics in social science, his questions are like jigsaw puzzles and his arguments are imperfect. Then through each chapter of his books, readers go through that puzzles and deeply think about it and answer it themselves. He will not answer the question or solve the argument for us. It left there for people to think them through.
For me, one big plus size of his books are the simplicity in vocabulary usage. His writing is like you are listening to a guy, with a beer on his hand, his eyes wide open and his cheek glowing red, he is bragging to everyone about his travel story around a party table. The simplicity makes it an easy read and easy to absorb (that is maybe why I can read the whole 4 books in a matter of 2 days). Some popular unsolved trouble arguments of the modern society in the lens of the simplest writing structure.
Starting with Talking with strangers. This is his newest book. The book is just like the title, telling you how to talk with strangers, but it is not the typical book that you are thinking. He will not show you the way to do it, because he himself doesn’t know exactly how. Strangers are not easy. We cannot see clearly a stranger or understand them based on the flimsiest of clues. Gladwell extensively used well-known cases that show that when dealing with people we do not know; we are not always the best judges of their character. He uses examples from Cuban spices, a diplomatic failure of PM Chamberlain when dealing with Hitler, to the Amanda Knox case in Italy, to the popular series Friends constructed the way that we can imagine in our head what is going on just with only listening to the soundtrack. It all started with a famous case on a Texas highway, when a patrol policeman pulled over a black woman, a wrong misinterpretation between the two parties led to a wrongly arrest and the following suicide of the woman in prison cell later. They are both strangers, and they both didn’t know how to talk to each other.
There are four problems when talking to strangers that are being unveiled in the book in the span of 13 chapters. (Spoilers alert).
The default to the truth: We tend to start our conclusion about someone else by believing. We tend to not gather evidence of the truth before jumping to judging, rather, we presume others to be honest because we either don’t think of deception as a possibility during communicating or because there is insufficient evidence lending them unable to prove they are being deceived. That is a part of human bonding. We only stop believing when our doubts and misgivings rise to the point where we can no longer explain them away.
The transparency: The ways people express their voice, their body language, or their outside don’t already match how they are feeling inside. For example, we are taught that a sad person has their eyes half-closed, their voice lower than normal, the corners of our lip slight pulling down, etc. However, in reality, people appear differently in different cultures, countries, races. But we are often misjudging other’s intentions because we project the view of our own on them, we are questioning their transparency.
The mismatch: We are good at judging when the person is matching our projection, in those situations when the person is mismatched, we are all bad lie-detectors.
The coupling: Everything happens for a reason, well, maybe not just for one reason. There are several of them, different contexts give different behaviors. Those specific contexts couple and linked with one’s behavior. However, we are normally unable to appreciate those circumstances when dealing with strangers.
So what we could learn from the book: Gladwell doesn’t give us a specific clue on how to talk to a stranger. He just gives us the way our society operates and that it is not a piece of cake to deal with someone we don’t know, it is totally the opposite. Hence, we should accept the limits of our ability to decipher strangers. When doing that, we can thoroughly look beyond the stranger, taking time, place, and context into account and stop penalizing them for defaulting to the truth.
Highly recommended if you enjoy studying human nature.
The second book is Outliers. Outliers is a good read, quick, neat, and you are sitting on the edge for all chapter of the book, noted that it is not a crime thriller book. As it says on the front cover, it’s about the story of success. In other words, what makes someone successful. But it is not a self-help book, as a matter of fact, none of Gladwell’s books are self-help. In this stunning book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”- the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful, those that have achieved so much more than everyone else. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? Gladwell looks at them in various different areas of accomplishment including business tycoons, software developers, geniuses, pilots, education, and sports. It is a pleasure to read and leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward.
As a culture, we tend to believe that people who are successful are all ‘self-made-men’ and have risen to the summit of achievement on the basis of some incredibly special power they have and that we do not.
The first part of the book centralizes around the theory of ten thousand hours. Gladwell states that it takes approximately that many hours to master something, but not everyone can achieve that 10k hours. It is a combination of luck, birth, culture, circumstance, timing that account for success. Along with talent and ambition, all successful people enjoyed an unusual opportunity to intensively cultivate a skill that allowed them to rise above their peers. Gladwell told the stories of Bill Gates 10k hours, The Beatles journey, Mozart, Bill Joy, Joseph Flom, and many others.
Quote “Let’s not forget a man every bit as famous as Gates: Steve Jobs, the co-founder of Apple Computer. Unlike Gates, Jobs wasn’t from a rich family and he didn’t go to Michigan, like Joy. But it doesn’t take much investigation of his upbringing to realize that he had his Hamburg too. He grew up in Mountain View, California, just south of San Francisco, which is the absolute epicenter of Silicon Valley. His neighborhood was filled with engineers from Hewlett-Packard, then as now one of the most important electronics firms in the world. As a teenager, he prowled the flea markets of Mountain View, where electronics hobbyists and tinkerers sold spare parts. Jobs came of age breathing the air of the very business he would later dominate.”
So you need to be born in the right place, the right time, have the right education, the right parents, the right supports, etc, aside all of those, you also have the ability and to be able to achieve that 10 thousand hours of practice to get ready for success.
In this part of the book, I also love the way to stated that IQ doesn’t matter (Yay). There is maybe a difference between an IQ of 70/80 and 100/120, but for 140 and above, the gap is smaller to make no difference at all when accounts for high achievement in life. Gladwell walks us through the life of Christopher Langan — the smartest man in America, and what contributes to his failing expectation of a genius mind. He talked about practical intelligence, which is not like IQ, you have to be taught in a proper environment. Then, he told us the stories of how parents can construct their education toward their children. I love this part.
The second part of the book is about legacies. Our decisions and characters are greatly influenced by who we are, our history, whom are we with, where are we from, where did we grow, and several other factors that we might easily ignore.
One hazard of this genre is glibness. In seeking to understand why Asian children score higher on math tests, Gladwell explores the persistence and painstaking labor required to cultivate rice as it has been done in East Asia for thousands of years; though fascinating in its details, the study does not prove that a rice-growing heritage explains math prowess, as Gladwell asserts.
Another example from a Korean air company when they have a lengthy period of the crashes. The problem here isn’t from mechanical failure. It is simply from miss-communication. Gladwell told us the way Koreans communicate culturally differently with Western, and how could that lead to the misunderstood in the airplane culprit and the control towers. I took this part seriously because I myself recognize it through the stories of my various friends who are now studying a Ph.D. program in those countries, i. e. Korea and Japan, when the communication between a student and his advisor (a junior to a senior) seriously damages the student’s creative mind and freedom in science.
Finally, success can be predicted. It is not the best mind leading to success. It is also not a series of individual self-made decisions. It is, to put it rightly, a series of gifts. The outliers are those who have all those gifted opportunities, and they have the right mind to take them.
One minus sign of the book is the absence of any well-known female “outliers.”
So, what is a lesson for us? We can’t change our birth date, we have only one parent, we are from one heritage culture…, so we should let life take us where it is destined to go? Wrong. Instead, we should be aware of all those backgrounds, take it as our advantaged, practice as much as close to 10 thousand hours as possible, and when the opportunity comes, we will take it.
That is it! I will write part 2 about Blink and The tipping points ASAP.