Malcolm Gladwell Talks About His New Book, Outliers: The Story of Success

In the bestsellers Blink and The Tipping Point, Malcolm Gladwell managed a feat that has eluded hundreds of others: He made social science fascinating to ordinary people. His latest book, Outliers: The Story of Success, examines why some people thrive while others—including those who ought to be more capable—flounder. He spoke with Chief Business Correspondent Rick Newman about the financial crisis, parenting, and American values: Excerpts:

Your book is about success, but all around us it seems like there's more failure than success. Is it an odd time to publish a book on success?
It's actually a wonderful time to be talking about success. The book is a response to an idea prevalent in the last epoch on Wall Street, that individuals were the drivers of their own achievements. I argue the opposite. Success invariably involves many things that have nothing to do with the individual. If you believe that, maybe you wouldn't pay these guys $200 million a year. But there definitely has been this superstar culture on Wall Street.

When superstars fail the way some of these guys have, should we punish them?
I'm not sure punishment is that responsible. Outliers tries to situate people in their culture and time. It's important to situate players on Wall Street in their time. They're products of their time.

You identify a lot of factors that help determine success. Can you prescribe success? That's one thing a lot of parents really want to know.
Outliers is definitely not a self-help book. I'm arguing that success is a lot more subtle and complex than that. I'm trying to start a collective conversation. Institutions can provide success at the collective level, but there's a limited amount that parents and individuals can do to influence the institutions.

Take education. It turns out that summer vacation is a massive disadvantage for poorer kids. Richer kids get a lot of help over the summer. Their homes are filled with books and things that advance their knowledge, they go to camp and have all these other activities. But a poor family can't do that. To improve that, we as a society would have to provide it in the first place. During the school year, poor kids actually outlearn richer kids. Then they stall over the summer.

But there are also ways to overcome things like that.
Consider the 10,000-hour rule. This is the idea that you have to practice something for 10,000 hours to master it. That's about 10 years of practice. So, mastery is impossible without an investment of 10 years, which combats the idea that talent is something you have or you don't. It takes investment to achieve mastery. That's hard to do. Just think how hard it would be to be a poor kid, if you have to work a part-time job when you get home from school. When are you going to find time for those 10,000 hours?

You write about a lot of privileges that help determine success. Like Bill Gates having access to a computer in the 1960s, before most people even knew what a computer was. Yet over the last several years, there's been a growing gap between rich and poor, with more people losing access to the privileges of the wealthy. How does that affect your view of success?
Over the last 25 years, income inequality has dramatically increased. The United States is no longer the most socially mobile country in the world. People still move from the middle to the top, but there's very little movement from the bottom to the middle. Or from the top down. There are a unique set of privileges that accrue to the upper and middle class.

Educated parents are really savvy about how to prepare their kids for the real world. That lesson-giving is absent from the skill set of lower-income parents. We didn't have these divisions 60 years ago. The rich aren't just richer, they're also smarter about how to prepare their kids for the real world. It is so extraordinarily hard to break out of poverty in this country.

What do we do?
Well, like Rahm Emanuel said recently, a crisis is a terrible thing to waste. The question is, how do we take the lessons we know about really successful people and provide those things to poor children? For one thing, there needs to be more school for poor kids. The gap between rich and poor kids doesn't open up during the school year, it opens up over the summer. So we need more school. That ought to go to the top of the agenda. We're obsessed with class size, but we really need schools to be open longer. It's a simple but profound insight. Schools work; we just don't have enough school.