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

Do you think America is still a place where people can overcome adversity and succeed if they just work hard enough?
Once you've studied the path that successful people take, you're quickly disabused of the idea that these rags-to-riches stories are all true. We tend to be of the opinion that if you're smart, nothing should hold you back. But there's a lot of science that suggests otherwise. In one study in California, kids who came from poor families almost always underperformed. They could have an IQ of 150, but if you came from a poor background, you really struggled. So that leads you to back away from blind allegiance to the idea of meritocracy, the idea that intelligence is the reason people get ahead. There's so much more to it.

We're in a recession that might be pretty rough, and a lot of people are frustrated. They feel they should be getting ahead, but they're falling behind.
In times of distress, lots of very able people get thwarted. I'm very interested in the role that the generation you were born in plays. It turns out that the best year to be born in the 20th century was 1935. For one thing, it was a small generation, for obvious reasons. Not a lot of families wanted to have kids during the Depression. But it's not a bad thing to grow up in a depression, it's just a bad time to be looking for a job.

So I looked at all these very successful Jewish lawyers in New York who graduated from law school in the 1950s and were discriminated against. They couldn't get a job at any of the big New York law firms. That forced them to be entrepreneurial and forced them to go into one of the less popular kinds of law—takeover law. That might have seemed like the worst possible scenario at the time, but a couple decades later, that turned out to be enormously important, in the '80s on Wall Street. So it might be small comfort now, but think of how many things that turn out to be opportunities don't look like opportunities at first.

There's been some criticism that you don't focus on many women who are success stories.
Well, there are some women in the second half of the book, but the fact is that society has not provided the same opportunities for women as for men. So, there aren't as many women success stories for that very reason. Success of this kind is an overwhelmingly male world.

If you wrote this book in 30 years, would it be different?
Today, look at who's coming out of law schools. More women than men. Same with other graduate schools. So, if I wrote this book 30 years from now, yeah, there would be a lot more women in it.

There are a lot of incredibly rich people in America, and a lot of other people who feel left out. Are you optimistic about the direction American society seems to be going in?
I didn't look at this directly, but it would be very interesting to ask if extraordinary wealth is an advantage or a disadvantage. It's hard to work up sympathy for somebody born into millions who didn't succeed. All these lawyers I looked at. They were all upwardly mobile, with parents who were garment workers. Their families weren't rich, but they imparted to their kids the sense that they have possibilities in the world. Would they have been as hungry if they had come from privilege?

If I were a billionaire, would I worry about how driven my kids would be? Yeah, I might.

So what are the requirements of success?
You have to have the chance to put in your 10,000 hours. You have to come from a tradition of meaningful work, where there's a connection between effort and reward and you take joy from doing complex tasks. You have to come from a culture that supports those ideas.