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.

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.

And also, are you lucky? Do you belong to a generation that confers unusual opportunities to you?

You write a lot about IQ. Do you think people should know their IQ?
No. I think it's unnecessary. We need to get away from this stratification of intelligence You need to be smart enough to get into a good college, and you have to be honest and considerate and work hard. But you don't need to know more than that about your IQ. Or your kids' IQ.