Outliers: Cinderella stories are a fairy tale
Achieving the ’self-made’ American Dream requires a team of mentors and hidden advantages. Becoming an ‘overnight sensation’ takes years (often decades) of practice. Cinderalla stories need extraordinary circumstances.
It’s all bunk.
In his third book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcom Gladwell explores patterns of ‘individual’ success and failure. His goal? To kill the urban myth of the American Dream: “Personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. We do owe something to our parentage and our patronage,” he said. “The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact they are invariable beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in ways others cannot.”
Like many Facebook romances, it’s complicated.
Timing matters. Culture matters. There are always hidden advantages. You need to practice like hell (10,000 hours). You need passion. You need drive. You need to take every opportunity that presents itself.
In the hands of a great storyteller, like Gladwell, the book’s case studies (which include Bill Gates, The Beatles, inner-city kids and NYC lawyers) are wholly compelling. Are they wholly convincing? Maybe not. Gladwell’s research is (at times) less ‘empirical evidence’ than it is ‘descriptive context’ for storytelling.
Gladwell is a master of essays. As such, this book feels like the third installment of an incomplete work that began with Gladwell’s first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference and his second book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking. Even outside the context of this books, Gladwell continues his exploration with blog (www.gladwell.com) posts about late bloomers and underdogs.
Due to the quality of Gladwell’s writing – of the insightful comments each post solicits — It’s easy to get lost in Gladwell’s blog.
The Real Cinderella Story
Enter into a thriving YouTube subculture that recuts trailer for classic children’s movies: