According to Malcom Gladwell, it is mostly the latter. In fact he believes that to be really good at "anything," ten years of practice are a minimum. Also, the inspiration and the perspiration must come not just from the prospective genius’ own brain and pores but from his/ her family, friends, school and community. In other words, it does take a village to jump start a genius. For example, Gladwell takes great umbrage at the Bush brothers, George W. and Jeb, born to wealth and privilege (sons and grandsons a senator and a president) blithely identifying as "self made" men.
While they are the essential ingredients for success, according to Gladwell, talent, hard work and dedication are not quite enough. Going by the reviews and Gladwell’s own interviews about his new book, Outliers (which I have not read), the author argues that who among the talented set becomes a successful genius, depends also to a large extent on luck. No matter how good one is at one’s true calling or how hard and long the labor of love, nothing succeeds like "luck" and that Gladwell points out, is often determined by the time of one’s birth. No, not in the astrological sense, but whether civilization is ready for a certain type of genius at a particular point in history. Like everything else that Gladwell has written, this premise too sounds interesting and compelling for the most part mainly because the author fits the figures with his theory. There is little to argue about as long as one picks examples that follow Gladwell’s pattern and packaging of the lucky genius. Jerry Adler, the Newsweek reviewer wonders however about geniuses like Einstein and Shakespeare whose name and fame cannot easily be explained by their being perfect fits with the prevailing zeitgeist of their times. Actually, human thinking would be a stagnant, slow moving pool if all conspicuous works of genius were mere reinforcements (or minor tweakings) of prior knowledge and existing cultural mores. Otherwise we would never have heard of Darwin, Copernicus (Galileo), Lincoln, Marx, Jesus or Buddha. They too were outliers, perhaps the more notable ones.
Life is unfair, as even the bible acknowledges ("Unto every one that hath shall be given … "). We can’t all hit a baseball like DiMaggio or sing like the Beatles. But how much do we understand about those who can? Not enough, says Malcolm Gladwell, in his new book, "Outliers: The Story of Success." We attribute the Beatles’ fabulous success to being, well, the Beatles, four cute boys who happened to possess amazing musical talents. Gladwell has a different explanation. The Beatles, he says, lucked into a gig at a strip club in Germany where they had to play as long as eight hours a night, in styles ranging from bubblegum pop to hard-driving blues—making them possibly the best-rehearsed band in the world when they answered the call of the Ed Sullivan show. We can’t all be like the Beatles, but neither could John, Paul, George and Ringo, if their experiences had been different. As a determinant of success, talent is overrated, compared to, among other things, luck…..
"Outliers" opens with a typically Gladwellian puzzle: why are so many professional hockey players born early in the year? It turns out that Canadian youth leagues group players by age, based on a calendar year, so a player born in January will be the oldest on his team, enjoying a big difference in size and maturity. The early birds get more playing time and coaching, advantages that become self-reinforcing, spelling the difference between an NHL career and a job as a high-school coach. Life is unfair.
Accidental Blogger 
8 responses to “Genius and Success: Inspiration or Perspiration?”
From the review of the book “If I hadn’t just read Gladwell’s book, I’d be jealous of his talent, instead of his luck.”
Ouch!
LikeLike
There is little to argue about as long as one picks examples that follow Gladwell’s pattern and packaging of the lucky genius. Indeed. Gladwell is clever, and I don’t mean that as a compliment. He certainly does aim to “be[] a perfect fit[] with the prevailing zeitgeist” favoring quaintly quantifiable explanation and shunning squishy notions of talent or inspiration. The Beatles’ success is a function of their degree of rehearsal? But nothing about their work expresses such a level of technical or virtuosic achievement. Why should we accept that endless hours of rehearsal result in the prettiness of their music?
Gladwell is also a belated contrarian in this arena. Take Galileo, for instance. Mario Biagioli over fifteen years ago described his career trajectory in terms not of genius or scientific passion, but of strategic positioning and self-fashioning for potential patrons.
LikeLike
Totally agree with your evaluation, Dean. The question becomes chicken-and-egg like: Are these people primarily geniuses because they became famous, or are they famous primarily because of their genius?
Moot point: You may have heard of Dr.(Honorary, I must add) Abdul Kalam, ex-President of India, who was elected to that august office after a stint as the head of the Defense Research & Dev. Org. in India. My father knows him personally from his early days working in the same office with him and points out that he was not a top-notch scientist, despite what the media and fawning men of letters would have you believe about his life. He was and still remains one of the most adulated Presidents of India, held up as a shining example, but to put it mildly, he was the best politician among the scientists to achieve what he did.
LikeLike
I can respond with confidence to Sujatha’s question. Chickens precede eggs, and eggs precede chickens, but there are plenty of geniuses lacking celebrity, and plenty of famous imbeciles. These traits aren’t correlated. President Kalam’s fame is at least partly attributable to the office. Witness the acute escalation of celebrity for Obama post-election, and he hasn’t even served one day in office! But it also seems apparent that Kalam’s being only a so-so scientist neither helped nor hindered his ascendancy. The Beatles were by no means “great musicians” in a strict sense. I suppose one might include George Harrison among guitarists worthy of some superficial sort of emulation, or even Paul McCartney as a capable bass player and vocalist. But that sort of pigeon-holing takes a parsimonious view of “talent,” for which the most apt OED definition is “A special natural ability or aptitude, usually for something expressed or implied; a natural capacity for success in some department of mental or physical activity…”
How can Gladwell suggest, then, that “a natural capacity for success” is an insignificant determinant of success? Here’s how: he plays off two distinct meanings of success, public fame and individual achievement (or skill, mastery, etc.). He’s suggesting that the latter doesn’t determine the former, that bridging that divide requires “luck.” But it probably also requires talent in another endeavor than the one for which one is famous. Take Madonna [insert suitable Henny Youngman quip]. She clearly has some kind of musical talent, however etiolated, but it isn’t unusual for folks to attribute to her a talent for, say, self-promotion, business savvy. Gladwell’s making the same move, but he’s turned it into a book.
LikeLike
The self promotion angle works for artists, musicians and politicians – all need people pleasing skills. Scientific genius however, requires convincing other “geniuses” not playing to the gallery.
Kalam’s fame, I agree is due to his office not as a rocket scientist.
LikeLike
I also haven’t read the book, but since that has never before stopped me from pontificating… I feel like for Gladwell’s point to be at all plausible, what he’s actually saying has to be incredibly banal.
Obviously, for the Beatles to have been bigger than Jesus, they needed some degree of luck. (I would also agree with Dean that they weren’t musical geniuses.) People’s lives are shaped by circumstances — what is this, the nature vs. nurture debate? I thought that had been resolved with an “it’s both” theory. Tiger Woods is clearly a golfing genius, but he wouldn’t be the greatest golfer in the world if the game had never been invented! He also wouldn’t be the greatest golfer in the world if he hadn’t been raised the way he was.
With respect to the world being ready (or not ready) for a particular type of genius at a particular point in history, I doubt it’s possible to know this (beyond the trite and incredibly uninteresting examples such as “Tiger Woods the golfer if there were no golf”). If Milton had been born in the late 19th century, he might not have written Paradise Lost, but that doesn’t mean he couldn’t have written The Waste Land.
LikeLike
So is this basically just a famous person (who can, I assume, string together sentences rather well) writing a book that applies determinism to some combination of what we think of by “success” and “genius”?
LikeLike
Tiger Woods is clearly a golfing genius, but he wouldn’t be the greatest golfer in the world if the game had never been invented!
Well put Joe. That pretty much sums it up for Gladwell’s “time and place” in history.
LikeLike