Radiolab - Secrets of Success

Episode Date: July 27, 2010

Malcolm Gladwell doesn't like Gifted and Talented Education Programs. And he doesn't believe that innate ability can fully explain superstar hockey players or billionaire software giants. In this podcast, we listen in on a conversation between Robert and Malcolm recorded at the 92nd St Y.

Wait, you're listening. Okay. All right. All right. You're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts! From.

W. N. Y. C. C? Yes. And NPR. Hey, I'm Jan. I'm Moomrod. I'm Robert Krollwich. This is Radio Lab.

The podcast. The podcast. We should just say, as a sort of set the ground here. Set the ground? Does that, I don't know. Set the table. Table? Whatever.

that we are on the cusp of delivering five really fantastic shows right now. So we're busy, busy, busy, which got us thinking about a conversation that I had a few years ago. Which was conveniently there waiting for us. With Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers and Blink. I was over at the 90 Second Street Y in New York City. Okay, just pull it to your mouth there. The subject was, how do you explain people of really unusual exceptional talent? Like, why are they so good?

Yeah, what is the nature of being exceptional? Is this working hard or inatibility? Is it an accident? And as we all know, in America, there's a real hunt on from a very early age to find the gifted and talented children. And we have programs in our schools all over the country trying to identify exceptional kids. Malcolm Gladwell hates gifted and talented programs. It's ridiculous. Why do you decide? So a gifted program says that we identify a child and call that child gifted because of their performance at the age of whatever, nine or ten or eleven years old. Why do we care particularly how well a child

performs at nine or ten or eleven? They're nine or ten or eleven. They're a good twenty-five years for making any kind of substantial contribution to the world. Why don't we wait? What's the hurry? And also how do you know? So, like, you know, so one child learns to read it four, one child learns to read it two and a half, right? So what? Why does it matter? are the things that are being read between two and a half and four of such incalculable... No, no, no. It's the normal parent's response to, oh, if he's reading it two and a half, think of the things he'll do, and it's just an extrapolation.

I know, but like reading is reading. Once you can read, we're not. I mean, it's not like there's an infinite scale and that so-and-so reads better and better and better, and I can say, we can say today of Gladwell that he reads so much better than Crullwich. And that this is what separates the two of us. It's reading. I mean, like... Well, there is also among your...

You use the phrase the Matthew Effect. What is that? Matthew Effect is a phrase coined by Robert K. Merton, the great genius sociologist of Columbia. He's a guy who says in the verse in Matthew, which says that to him who has much more will be given. And he uses this to the... describe the Matthew Effect, which is this notion that a small initial advantage difference

in a small initial difference in the performance of any two people will inevitably grow because the person who's a little bit ahead will get so many more advantages that they will end up being far ahead. So a good example, there's all kinds of great Matthew effects. So if you're born, if you're a young boy born in October, November, or December, who has designs on being a professional soccer or hockey player, the deck is stacked against you. There's not much you can do. You should probably give up.

Why, exactly? Well, it's really an accident of birth thing. The month you were born in, Malcolm thinks, might make a huge, huge difference in your life. Here's his way of describing this. I'm going to read here a passage from his book, Outliers. On page 23 of your book, you do a play-by-play.

I can have a clever way to do this. We're at the Memorial Cup Hockey Championship. I want to read what you wrote. March 11th starts around one side of the Tigers net, leaving the puck for his teammate, January 4th. He passes it to January 22, flips it back to March 12th, who shoots point-plank at the Tigers goalie. April 27th, April 27th, blocks the shot rebounded by Vancouver's March 6. He shoots Medicine Hat defenseman February 9th and February 14th dive to block the puck. January 10th looks on helplessly, March 6th scores.

Question is, why did you choose this peculiar kind of nomenclature? Because I wanted to make this point that all, an extraordinary number of hockey players are born in the first three or four months of the year. 17 of the 25 players on the Madison Hat team were born in those first three months. Why? Because the eligibility cutoff date for for age-class hockey in Canada in the world is January 1st, and we start recruiting all-star squads in hockey in Canada

when kids are 9 and 10 years old. But of course, when you're 9 years old, the best one is the oldest one, right? So all you do is you choose the kids who are born closest to the cutoff date, and then you give them special coaching and put them on all-star squads until 9 and extra games and extra practice

until 8 and 9 years later they really are the best. And by the way, we see exactly, the same effects in school systems, right? The kid, the relatively youngest kids in the class underperform the relatively oldest kids and that underperformance less into the college years. The kid born the young, kid born the last, you know, three months of the youngest three months of their age cohort in school are something like, I forget the exact number, nine or ten percent less likely to go to college than those born in the, are in the three oldest months. And we can fix it really easily.

You've got three classes in an elementary school, right? Typical elementary schools. Divide them up by birthday, right? Well, doesn't that mean, though, that you have to get, you had like a half dozen soccer moms to work out the logistical problems because you've now got four leagues

where you used to have one, and someone has to be in the Seward Park on Mondays and Wednesdays, but who's going to be on Syward Park on Thursdays and Friday? Is that kind of a... So you would, just for the sake of efficiency, you'd be perfectly happy to sacrifice the talent of two-thirds of.

No, what I'm saying, no, but this is exactly, I brought this up with, I had a conversation with this hockey guy in Canada, big deal hockey mocker. I don't know whether they call them mockers. You can call them mockers here. Absolutely. And I say to him, look, you're Canada. You want to be the best hockey country in the world. Why don't you have the three parallel leagues? How hard is that? Every single town in Canada has like 25 different hockey teams. Just divide them up. How hard is this? Seems like, oh, it's too difficult. Let me give you a harder one, because just another success puzzle from the book.

This, I'll have to set it up for you. It's about the Janklow family. So there's two Janklos. We're going to talk about Maurice and Mort, but since those names are supposed to. We call one Daddy Janklow and one Sonny Janklo. Yeah. So Daddy goes to Brooklyn Law School, class in 1919, sets up a practice in Brooklyn, he's elegant fellow, dresses in a Hamburg, Brooks Brothers clothes, drives a Beard's Brothers clothes,

drives a big car, moves to Queens, Mary's the right girl, works hard, hard, hard, hard, sets up a business. Goes nowhere. The son, baby Janklow, born 30 years later, gets a law degree,

marries nicely too, works hard too, puts together a cable franchise, sells it to Cox Broadcasting, makes a fortune, creates a literary agency, Janklau and Nesbitt, signs you, now he lives on Park Avenue, he has an Ensil Kiefer painting

and his own airplane. So the question is, is the son succeeds, the father fails, Why? Is this a question of talent? That part of the book I'm really interested in generational effects. The worst year to be born in the 20th century is, you can all kinds of sociologists figure these things out, it's between 1900 and 1907, or maybe 1900 and 1910 that decade, because you get out of college

and just as you're getting going, the depression hits. Yeah. You have nine years of the depression. And just as you're emerging out of the depression, trying to make a go of it, you're shipped off to war for six years. Right? And so by the time you come back and want to start your business, you're in your late 40s, right?

So it's really, really hard for it. Whereas the best year to be born in the 20th century, if you live in, grow up in New York City, actually, I think anywhere, but particularly in New York City, is 1935. Because? Because... Because...

Because it's the smallest birth... year of the 20th century. You always want to be part of a really small birth cohort because no one's competing with you. Think about it. So the difference between being a part of the smallest birth cohort and the largest one, the differences between the smallest is enormous. It's like per capita twice as many babies are born in, you know, 1920 as 1935. So if you're in 1935, there's this huge generation before you. So what do they do for that generation? They build big, huge, shiny schools and high. hire tons of teachers, right? Then there's no more kids. So you sail in and all of a sudden,

your older, you know, brother had 35 kids in this class, you have 18. Your older brother competed against a zillion people to get into City College. You competed against no one. You wanted to join the debate team. No one went out for the debate team. You were, you were captained to the debate team. Like, I always, you know, it's funny, you always talk to people in this born-in-inched-small-coharts, and they always think, you're talking to some guy, accomplished old guy, grew up in the Bronx, white hair, and he'll tell you about his extraordinary high school experience. He'll say, you know, I was captain of the basketball team, and you look at this guy, and he's five foot two, and you say to yourself, this is a man

who belonged to a small generation, right? Nobody was going out for basketball. So these guys, they haven't made in the shade, and then they come into the workforce. They go to Harvard Law School. Of course they go to Harvard Law School, right? No one's applying to Harvard Law School. Then they get out in the workforce, do they get a job? Of course they do. Everyone's desperate for work because there's no one out there. And then what's behind them? The biggest generation of the 20th century. So they sail in the positions of authority and they have in front of them this enormous market to serve, right? It's just genius. You can even go more specifically. There's this great thing that happens great in quotation marks in New York City in the Depression,

which is that a whole bunch of very, very, very able people can't get jobs in the private sector. There are no jobs in private sector. So what do they do? They become teachers. Yeah. And you talk to this generation born in 35 about their high school experience. And I lost count in the number of people of that generation who went to public schools in New York who told me, for example, that their math teacher had a PhD in math. And so here's a generation who not only could they be captain the basketball team, but their teachers were these extraordinary people who, you know, were by virtue of a lack of opportunity ended up in the public school system.

So is that the difference then between Janklow Dad and Janklo Son? That is just the accident? It's the beginning of the explanation. I mean, I never met Janko. I mean, you can only go so far with this, but it helps you to sort of set the stage to understand who you've got these two very capable people, one of whom achieved extraordinary success and one didn't. And you, I think you have to go beyond the individual to make sense of that.

Right? I mean. So there is such a thing as getting an actual. accidental boost. And I mean, you know, nobody chooses when they're going to be born. It's always mom and dad's fault. But there's something even bigger and even more important than good luck with your birthday. And to illustrate this, Malcolm cites the example of Bill Gates, the so-called genius behind Microsoft. Why do you say so-called? He'll see. He's the luckiest guy in the world, and he's the first to tell you that. He goes to, he shows up for eighth grade in 1968 or nine.

at Lakeside Academy, and for reasons no one can remember, somebody on the parents' committee bought a computer for the kids. And a little teletype, hooked into a mainframe in downtown Seattle, and Gates has essentially, now what that allows you is to do real-time programming. Everyone's programming with cards back then, right, which is incredibly laborious, time-consuming, and you don't really learn how to program because it just takes too long. He can do real-time programming the way we program now on this little teletype. And he does that, starting in 1968, basically for his entire teenage life. And you mean that almost literally? Yeah.

He told me this one story about he then goes to these whole series of things of finding other computers. And at one point, Paul Allen, his classmate at this school, discovers that there's a mainframe that's free at the University of Washington Medical Center between, it's free between two and six in the morning on weeknights. And he's now 15 years old. and so he sets his alarm for 1.30 in the morning, and he crawls out the window, right? He doesn't want his parents to know. At 2 in the morning, walks two miles to the University of Washington,

programs from 2 till 6, walks home and goes back to bed. And his mom, upon discovering this years later, says, I always wondered why it was so hard to get Bill up in the morning. So the question is, he's clearly a brilliant guy. No one's taken that away from him. But he has this other thing which he, by the way, what's really remarkable about that story to me is when he does that, he's 15.

So he's a teenage boy. And all of us here know about teenage boys, right? What a teenage boy want to do? What does a teenage boy want to do? Well, what is one of the things a teenage boy wants to do? Sleep, right? Here's a kid, here's a teenage boy who was willing to surrender his sleep, you know,

five nights a week to program from two to six in the morning. That is what's special about Bill Gates. And it accumulates, right? It gets its hour, it's three hours or four hours. hours a day and then five hours a day, whenever he can make it six hours a day, it's for years and years and years and years until he clocks in a lot of hours. Yeah. And Mozart, I guess, played the piano for Lutts of hours and Tiger Woods just to play golf with Lutza. These people are all examples of what's called the 10,000 hour rule, which is this notion that it's kind of brilliant kind of Erickson, a psychologist, has kind of formulated this principle that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex discipline, It seems almost with that exception that in order to be good, you must practice at least 10,000 hours.

What sort of surprised me is you put the Beatles on this list. Why are the Beatles? Because they go to Hamburg. Before they come to America, as teenagers, they go to Hamburg and they play, they're the house band in a strip club, and they play eight-hour sets seven days a week for months at a stretch. I mean, it's incredible. I mean, you know, parenthetically, one can. I cannot imagine a more dismal experience than playing, first of all, playing in a strip club,

secondly playing in a strip club in Hamburg, and thirdly, playing in a strip club in Hamburg in the 50s. I mean, can you imagine? It's just again. So they learned in those hours and hours and hours of playing every night, they learned just to play and play and play and play whatever and somehow... Because, I mean, there is... In the book you're arguing, I think, that...

I mean, you could say, by the way, that the Rolling Stones, I don't think... think went to Hamburg and there probably were other Liverpool bands that did go to Hamburg and played in the same strip clubs and you do not know their names. It's a necessary, not sufficient or sufficient, and not necessarily, I forget which way it goes. But whatever way it goes, it's that. Yeah, it's that. Okay. But now, so what we got here then is you have this talent plus the persistence versus this Matthew effect.

That is, with the Matthew effect, you start out with these little accidental differences and then coaches and situations magnify them, so they get bigger and bigger. But with persistence, what seems to be happening here is the accidental differences that may have given you advantage is get narrowed when you add the practice, add the practice, add the practice, add the practice. Mozart at 13, eh, you know, copying other people's work. Practice, practice, practice, practice. Mozart at 17, better. Mozart 23, 24, oh my God.

Yeah. So Lenin and McCartney, eh, at 15, 16. But when they make their jumps, they make leaps of a genius nature. Leaps that are not available to other people. Isaac Newton, he goes home for vacation, thinks about how am I going to measure this, and he invents calculus. So you were being accused of being a genius denier. Yes.

Are you a genius denier or are you simply a genius disliker? Well, so there's clearly the same thing. There's clearly this thing called talent, right? And it's the magic dust, right? They get sprinkled onto persistence. It turns a lot of hard work into something great. And the question is, how large a role does it play, and what does it consist of?

In a piece I wrote years ago for The New Yorker, I remember writing about Wayne Gratzky and reading a biography of Wayne Gretzky, and he's a kid. This is a great hockey player. Great hockey player. Greatest hockey player of all time. As a kid, when he's two years old, his parents would sit up in front of the television.

He would watch hockey games on Saturday nights. And when the game ended, he would burst into tears. And it was this little glimpse into his future greatness. Because here he was at two, and he loved this thing. He couldn't even play hockey. He's two. I mean, he can barely walk. But he already has understood he loves this thing so much that for it to end is an unconscionable burden, right?

And it's like the world is ending, and he's disconsolate. So what is Wayne Gretzky's talent? Well, part of it is his extraordinary vision, his coordination, his whatever is this. But a lot of it is this guy loves this game so much that he would do nothing but do it and think about it and engage it and do all those things. Now, is this magic dust called talent? Is that all it is? Maybe. I don't think that's denying or hating genius, though. I think that that definition of genius is far more appealing to me than the notion that it's this, it's simply some sky-high IQ or some... Well, this is the genius which just won't quit, and you can't even, it won't quit you.

sort of like break, but moving about the two guys on the mountain. I mean, I'm recasting it, sort of like what? Break back, break back, you know? Oh, break back, yeah. So it's the love of hockey. Yeah. That will not speak its name. Yes, I suppose.

That's a, not an analogy that would have occurred to me. Let me. Maybe one of the things that I detect is that it's not that you don't like geniuses, is that maybe you don't think we need them. No, no, we're going back for a moment. Okay. Why are people so hostile to the notion that what genius is is an extraordinary love for a particular thing? Why is the love – so we're – you know, we hear the ability definition of genius,

the rare ability definition, and we think, oh, that's so plausible. Totally, that's what it is. But then we hear the extraordinary love definition of genius, and we say, he's a genius denier. Why? Why are we so hostile to the notion that what separates the genius and the rest of us is the genius loves what he or she does more than we do? But we have no problem at all that what separates the genius

is that they have some, you know... Well, because it misses the point. I mean, there are people like Paul McCartney... Are you hostile to them? notion of love? Robert, is that what that is? Do you... I know, I just want to make an obvious point here that, you know, Harry Smith, no, that's a real person, Harry X could love writing songs, but Paul McCartney could love... Even the way you say love, though, is so...

Really, have you thought about this? You know, come on, I'll... Your Harry X could love writing songs. He loves writing songs so much that he can't stop, but for lunch and dinner, and sometimes not even those. But next door is Richard Rogers, little Richard Ricky Rogers. He loves writing songs, too. But for some reason, Harry writes and loves writing. Ricky writes and loves writing.

And Harry writes an unmemorable song called The Babbling Book, Those Two and Flow. And Richard writes, Some Enchanted Evening. Well, no. So there's a difference there. No, well, hold on, hold on. The love doesn't get you. No, no, no, no, but the love does. So think about this. Love is not the complete explanation.

Love is the way in. Because Wayne Gretzky loves hockey so much, he thinks about it all the time, and does more than that. He engages the sport in a way that no one else has ever engaged it. So there's this wonderful, remember when I was writing about Gretzky, there's this thing that he famously did once where he scored a goal from behind the net and he flips the puck over the net, like, and it kind of does a little thing and goes in. And the reason no one had ever done

that before was not just that no one could do it, lots of people could do it. It had never occurred to anyone else before, right? No one had engaged the sport on that level. So why is Gretzky engaging in that way? Why is he thinking about it that deeply and creatively? Because he can't get hockey out of his head, right? Whenever I encounter someone like that, I cannot get past that since they give off that they have found their calling, that they are actively in love, in almost a romantic way with this thing that they do. No, you're right. Absent that, you can't be a genius.

I'm sorry, you can't. Are you convinced yet? Are you still holding up for some chilly abstract, you know, Nietzschean notion of... No, I'm going to pull back. for a minute here. We went on a little bit longer, but I think I come to shut out with this one. Go Malcolm. That's what I say.

I say go Malcolm right there. Although, you know, I would say he might be shortchanging the idea that there's a diversity of ability out there. Inmate talent. Yeah. But I do agree with him, though, that the idea of genius, that old 19th century stupid idea, does contain within a really dangerous thought, which is that our ability, are just sort of God-given, and so they're fixed. But his argument would be, you know, you need some talent,

and you need certainly a little bit of good luck. But what you really need is this strange love of the thing you're doing, and it's the love or the determination to succeed, if that's what love equals, that makes you just want to do it, and then do it, and then do it some more. Amen. We should thank the 90-second Street Y, and then get the hell out of here. Thanks to them.

Thank you to Malcolm Gladwell. And to you for listening. I'm Chad Aboumrod. I'm Robert Kovic. All new episode in two weeks. See you then. This is Alicia Sonsmo, Radio Lab listener from Grinnell, Iowa. The Radio Lab podcast is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the Sloan Foundation.

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