Malcolm Gladwell runs out of tricks

One day not too long ago, Malcolm Gladwell defended himself. He'd been accused of promoting claptrap in the form of the "10,000 hour rule," the primary subject of his book Outliers. He posted a response on The New Yorker's Web site that included this sentence: "There's a reason the Beatles didn't give us 'The White Album' when they were teen-agers."

Well, yes. Before the Beatles could give us The White Album, they had to achieve disorienting success. They had to take a lot of drugs. They had to learn to hate one another. They had to experience the centrifugal energies of the '60s. They had to live. What we infer from what Gladwell wrote, however, is that they had to practice, and were able to make The White Album once they passed the 10,000-hour threshold.

It is a notion both obvious and preposterous, one that could be taken seriously only by Tiger Moms and other anxious exponents of the meritocracy. It is also utterly characteristic of its author. Gladwell has been treading the line between the obvious and the preposterous for years, yet instead of being dismissed out of hand, he has become the most influential journalist of his generation, a village explainer embraced as a kind of philosopher.

His success is not accidental; his success, indeed, is grounded in the fact that he has made success his subject and has learned from his heroes. In all of Gladwell's books, people succeed when they master a skill that seems inconsequential but turns necessary.

Source: esquire

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