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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