Like many of you, I have recently read Malcolm Gladwell's new book Outliers, which presents his perspective on success and the people who achieve it. Like his previous books, Outliers is well-written and provocative. We should all pause for a positive psychology moment and be grateful that such a talented writer is among us.
Gladwell's concern is with celebrated accomplishment like that attained by John D. Rockefeller, the Beatles, and Bill Gates. Prodigious achievement is an often over-looked member of the positive psychology family. Getting much more positive psychology attention are the warm and fuzzy family members, the ones we want to hug because they hug back: happiness, hope, kindness, and love. In contrast, accomplishment is elite and exclusive and for many of us not nearly so embraceable.
Nonetheless, accomplishment matters mightily and obviously contributes to the life worth living.
The arguments advanced in Outliers square with the research as I know it.
First, prodigious achievement does not simply happen because of an individual's genius. Talent matters but is not sufficient. Rather, achievement results from the alignment of all sorts of factors external to the individual: being born in the right time and place, having access to appropriate resources, and receiving instruction and encouragement. No one does it alone. There are no self-made men or women. Rugged individualism is ruggedly wrong.
Second, before success is achieved, someone needs to put in years of work perfecting a craft, whatever it may be. Gladwell suggests 10,000 hours as the minimum commitment, and this may be an underestimate. Psychologists who study achievement talk about the 10-Year Rule, meaning that people who make important contributions to a particular field have usually devoted a full decade to the mastery of necessary knowledge and skills. Psychologists also talk about the 12-Seven Rule, meaning that this decade needs to be filled with 12-hour work days, seven days a week. Sound daunting? Of course, but American Idol notwithstanding, there are no shortcuts to excellence.
This conclusion may not be what many young people want to hear. I sat on a train the other day next to a young woman. We talked about her career aspirations, and I gently mentioned the 10-Year Rule. She kept changing the topic to "positive imaging" as a better principle to follow. I persisted because it is irresponsible for those of us who know better to let our children think that success comes easy or overnight, that it is just a matter of finding one's passions and interests, printing business cards, starting websites, or - heaven forbid - simply wishing and hoping for success.
Third, Gladwell stresses the role of legacy in achievement, by which he means the affordances of the cultural group into which one is born. In given times and places, legacy makes achievement in a particular domain easier. For example, Gladwell discusses Jewish lawyers from a generation past who were not hired by elite (i.e., WASP-y) law firms and thus had to start their own firms. These elite law firms also did not handle certain sorts of cases - like the occasional corporate takeover - which necessarily fell into the laps of the "other" law firms. As business and legal landscapes changed to make corporate takeovers more common and exceedingly lucrative, it is not surprising who flourished.
In closing, I would like to suggest that the ideas in Outliers may apply to another sort of achievement: happiness. Here I mean more than somewhat above-the-scale midpoint life satisfaction. I mean prodigious happiness, not extraverted mania but a life that entails walking on sunshine, one that makes onlookers shake their head and say wow.
Each of us probably knows a few people who are happy in this prodigious way. Were they simply born that way? Would they be happy in any and all circumstances?
Extrapolating from Gladwell's book, I say no. A cheerful temperament and secure attachment may set the stage, but a happiness outlier, no less than an achievement outlier, further represents a perfect storm of enabling factors, many external to the person, as well as the absence of disabling factors.
This sounds fatalistic and probably not the starting point for a self-help book. But remember the role played by sustained practice in the lives of achievement outliers. There are things we can do to be happier, but these probably take many years to perfect. Research suggests that happiness and life satisfaction do not increase with age. If we take these data at face value, they mean either that people are not trying to be happier or - more likely - that they do not know how to do so. Perhaps this can be a long-term contribution of positive psychology. However, positive psychologists need to do more than provide a reasonable formula. We also need to provide the warning label: This will take a really long time!
Can we speak about a happiness legacy? Gladwell's discussion of legacy is the most interesting part of his book but also the most tenuous. "Culture" is a sprawling term, and in focusing on one aspect of culture to explain achievement, he necessarily ignores all of the others that may also be crucial.
So, he attributes the mathematical accomplishments of East Asian school children to the fact that China, Japan, and Korea are rice-based economies. It takes a lot of hard work to grow rice, a cultural lesson presumably carried into the classroom even if a student is not the child or grandchild of rice farmers. True. But there are other features of East Asian cultures that might also matter. Gladwell mentions some of these - e.g., "number" names in East Asian languages are short and consistent. He does not mention the possibilities that the written languages of China, Japan, and (until 1446) Korea engage different parts of the brain than the Western alphabet. He does not mention Confucianism, which has infused East Asia for centuries and not only extols hard work but also places the teacher at the top of the respect pyramid.
But I digress. What does a happiness legacy look like? It would be a culture that stresses the sorts of things that lead to a good and satisfied life: family, friends, community, freedom, tolerance, engagement, meaning, and purpose (see my earlier blog entry Book Review: The Geography of Bliss). It would likely not be a culture that stresses hedonism, materialism, or ruthless competition. It would certainly not be one that tolerates or rewards meanness (see my earlier blog entry Positive Psychology and Assholes). It might even be one in which there were no Wednesdays (see my earlier blog entry Happy Days and Happy Times).
That said, I suspect that happiness legacies can be more local. Indeed, to paraphrase Tip O'Neill, perhaps all happiness legacies are local.
What is encouraging is that local cultures can be changed. Gladwell provides several intriguing examples of legacy change. He describes how South Korean airlines, once quite dangerous because of culturally-mandated deference that led co-pilots never to challenge pilots, even as their planes flew dangerously off course, became much safer by mandating the use of English - and all the bluntness that entailed - in the cockpits. Gladwell describes how the acclaimed KIPP schools have changed the cultural legacy of their students. As I see it, the KIPP schools in effect have created East Asian classrooms in the inner cities of the United States. Wow.
How can we create a cultural legacy of happiness? If you have read any of my other blog entries, you know my answer: Let other people matter. And that means moving beyond the slogan and working diligently over the years to make it so.
