Malcolm Gladwell on Why You Haven't Lived Up to Your Potential
Author Malcolm Gladwell
Which leads us to stupidity, the second of Gladwell's three factors that affect people making the most of their human potential (James Flynn's "capitalization"). The other two are poverty and attitude.
Of course everyone realizes poverty is an obstacle to achievement, Gladwell half-shouts to the Town Hall faithful from his lectern/pulpit, but almost no one appreciates how insurmountable growing up in poverty can be. He refers to a long-term study of top performers on a California IQ test--the top minds in the state were selected as children and followed to see what they'd accomplish. Only 15 percent "succeeded" in life. And the primary indicator of that success was class--"poverty trumped IQ," emphasizes Gladwell. "We underestimate what a burden it is."
By stupidity, Gladwell is more or less referring to systems and structures we create, without questioning what their effects are. His example here is the 2007 Czech Republic's junior hockey team. Because the cut-off date for admission is January 1, and the players are selected young, the overwhelming majority of them are those lucky enough to be born soon after January 1. They have nine months more growth and maturity than someone born in October. This system isn't selecting the best across the widest range--it's simply boosting the chances of kids born January through March.
If you're not into hockey, says Gladwell, his kicker dropping on you like a panther from a branch, note that this applies to education, too. The older kids within a class's year do better on average than the younger ones. In fact, the youngest kids are 11 percent less likely to attend college. For the crime of being young.
Then we're back to James Flynn, and his study of why Asian students as a group do better at math than Western students--up to 1.5 standard deviations better. The difference, Gladwell thinks, is attitude: Western students think math talent is innate. Either you have it or you don't. Asian students think brute persistence is key.
There's a long questionnaire associated with the TIMSS math tests--120 questions--and many students don't finish it. If you compare the kids who stick it out with the kids with the highest math scores, they are more or less the same people. (This is the kind of gap-closing anecdote that Gladwell triumphs with and makes more nuanced perspectives seem wishy-washy in comparison.)
This prompts Gladwell to repeat the theory--Gladwell is a journalist-explainer and it's important to remember that everything he says is someone else's theory--that this kind of persistence arises in rice-growing cultures. There's a Chinese proverb that the man who works from dawn to dusk 360 day a year will not go hungry, he reports; whereas he believes the English peasant side of his family would have produced something like, "The man who works from dawn to noon about 175 days a year may or may not go hungry." (This last may not have endeared him to the English.)
