I’d say Malcolm Gladwell is one of my favourite writer-thinkers. I find his books enjoyable, entertaining and productive, and the way he thinks about and approaches certain subjects undoubtedly wakes my brain up and gets me thinking critically.
In Outliers, where Gladwell looks at why some people succeed and others don’t, he showed some statistics from the world of sport: because of the cut-off date for children entering competitions, a whole series of disadvantages arose for some kids. From this we could infer that the best athletes and professional players in hockey, soccer and baseball leagues were more successful not so much because of their talent, but because they were born early in the year relative to that cut-off date. And there really is a coincidence: a large percentage of elite athletes were born in the same months. Gladwell’s theory certainly makes more sense than blaming that coincidence on horoscopes.
In David and Goliath, meanwhile, Gladwell masterfully explained how it was actually Goliath who had the greater disadvantage in his fight against David. Goliath’s strength was hand-to-hand combat. On that ground he was the best, with a huge advantage over the little shepherd boy with no battlefield experience. But David had just one strength: the sling. And David’s strength turned Goliath’s into absolute weaknesses the moment the battle was no longer hand to hand. This theory is applied in business and is even more present in personal development: it’s not about having no weaknesses, since we all have them, but about focusing on our strengths so that we can compete.
See also: Achieving wisdom and mastery in the internet age
If we move on to another of his interesting books, Blink, there he put forward the controversial hypothesis that intuition is really the product of our experience. There’s nothing magical about being more intuitive. It’s simply that we have more unconscious experience than someone less intuitive (with less experience). That’s why a veteran police officer is, as a rule, more intuitive than a rookie. The same happens in investing and business.
For these reasons Gladwell, like Nassim Nicholas Taleb or Robert Greene, is among my favourite authors. That doesn’t mean I agree with every single theory they put forward in their essays, but I enjoy everything they write. They make me think, reconsider, reflect and research further to reach my own conclusions, which forces me to use critical thinking, something that is gradually being lost because of a combination of factors. Among them are the absolute dominance of cognitive biases over our brains and the online habits we’re picking up. And this is one of the theories I have developed myself, applying, as far as possible, the critical thinking I learned from these three authors. I’m proud to be able to say that you may or may not agree with it, but you’ll have a hard time refuting it.
On the subject of the learning process, if we go back to Outliers, there’s a theory that has been as widely praised as it has been debunked. Today I could almost state categorically that his theory is true.
In the chapter on the 10,000-hour rule, many people misunderstood the theory, while others took it literally that you need 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert in something (not 6,000, not 8,000). Here we could say that Gladwell’s theory is in line with Aristotle’s. Practice makes perfect, just as Aristotle told us that “we are what we repeatedly do”. None of this applies only to professional life. It applies just as much when it comes to growing as people and building habits.
While practice is important and almost always leads to better results, that wasn’t Gladwell’s key conclusion. His conclusion was the need for specific practice. Let me explain. A martial artist can train two hours a day, and he’ll certainly be a good fighter. But then there have been other martial artists who trained 2,000 punches and 2,000 kicks every day, and, just as in the case of David and Goliath, in a street fight your 10 years of training would count for nothing if you got in the way of one of those kicks or punches trained with complete intention (figuratively speaking, of course).
The highest-level performers practised a lot, but they practised with intention. Their practice was designed to let them perform fully at the limits of their skill level. What they have in common is that they were absorbed in that particular kind of learning, and this led them to start enjoying it and feeling motivated by their progress, which ended up creating a positive feedback loop that reinforced both their learning in that activity and their desire to take part in it. One example is the genius Da Vinci, who kept developing his skills and perfecting himself until the day he died (see: Leonardo da Vinci’s key).
In this way, the 10,000 hours of practice can be cut down astonishingly, turning us into experts in record time.
We need to understand that there are different ways of learning. On the one hand, there’s learning through repetition. This way, what you learn becomes instinctive. Any athlete is a good example here. It’s said that Michael Jordan had to miss a shot for a commercial, and that they had to repeat the scene quite a few times because he couldn’t miss the basket.
Then there’s learning by linking concepts: you learn something specific and add new, related knowledge. Before you know it, you’ll end up an expert.
But learning is also a habit. In other words, the more you learn, the faster you’ll learn. The example here is language learning. Someone who speaks four languages will find it much easier to learn another three than someone who has never learned a single foreign language. This is because of the connection that forms between old knowledge and new learning.
Coming back to Malcolm Gladwell, if you look at the course of his books, he has simply been applying parts of his earlier theories to shape the later ones, so that the man has become a true master at developing hypotheses.
There’s no doubt that Gladwell has managed to make a living telling incredible stories to millions of people around the world. His way of thinking makes many people love him and others hate him. But one thing I have noticed is that the critics of Malcolm Gladwell’s theories have only been able to criticise, without offering a critique based on anything that dismantles his hypotheses. And once again, that’s why I love reading Malcolm Gladwell.
See also: How long does it take to get good at something? Four tips to speed up learning a skill
Featured image: Bea Phi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
