10,000 Hours, Gladwell, and The Force

As my primary spotter (Annabelle's Dad) can attest, I am a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell.

Gladwell is best known for his essays and short books on what has come to be known as "pop economics" or "pop sociology." These are simply some of the most interesting airplane (2 to 4 hour flight) reads you can get your hands on. My favorite is *Blink.* In *Blink* Gladwell identifies "blinkers" -- that is, people who tend to make up their minds immediately, or come to knowledge on the spot. Blinkers stand in stark contrast to more analytical thinkers who do a lot of research and take a lot of time making up their minds about something.

Tiger Wife is definitely not a blinker. And neither, I am told, both by him and aching Fitness Forest reviewer, that primary spotter is not a blinker. For a blinker I guess I get on well with non-blinkers.

Gladwell's argument can be read as a celebration of "blinkers." I certainly read it that way to champion my own way of being -- mainly in lively discussions with Tiger Wife. But Gladwell is always subtle, and he has a way of undermining those, like me, who would take him out of context. One of the things Gladwell points out is that really good "blinkers" don't have some kind of special insight or instinct (darn -- I always wanted to be a superhero with Spidey sense!) but have gotten to be blinkers after accumulating huge amounts of knowledge or expertise in a given field. His opening anecdote in that book, for instance, involves an art historian who immediately tells the Getty Museum that they have overpaid wildly for an ancient statue. The statue is a fraud says the historian -- in an instant. But he can't tell the Getty people why. "I just know," he says.

That can work in poetry readings and discussions of film but not when big chunks of money are at stake. So the Getty folks ignore him. But it turns out the blinker IS right. But he is right because of years of accumulated knowledge. Good blinkers are good because they spent years as serious analytical thinkers. I am not the blinker I think I am. Tiger Wife and Primary Spotter are probably closer to authentic "blinkers" when they, on occasion, make a quick judgment.

Gladwell's other incredibly popular book, The Outliers, also can be read against its own grain. In Outliers Gladwell tries to identify how truly exceptional people became exceptional. Here he made the 10,000 hours theory wildly popular -- so popular in fact that even the Force Newsletter has picked it up!!! (Rule Britannia -- Gladwell is a child of the empire, too! Does one sense the more regular presence of Andy Wagstaff?). The 10,000 theory is that to be truly exceptional at something -- let's say the violin or soccer -- one must spend 10,000 doing it. In one anecdote Gladwell describes how Bill Gates spent at least that much time in a computer lab in the 1970s...presto-- Genius.

Consequently, it is easy and almost logical to take from this book the idea that if you want to be even good  at something you should spend 10,000 doing it!!!!

But Gladwell's real point is show how one becomes an OUTLIER or EXCEPTION -- not merely  good. In fact, one of his critical points is that people come by their 10,000 hours almost by accident. Gates, for example, was one of the few kids to live near the relatively small number of computer labs in existence in the early 1970s. And he had regular access! (I forgot why -- buy the book --help the publishing industry).

That is, Gladwell specifically suggests you can't deliberately create a path to OUTLIER or exceptional status. Pounding out 10,000 hours at something is no guarantee. Gladwell is much more interested in showing, in fact, the hapzard path to exceptional status, a path that -- contra an English Protestant Work Ethic (Tiger Wife's Dad) -- can't be traced simply through individual effort.

Gladwell's opening story is of note, not just because it tells us something about his theory, but because it tells us something about youth sports.

I cite from that wonderful creation -- the equivalent of the USS Enterprise's voice activated computer: Wikipedia

 "a disproportionate number of elite Canadian hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year. The answer, he points out, is that since youth hockey leagues determine eligibility by calendar year, children born on January 1 play in the same league as those born on December 31 in the same year. Because children born earlier in the year are bigger and more mature than their younger competitors, and they are often identified as better athletes, this leads to to extra coaching and a higher likelihood of being selected for elite hockey leagues. This phenomenon in which "the rich get richer and the poor get poorer" is dubbed "accumulative advantage" by Gladwell, while sociologist Robert K. Merton calls it "the Matthew Effect", named after a biblical verse in the Gospel of Matthew: "For unto everyone that hath shall be given, and he shall have abundance. But from him that hath not shall be taken away even that which he hath."^[7] Outliers asserts that success depends on the idiosyncrasies of the selection process used to identify talent just as much as it does on the athletes' natural abilities."

Translation: one should be cautious in trying to artificially create 10,000 hours as a path to success. It is just as necessary to be born at the right time.

But what do I know? The only thing I ever put in 10,000 hours on was watching Star Trek and memorizing NHL stats from 1925 to 1980.