an obfuscation of outliers
I wonder if Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success is going to inadvertently create a popular misunderstanding about success similar in form to my previously stated fear about what a superficial reading of Gut Feelings and The Wisdom of Crowds would do for effective decision-making.
In a few Twitter exchanges yesterday, the notion that 10,000 hours of work invariably leads to success seems to have been the takeaway of one or two people who have read the book, although that might be an erroneous gut feeling on my part, constrained by the 140-character limit of such “conversations”. That is how misunderstanding cascades through new media 
. To compound that problem, I have not yet read Outliers myself. However, it was David Shenk at The Genius in All of Us (a blog and the title of his forthcoming book) who highlighted the various longitudinal studies into talent that I believe Gladwell is using too.
My understanding from Shenk, whose blog has sat quietly on my blogroll more or less since I started here, is that 10,000 hours of hard work do not necessarily lead to success, but are the minimum needed for mastery of a complex cognitive task or subject. If that mastery or genius represents success, then there is no debate. But there are plenty of back stories (I am collecting them, of course) that reveal how other factors play a part after the mastery and may yet prevent even hard-won talent from being recognized. For example, Sibelius, who I’m learning seems to have had a rough ride from 20th century musical fashion in general, flunked his audition as violinist for the Vienna Philharmonic through a disastrous bout of nerves. In Gladwell’s defence, I’m sure that he states clearly in his book that there are a lot of environmental factors (some of them entirely random) that are usually necessary to support an individual over the ten years or so required to sustain that disciplined effort.
But I will not be surprised now if successful people, who have not read the book, start explaining their success having backwardly calculated that they must have spent 10,000 hours of hard work to earn it. Let me know any examples, won’t you.
You’ll have noticed in the last post [sic] that I surreptitiously tried to sneak myself into the musical outlier group that is prize-winning horn players. Here is the outlier among those outliers, Dennis Brain, providing an introduction to the horn. Killed tragically in an accident in 1957, aged just 36, he remains to be surpassed:-
The works of Dennis Brain can be purchased from Amazon here.
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6 Responses to “an obfuscation of outliers”
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Tim
Good posting and I agree entirely with the concerns that many will attribute their success (or lack of it) to investment or under investment of time, thereby ignoring all the silent data. How many musicians and their Transit Vans have put in considerably more than 10,000 hours yet still only get there £50 and free beer for doing the Dog and Duck at Thorton Watlass on a Friday night.
However, in a recent conversation about sport, muscle memory and mental pathways, a prominent coach told me that some gymnastics would consistently forget to point their toes at the top of pike. Anecdotally, over the years he found that whether he reminded a gymnast of this observation weekly, or whether he told them multiple times in every session, it would always take approximately a year for the change to become “hard-wired” He became convinced that the brain and need a certain amount of time for things to “knit” and that the amount of reinforcement needed to be constant but relatively low noise. So Gladwell’s recording of the phenomena might be correct, but his interpretation might not.
Iwan
I may not have been clear. I expect Gladwell to have reported what your coach also observes. So I doubt he will have misinterpreted it. Others will.
But I think your point goes to the heart of it. The support, the coach, the reminders that add up to the hard-wiring. All those externalities are what we forget about when the talent stands in front of us alone. Some few will have done it by themselves, but the research shows that it is a combinatorial effort, with much opportunity cost for the support network. And as Dennis Brain demonstrates, it helps to have had a father in the business too
.
Cheers, Tim
One of my horn teachers Jerome Ashby of the New York Philharmonic (RIP)(is this becoming a horn blog?)once told me that a very concentrated and INTELLIGENT 6 months of practice were needed to significantly jump to another level of ability (it could be called hardwiring i guess)
I subscribe to this theory and I added to it my own theory of 2 years (6 months x 4, a Bachelor’s degree without the vacations:-)to start to be really good at something providing you really concentrate on the goal and practice intelligently. Of course there has to be good soil to plant the seed, meaning some aptitude for the subject, mentally and physically.
To be a master takes years of experience and thought and not everyone becomes one.
To get recognition is another story. Is an accident or a planned accident, meaning that you have to choose to be in a geographical place were the domain is strong. Plus the gatekeepers have to like you.
The best example I know of mastery vs politics is of my brother now Oboist and Principal English Horn of the MET Orchestra in New York and Juilliard faculty. He paid his dues playing in minor orchestras all over the world until he unanimously won his audition months before turning fourty years old. It wasn’t your case of being guided straight to a job from a teacher that believes in you when you are 19. He suffered from low income and uncertainty as a freelancer in New York and had to play in pretty bad orchestras to make ends meet, and…He was never called to sub for the MET!! But he was a tough cookie and at fourty, an unknown master of the english horn coming to audition from a Mexican orchestra won the battle (audition)
Now he is a gatekeeper himself. I just heard from one of his graduate students that came to sub with our orchestra that his students love him and many come to Juilliard expressly to study with him. Surely his own experience with adversity made him wiser.
There are thousands of unemployed musicians that are very good and sometimes even better that the people that are lucky to have a chair in a symphony orchestra. The good thing about Europe and the UK is that here are myriads of chamber groups and many oportunities to make music. Where I live if it wasn’t for my symphony job I would probably have to decide either to emigrate to freelance in NY or work at something else ( I have a family = restricted mobility)
Wow that was a long post, I hope I stayed on the subject and as always, excuse my english:-0
P.S. Dennis Mathews was a monster pianist! and of course few have attained the lyrical quality of Denis Brain’s playing except myself ahahahaha!! (just kidding)
Raimundo,
What a great example: that persistence beyond persistence may be required. I think it was David Fickling who said to me, referring to the writer’s struggle, that it is a matter of heart.
I’ll have a listen to your new stuff when I fix or replace my modem, which decided to die this evening. Would love copies for sure.
Secretly, I am occasionally picking up the horn, but don’t want to detract from the Fender project, so don’t tell anyone
.
Tim
Yeah, go for it!!!. Remember that mouthpiece buzzing is very important, do glissandos up and down from a middle c or so to a third line c, then keep going higher keeping a good buzz
without doing a lot of pressure to get the high notes.Use your left hand (like the horn) to hold the mouthpiece. If you have a flexible, clean buzz the horn will be easier to play. THIS IS NOW A HORN BLOG- RESISTANCE IS FUTILE.
Raimundo
You really got out in front on this one, Tim. Excellent! I also had a conversation about this on Twitter with a couple people — and it was about Seth Godin misinterpreting Gladwell’s theory. I think the whole issue comes down to one of semantics. If Gladwell had used the word “expert” instead of “best” I think his theory would be less apt to be misconstrued. But in fairness to Godin, one of his points was that if you can find a small enough niche then you don’t need 10,000 hours to become the best (or an expert).