The Story of Success

I’ve been out of blogging action, mainly due to this and also to a curious reluctance to go anywhere near WordPress’s Admin. An almost self-imposed blogging block, if you could call it that. Or less romantically, just plain laziness. My offline writing fared better though I have yet to run out of pages for my (oh so lovely) moleskine.

The reading has chugged along steadily, with more non-fic titles than the other kind. The latest two I’ve completed are Daniel Pink’s A Whole New Mind and Malcolm Gladwell’s The Outliers. Both are synapse-worthy reads, compelling in their presentations of ideas.

Pink proposes that the skills in demand for the future will require right-brain engagement instead of the left-brain intensive skills that are prized so highly now. In other words, abilities to do with creativity, empathy, design, symphony, play, meaning, and – best of all – story, are those that will be needed in the economy of the future, at least in “advanced” countries.

The more analytical, mundance, routine diagnostic and number-crunching work will all be highly competitive areas where there are plenty of good brains (good left-brains, rather) in countries like India that can more than handle the work. In other words, to provide value to the marketplace, you need to be more than just good accountants, lawyers, and doctors. Pink is not saying that left-brain skills are not needed, but that right-brain abilities need to be strengthened and brought into the “major league” when they’ve been unfairly benched all these years.

He includes some tips and follow-ups for you to strengthen your own right-brain abilities and become a more “holistic” thinker, and these include storytelling resources (intriguing!), mind-mapping pointers, and – even – resources for you to develop a sense of humour. (If sense of humour is necessary for success in the 21st century, then I am in a lot of trouble).

You can’t disagree with Pink about the competition that’s already abundant in routinised analytical work such as accounting, drafting of standard law contracts, programming and even reading of x-ray charts, tasks that are outsourced to varying degree to highly qualified graduates in countries such as India and the Philippines. What is sobering is that Pink labels the “Knowledge Age” as one that is on the way out for developed economies, with the Conceptual Age already upon us (this is sobering because this country is still grappling on the path to becoming a “knowledge society” and we are definitely unable to compete with India, China and Philippines in terms of providing the numbers of “left-brain” workers at the right amount of salary). In this Conceptual Age, it’s right-brain dominated abilities that will be needed. He goes so far as to say it won’t be MBAs that will be in demand but MFAs (Masters in Fine Arts).

While Pink includes the storytelling chapter,it’s Malcolm Gladwell who truly exemplifies the power of story in his book about people who have achieved extraordinary success in their lifetimes, the “outliers”. I have never been as smitten by a non-fiction book as I have by The Outliers. From the very first chapter when Gladwell dissects and tears apart the abnormally healthy statistics of a town called Roseto in Maine, he had me hooked on his stories and theories about success. And his central theory is that successful individuals did not make it purely on their own talent and hard work but that success is as much a combination of opportunity, background (yes, background – in a lot of cases, it matters whether or not you were born into a middle class or poor family), cultural heritage and even the year of your birth (not numerology here but common sense – if you are born in a certain era, you can take advantage of particular events and discoveries, such as the railroad boom and the advent of the computer).

He provides examples in the form of Mozart, Bill Gates, the Beatles, the contrasting lifepaths of geniuses like Chris Langan (an IQ reading that was ‘off the charts’) and Robert Oppenheimer (the atomic bomb creator), Jewish lawyers, Korean Air pilots and even his Jamaican mother. The stories are convincingly told and halfway through the book, he had me ensnared with his theory that a lot of external factors come into play in the making of a “success”. As Gladwell pointed out, the mighty oak tree cannot become a mighty oak tree if its trunk had been chopped, if sunlight had been blocked, if water was unavailable, and a multitude of other factors. How very true.

The theory I particularly liked (because it’s concrete and countable) is the 10,000 hour theory; that you can only be a master at some job or work if you have put in 10,000 hours or thereabouts of practise. Writers,  musicians (the Beatles practising at Hamburg), computer wizards (Bill Gates got early, privileged access to computers way before other kids did) and even lawyers who have become successful only became so after they had put in the time (and had the opportunity) to practise their craft. It is also this 10,000 hours that differentiate the merely good from the excellent. In a study he did of talented musicans at a top music school, he found that those who excelled invariably had been those who increased their hours of practice year by year. There were none among the top musicians who excelled without putting in the practice.

Gladwell goes on at length also about cultural heritage (cultural baggage in some cases) and I could not help wondering if some of what he posits could be applied in Malaysia to ramp up performance and results among certain segments of students (males in particular) in our public universities. Certainly, Gladwell highlights cultural heritage that help (the work ethics of farmers in China) and those that hinder (Koreans’ obsessiveness with societal hierarchy and all the rules that some with it), and also presents studies where obstructive cultural baggage was successfully removed (Korean Air pilots).

The Outliers is enjoyable and fascinating though I am not convinced that the theories provided are rigorous enough to withstand proper empirical scrutiny. Still, it’s a book that makes your mind travel through paths it’s never travelled before, and that’s (almsot) always a good thing.

By chance, Gladwell, dubbed “the rock star of non-riction” (he reportedly received a $4m advance for The Outliers and is also on a lecture tour in Britain), was recently interviewed by The Independent UK. I like to highlight his take on meritocracy in the US:

The touring Gladwell will take questions at the end of each lecture, so you might prod him on why British people should be surprised by this book’s premise; ours being a society where there may still be some correlation between success and the class you are born into. Really interesting, though, is the hole Gladwell punches through the hoary stereotype we sometimes hold about America – that by contrast, it is a classless meritocracy.

“Both countries stack the deck in favour of certain people over others,” he begins. “They choose to stack it in different ways. Americans do perhaps use more subtle mechanisms for doing so. But there is certainly an Ivy League caste system here that rewards and promotes kids by virtue of having gone to a small set of colleges and entry into those colleges. While it appears meritocratic, in large part it is not. You get there because your dad went there or you are a jock of some kind.”

That, and his book, will make you view “succcess” as not quite the simple equation you once thought it was.

Filed under: Books, Reads , authors, bedtime reading, Books, Daniel Pink, Malcolm Gladwell, reading

He Makes Me Want to Write

It is February the Fourteenth, at that hour of the morning when all the children have been taken to school and all the husbands have driven themselves to work or been dropped, steambreathing and greatcoated at the rail station at the edge of the town for the Great Commute, when I pin my heart on Missy’s front door. The heart is a deep dark red that is almost a brown, the colour of liver. Then I knock on the door, sharply, rat-a-tat-tat!, and I grasp my wand, and I grabbed my wand, my stick, my oh-so-thrustable and beribboned lance, and I vanish like cooling steam into the chilly air.. (Harlequin Valentine, Neil Gaiman in Fragile Things)

Here I am, having gone through Neil Gaiman’s Smoke and Mirrors for the second time and re-reading some stories from his Fragile Things. There’s no other author who inspires me to write quite like he does. There’s one particular story in Fragile Things that never fails to make writing seem like such a fun enterprise.  

That story’s “Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire”. The story’s as quirky as the title, and Gothic with a capital ‘G’. A clever tale where the worlds of fantasy and reality (ours, that is) are inverted; the protagonist is a wannabe writer (even in Gothland, they exist, apparently) who lives in a world of ghouls and shrieking women, but who yearns to write fantasy with fantasy being our boring world of toasters, work, strained relationships and hurried breakfasts. It’s humorous, whimsical and – for me, curiously inspiring. There’s also a lesson-nugget embedded, delivered by that fixture of gothic tales – the drawn, humourless, seemingly bloodless but always faithful butler.  

In the introduction, Gaiman (one of the few authors who seems to have a rollicking time conjuring up stories for the rest of us) remembers how the story – which he wrote twenty years ago – was rejected by publishers. It was only two decades later that it was rewritten and published, first in a gothic anthology, and subsequently included in “Best of” Anthology Collections. It was the Best Short Story in the 2005 Locus Award.  

Fiction is subjective….and writing it is never as much fun as it seems. Anyway, here’s a state of bliss towards which all writers strive, even without ghouls and monsters and a mad, shrieking Aunt Agatha in the attic.  

The quill went scritch scritch across the paper, and the young man was engrossed in what he was doing. His face was strangely content, and a smile flickered between his eyes and his lips.

He was rapt.
(Forbidden Brides of the Faceless Slaves in the Secret House of the Night of Dread Desire, Neil Gaiman in Fragile Things)

Filed under: Books, Personal Note, Writing , authors, Books, fantasy, neil gaiman, reading, Writing

Saved by Starbucks

Note: This is another of my not-a-review-but-a-collection-of-thoughts kind of note

I don’t know how I missed this book the first time around, given how addicted I am to overpriced coffee.

Published sometime in the third quarter of 2007, the book tells the story of Michael Gates Gill, a once high-flying ad executive who lost his job after more than 25 years of slog, and who – wonder of wonders – got desperate enough to accept a job in Starbucks where his new Boss, Crystal, is not only an African American female but is also half his age. A fifty plus guy working under a young lady boss of a different ethnicity is not exactly head-twisting stuff in this day and age but it’s a remarkable turn of events for a “son of privilege” like Michael Gates Gill, son of New Yorker columnist Brendan Gill, who had everything from school to grand piano to first job handed to him on a silver platter.

The author, I suppose, must be commended for being quite honest about all of his mistakes and prejudices, though his air of naivete does make you wonder whether it’s all real. I give him the benefit of the doubt and choose to believe his change of heart and newfound happiness behind the bars of a Starbucks outlet in New York.

The excerpt below is at the beginning of the tale, when Michael revisits his childhood home and finds himself longing for those comfortable times again.

How far I had fallen from those happy times. I had come a long way from my childhood, when money was never mentioned. I was now nearly broke.

Turning away from the comforts of the past, I looked for some comfort in a latte. One of my last remaining treats. A Starbucks store now occupied the corner of Lexington and Seventy-eighth, where during my childhood there had been a pastry shop. In my depressed daze, I did not notice the sign in front reading: “Hiring Open House”—not that it was the kind of sign that I would have noticed anyway. Later, I was to learn that Starbucks has hiring events at different stores every week or so in New York. Managers from other stores in the area come in to interview prospective employees. Looking back now, I realize that the good fortune that had left my life returned the moment I chose to step into the store at the corner of Seventy-eighth Street.

What does smack of commercialism is his raves about Starbucks. However much I love coffee and appreciate Starbucks for being here in Malaysia to serve up RM8.50 lattes and RM12.50 frappucinos, I can’t imagine it to be the workplace heave that Michael has made it out to be. A lot of its employee policies sound great – healthcare benefits, study loans, a conscientious effort to locate its staff closest to their homes, an entrenched culture of mutual respect and open communications - but perhaps they got the raves from Michael because his former place of work treated him so unfairly. When you’ve been mistreated, kindness, fairness and courtesy gain higher currency in your eyes.

Starbucks photo from Barneto.net

If you give in – yes, give in – to the book and its message, it is a heartwarming tale of how a fair and positive work environment can do wonders for an employee’s morale, confidence, performance and general sense of well-being. It also fosters incredible loyalty, as the Starbucks “partners” demonstrate. In the store, Michael also finds out what it feels like to be in the minority in terms of race and age (he’s white, and he’s one of the oldest employees), and it’s clear that he thinks the world of Crystal, his new Boss. What’s touching is how much he’s willing to learn from his much younger colleagues, and how much of his own past ego he’s willing to let go. Now that is unusual.

This is not a book to read for its writing but for the tale that it tells. It’s a nice story, made meaningful because it’s true but made suspect because it raves just too much about Starbucks. Take the lessons offered – that life is full of surprises, many of them nasty, but that it’s still possible to deal with change and be happy – and soak up the myriad things you would learn about Starbucks (it provides a chart for displaying pies and cakes and has a system of calling out beverages ordered for its baristas). The story is also a sobering reminder of the yawning gulf that exists between the haves and the have-to-work-for-it groups.

It’s only in America, I suppose that a high-flying ad executive could be fired, broke, divorced, humbled, renewed, and then land a rich movie deal through the whole experience. Yes, that’s right, Tom Hanks has secured the rights to this story, so it’s likely that Michael will be the richest Starbucks barista very soon. B

Well, given the recent troubles the chain is facing, Michael’s story and Tom Hanks’s visual dramatisation, could be just what it needs to heat up its business once more.

As for the author – well, all I can say is, well done. And in the spirit of Christmas and the New Year, let’s all take whatever inspiration we can find to make our lives brighter, bigger and better. Whatever time that we have left in this world, let’s make it good.

Merry Christmas, all, and Happy New Year.

Filed under: Books, Personal Note, Reads, Work & Productivity , authors, Books, coffee, how starbucks saved my life, michael gates gill, movie rights, not-a-review, reading, starbucks, tom hanks

King of Horror, on Writing

We’ve moved, after almost a year of waiting.

The bookshelf that housed my books in our former home now lines up a new wall, its wood once more the solid ground on which my hardbacks and paperbacks, yellowed, dog-eared and dusty, or clean, white and compact, rest. I gave very few of my books away – I am stingy when it comes to these “friends” of mine, I have to admit – and there are still the Enid Blytons, Alfred Hitchcocks (and The Three Investigators), as well as Kathryn Kenny’s Trixie Belden (first published in 1948!), which I hope my kids will one day pick up, read, and love.

In the course of arranging and re-arranging my books (an exercise more complicated than figuring out seating arrangements for VIPs!), I discovered a long-forgotten borrowed copy of Stephen King’s On Writing. I have honestly forgotten where the book came from (if the Good Samaritan is reading this, please contact me), but I’m immensely grateful for the copy.

I was an avid Stephen King fan in my late teens, preferring his tales of darkness to Harlequin romances and Virginia Andrews’s incestuous epic (at that time, such a hit among my peers). It’s hard to put my finger on what appealed to me, exactly, as King’s tales always took place in Maine (Derry, Bangor) where the people tended to talk funny (ayuh, being one of the terms I picked up) and the towns tended to be small. It was not his monsters either that were so enticing – Laurell K Hamilton’s werewolves and zombies, and Anne Rice’s seductive, angst-filled vampires are often richer and bloodier than King’s lurking-in-the-dark-evil.

But.

King’s unknown monsters were often mirrored in the darkness of his characters as well, and the battle against the unknown, the outside unknown, became also a battle against the demons within. In Pet Sematary, for example, the resurrection of the dead happens only because the living are unable to accept the deaths of their loved ones and move on (the movie version was crappy, by the way, so read the book if you want the real horror). In The Shining, the protagonist’s losing battle with his ego and alcoholism serve to accentuate the evil residing within The Overlook Hotel. And in Salem’s Lot – my favourite Stephen King tale – the residents of a small town surrender one by one to a master vampire, either because they were seduced by the promise of power or because they surrendered to fear and decided it was easier not to fight the darkness that came after them. I read Salem’s Lot twice and would not hesitate to rate it as the best vampire tale – horrifying, gruesome (but not to the cruel extent of the late Richard Laymon), and – most frightening of all – entirely plausible.

I have to add, of course, that apart from the psudeo-intellectual reasons above, Stephen King just knew how to spin a bloody good yarn (pun not intended) to keep his readers hooked through hundreds of pages of narrative. And so it is that his book On Writing – which is half a writer’s memoir and half a how-to novelist guide – emphasises the heart of his writing – storytelling.

Book-buyers aren’t attracted, by and large, by the literary merits of a novel; book-buyers want a good story to take with them on the airplane, something that will first fascinate them, then pull them in and keep them turning the pages.

In the first half, the memoir, King tells us how his interest in writing grew (through a lot of reading, horror movies and early encouragement by his Mom and friends who bought his self-printed stories). I never knew, actually, that one of my favourite authors had a Dad who did a permanent walkout of family life and who was brought up by his Mom (and a succession of baby sitters) from the age of two onwards. King’s background is strictly working class – his Mom worked in laundrettes and diners to make ends meet – which explains his characters and a lot of his novels’ settings.

He does mention the number of years it took him to get over the guilt of writing “trash”, as opposed to writing “good stuff” (this is something a lot of popfic writers have to work out within themselves, I would imagine). What comes through very strongly is his love for writing and his no-nonsense approach to it. The second half of the book deals with the writer’s “toolbox”, where King discusses grammar (important so get a copy of Strunk and White now, will you?), plot (the engine of every story but he doesn’t machinate his plots in advance – situations first, then characters, then see what happens), dialogue (use your ears) and description (just include a few important details and let your readers imagine the rest). He also adds in an example of an unedited and edited work (1408, which I watched but didn’t read) and even explains the best way to approach an agent and become published. It gets surprisingly technical and detailed in the second half but the tips are welcome, coming as they are from a seasoned “bestselling” novelist like King.

His 1999 accident, when he was hit by a van and was almost paralysed – was a life-changing event for King and it’s thoughtful that he included a chapter on the accident as well as the recovery period where writing played a role in helping him heal.

I enjoyed On Writing – more for what he went through as a writer than as a how-to guide – and appreciate King’s take on writing, that it is about “enriching the lives of those who read your work, and enriching your own life as well.”

On Writing belongs on the shelf with the also-excellent Natalie Goldberg’s Writing Down the Bones and Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird.

Filed under: Personal Note , authors, Books, library, stephen king, Writing