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
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