now the Bible is the best-selling author of the tipping point blink and now out is a number one New York Times bestseller all of which have sold millions of copies throughout the world in the tipping point which was you pants 2004 freshmen reading product selection and I've been discussing potentially mass identification of small-scale social events the second book blink dealt with why we should trust our first impressions his latest book outliers explains why some people succeed involuntary remarkable and incredibly impactful lives in other words some people like Malcolm become people ladies and gentlemen please join me in warmly welcoming Malcolm Gladwell Malcolm thank you very much for joining us again this evening we really appreciate it firstly please briefly describe what is profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success well I said I was motivated to write the book by in response to the way in which we personalize success personalized and individualized this idea that I'm interested in extent in the in the extent to which an individual is personally responsible for his or her achievements and although that seems like a kind of I mean it's obvious that they are in certain key ways they're not and the question is what is the balance between the ways in which people are individually responsible and the ways in which they're not and I would like to argue that the ways in which they are not occupy a significantly larger portion of their achievement then then we then we generally leave the state that we make rules that frustrate achievement prematurely right off people as failures we overlook just how large a role we will play and by we I mean society in determining who makes it and who doesn't please elaborate and what sorts of recommendations do you have this school so opportunity bit more democratized yeah well I the the metaphor that I tell in the book is that I used to talk about this is this stuff about sports about football and hockey that if you look at elite hockey players you discover also soccer players you discover that a very large a disproportionately large percentage of them were born in January February and March right and the reason for this is that the eligibility dates for age class hockey and soccer are eligibility cutoff is January 1st your so when so when we go and we look for at the age of 9 and 10 and hockey mat places like Canada you go and you look at a whole group of kids and you pick the best one so you can put the one in all-star team and give them specialized coaching and you know create an elite right well when you look at a group of nine year olds and you pick the best hockey players you're not picking the best ones you're picking the oldest ones right because at that age difference between being born in January and December is enormous so what we do is we collect all the oldest ones think we're collecting the best ones give them access to specialized coaching extra games all kinds of special opportunities until seven and eight nine years later they actually are the best so we have created an elite not because that elite had any kind of special unique talent to begin with but simply because we have an arbitrary rule which gave them privileged access to a set of opportunities that made them who they are that to me is a beautiful metaphor for the way a lot of elite systems work they are I mean the the phrase that the lovely phrase that Robert Byrd and the famous sociology sociology uses to describe this is a matthew effect the from the verse in the New Testament that says to him that has much more will be given right we create these systems where we identify group people who have a narrow initial advantage and then we shower them with all kinds of additional that Edge's which causes that small difference to grow the American economic system is a beautiful example of the Matthew effect right the wealthier you get the more economic advantages we give you but if you're wealthy enough to be able to afford a house we let you write off your mortgage right we don't let you write off your rent if you're renting that's a matthew effect so the minute you're wealthy enough to own a house the government steps in and bails you out to the tune of thousands of dollars and then the minute you're wealthy enough to have investments we give you a disproportionately lower tax rate on the investment right I mean we those our means are built into all kinds of different systems and so when we congratulate when the successful could graduate themselves at some later date for their the extraordinary things they've done on their own behalf they generally forget to point out the extent to which they had been privileged by these kinds of systems that my favorite little factoid mellitus is was that it used to be the case that the international cutoff date eligibility day for age class football soccer around the world was August first and back then if you looked at the composition of elite soccer teams around the world they were overwhelmingly filled with people born in August September and October and then they about ten years ago so they changed it to January first and within a few years soccer teams were overwhelmingly filled with people born in January February and March the whole structure of international soccer is an artifact of where we choose to put the birthday right so if I was head of the International Soccer Federation and I had a child born on December 1st who ideally wanted to become a successful soccer player I would stack the deck in favor of my child by moving the eligibility date to December 1st right I mean let's just be honest and frank to about the extent to which these kinds of utterly arbitrary rules structure advantage and create lasting differences in the ability of certain people to achieve very long answers your question excellent excellent answer one or more people talk about selection streaming and differentiating experience and please describe how someone's date of birth my planes then being at the top instead of soccer and football the time their academic class yeah so the same thing if you think about what I've just been talking about with sports we do exactly the same thing when it comes to kids in school right we go in so the the reason we have this weird situation in sports is that we start at a very early age identify a so called gifted population and give that gifted population access to unique and special opportunities that speed up their development we do the same thing with so-called gifted kids right we identify a group of children who we believe to be intellectually superior at the age of nine and ten yank them out of the Normal School System and give them a privileged set of opportunities better teachers smaller classrooms and lo and behold they turn out five and six years down the road to be better students right now is it because we were successful in and accurate in identifying a uniquely skilled population in the beginning or is because we created that superiority by virtue of giving them access to privileged opportunities and also if you look at you'll see the same age biases in gifted programs if you have a school system that has an eligibility date of cutoff date of September first your gifted program will be full of kids born in September October and November why because just like physical maturity intellectual maturity at that age is very strongly a function of how old you are right now why this has not occurred two people running gifted programs I don't know but you can see we've got beautiful economic data that shows that kids who are in the youngest cohort in their age class in schools are something like ten percent less likely to go to college you know ten fifteen years down the road in other words these kinds of biases that we build into the system very early on continue to reflect and and diminish achievement a decade later right they're not we're not so these are we're not playing games here we're actually talking about something that has a very real effect on on on achievement sounds like President Obama she chosen you as Secretary of Education well there are many much more right no I don't have I got one idea I mean this is you know I think the American educational system is in need of many more ideas on that one please describe you 10,000 hour rule hi and how it might apply to some of the most successful Hollywood agents Hollywood agents well the 10,000 hour rule is just this observation that's made been made by psychologists that um that almost without exception it appears to be impossible to achieve a level of excellence in any cognitively complex task without first putting in 10,000 hours of practice so you can look at any number of different fields and look at the best people in that field and ask yourself how long did they have to immerse themselves in that field before they became good right so when we look at chess players grandmasters the own there's only been one Grandmaster in history who achieved the level of Grandmaster without playing ten years of chests 10,000 hours in 10 years are roughly the same it's like four hours a day for ten years gets you 10,000 hours the only person in history to do it in under 10 years is Bobby Fischer hated nine years right you can't find almost impossible to find a classic composer who composed a truly great work without first composing for ten years right so even Mozart who we think of as the poster child for precocity he does he doesn't do his first really great work until he's 22 or 23 I mean really transcended stuff and after at which point he's been composing for you know 12 or 13 years he is actually technically a late bloomer believe it or not and only you know its engines because of course the story we tell us Mozart is always presented as case study number one in this notion that genius spring you know perfectly and beautifully from the mat out of them out of the mouths of babes nonsense he's composing things when he's 10 years old but they're terrible you know he doesn't it takes him like anyone else a long time to be good and what's interesting about that notion is that is it suggested I think that we are far too impatient with with in the development of talent we are our expectations you know we like to judge people and because we like to categorize them and put them in different groups and decide who we're going to back and do we're going to give up on but I feel at that process once you want to stand in 10,000 hour rule I think that you come to the conclusion that we do that kind of categorization much too quickly you know basically it says if you want to know whether someone's any good you have to give them a chance to practice for 10 years first right there isn't a you know take that little nugget into corporate America and see how far you'll get and and it also says that those who are it is so difficult to put 10,000 hours of practice in that it says that those who get good who have the opportunity to be good are usually those who have had some special opportunity to practice right so you can't if you want to be a great piano player you can't have a part-time job after school in high school you can't come from a family that requires you to work because there's no way we know that you cannot be a great pianist unless you put in 10,000 hours and you cannot you absolutely cannot there are not enough hours in the day to get your 10,000 hours in before the age of 22 or 23 if you have a part-time job right the very simple illustration of a fact that says you will never get except in the most extraordinary of circumstances a great pianist or a great chess player or a great anything of this type from a family that's not wealthy enough to to support children without them themselves going out to work right now a beautiful little illustration of how class matters and how this are idealized notion of how talent always rises to the top in our society it's nonsense right there's a massive constraint on it which is this fact that you need 10,000 hours and only a small number of people can possibly be in a position to get that in one is the IQ test still used since as you write it does not have a correlation to someone's success only measures what lewis terman thought determines intelligence and classifies select extreme and differentiated students and non ones the same when they take the test well it's not that IQ tests are useless very very useful and they do correlate with success but they call it success in a very specific way there is this I don't actually use this phrasing book but is there's this lovely concept in statistics called restriction of range which says that those of you so it's just as I'll know what I'm talking about which says it as you get to the top of any distribution your ability to meaningfully measure differences between data points becomes limited another way of saying this is that the things that the qualifications that one uses to join a group are different from the qualifications that are different from the qualify here I am talking about IQ and we haven't even turned on the the qualifications that that that are that that gets you into a group are different from the kinds of things that make you good at that particular discipline right so entrance criteria are different from excellence criteria so here's an example a class a simple example is you have to be tall to play basketball right that's an entrance criteria you cannot be 5 feet and want to play in the NBA right but once you are tall someone's height cannot reliably be used to predict their excellence at the task of being of NBA basketball player right I was recently did a sorry about teachers about what makes a teacher good and this teaches our great example of this you need to be relatively smart to be a teacher but once you're smart enough your IQ is no longer a good predictor of your of your ability to be a good teacher right it predicts entrance it does not predict excellence well IQ in general works this way so you need to be smart enough to go to Harvard or Yale or Cambridge your Penn but once you are smart enough to get in your IQ is meaningless as a predictor of your performance while you're there so this is in fact Leeds has led a number of very very smart people to suggest that the ways in which Ivy League schools for example and this is a favorite hobby horse of mine because I didn't go when I big school man and you did so it's a wonderful opportunity for me to sort of get on my high horse and I believe the last time I was here I lectured at length on this but I can't resist so I'll return to it the way in which schools like that elite schools run their admissions programs is nonsensical right they take a whole group of people who have almost basically identical entrance criteria and they pursue they presume to be able to distinguish among them on the basis of those entrance criteria right you can't do it you can't all you can do all you ought to be able to do if you're running elite school is you say I haven't here's a series of cutoff criteria you've got to have at least X on your SAT you must have at least X on your high school grades you must have you know at least two really warm recommendations from interesting people and after that we're going to throw you into a hat I'm going to take the names out and the lucky ones get in and the ones who lose a lottery don't that is the only intellectually justifiable way to run an entrance into a lead institution and anyone else who tells you otherwise is blowing smoke right there is nonsense and you know this is a anyway I could go on and on but so it says that it doesn't is not to say that IQ is useless it is only to say that IQ is of limited use in the prediction of excellence and that was sort of one of the points I wanted to get up because we are of course even though we routinely claim not to be we are infatuated with IQ simply because it's we love the idea that you know this number is meaningful in fact it's of limited in furthering that point a little more the one story from the book that I will ask you about this evening is a different past at Chris laingen and Robert Oppenheimer talk please very briefly describe who Chris laingen is what he is doing and why his path is so different from Oppenheimer who attempted to murder of his professor but became famous yeah um were you given away my punchline but um I very point I tell the story in the book about um this guy named Chris laingen who is believed to be the person with the highest IQ in maybe the world certainly America and his IQ is you know it's impossible to tell when you get um into the upper ranges of the IQ test of course the IQ test ceases to become useful so you have to develop for people who score really high you develop like super IQ tests and then out of them you develop an even more extravagant IQ test it's like a this kind of it's like Russian dolls and then you in the end you have this kind of super super super IQ test anyway this guy got like 19 out of 20 on the super super super IQ test so he and he's a for much of his life he's been a bouncer in a bar so the question is how is it for the guy with the highest IQ like that we've ever seen he's got 40 points on Einstein for goodness sake right how is it he's a bouncer in a bar so I was trying to so the reason is of course that once you're past a certain point of smartness probably an IQ 120 all those extra IQ points don't matter it's the same thing we've been talking about it's an entrance criteria not on excellence criteria um and so I thought I would be really fun to compare him and I was a teller of his life and his life is really interesting because he goes it's a scholarship to ecology and he drops out for the most kind of bizarre and totally hard to understand reasons his scholarship gets screwed up and he can't convince Reed College or he's going to let him stay and so he drops out he never actually gets his BA and this man who by rights should be should have gotten like four PhDs and published a thousand scientific papers ends up as a bouncer at a bar in Long Island and so I decided to contrast this to the story of Robert Oppenheimer who you know is the same a similar kind of child one of these one-in-a-billion kids with a super super high IQ and everyone thought he was a genius but he doesn't grow up as Chris laingen did in this kind of very poor impoverished background he grows up on Central Park West and he goes to ethical culture and he goes to to Harvard and then he goes to Cambridge and when he and ke also when he's in college encounters a difficulty only his difficulty is not that they screw up the paperwork on his scholarship his difficulty is that he tries to murder his tutor at Cambridge and how and what happens to Oppenheimer when he started tries to murder his tutor at Cambridge he talks his way out of it they gave him probation and the punishment is he has to go down to London and see a Harley Street psychiatrist once a week right so here's this wonderful you know little comparison the the super brilliant kid who'd run who gets drummed out of Reed College because his paperwork gets screwed up and the super brilliant kid who tries to murder his tutor by the way not just any tutor this guy Blackburn or black something who goes on to win a Nobel Prize would you know later so he tries to to murder a future Nobel Prize winner and what happens to him he goes on to hold the single most important government job of the 20th century right the Manhattan Project so if that's all about that has at this point we are so far beyond IQ and we're talking about other things we're talking about your ability to negotiate the your social surroundings and to get your way in the world and so that that whole chapter is all about the importance of class because the argument there is that Oppenheimer was taught how to get his way and negotiate his way out of trouble because that's what you learn when you grow up in an educated wealthy family on Central Park West that is the gift that upper middle class parents give to their kids and that is the thing that is notably lacking from the upbringing of who grew up on the other side of the tracks and that's another one of these impediments that we don't want to talk about that and I think that we have to acknowledge if we're going to do something about or help those at the on the other side of the tracks to to achieve what is the difference you briefly described it but what is the difference between practical and analytical intelligence why has practical intelligence served Steve Jobs so much better than the analytical intelligence of thousands of people at competitive corporations well practical intelligence so here we're getting into sort of this whole I mean there's been recently been a great deal of interest in this notion you with emotional intelligence is a kind of subset of this and and we you know we have become aware that when we look at people who are very very successful in their careers they're they do not fit the profile of those who are very very successful at school right so we're becoming increasingly and painfully aware that performance in at academic tasks is is not the most useful of predictors of performance in the real world now we kind of knew that all along right but we we go through these periods of conveniently forgetting that fact jobs you know I don't know whether jobs I mean jobs is and I don't actually talk about jobs I haven't in my book nor have I thought about him to any great extent I he's clearly a wonderful example of something what he is a wonderful example of though I'm not sure I mean I'm I am i I do have a little moment in the book where I talk about how so many people in Silicon Valley I was so weird that so many people in Silicon Valley were all born in 1955 or thereabouts which is this a generational effect that they too have come of age in the mid 80s when the to be twenty-one and nineteen eighty seven or six I'm sorry nineteen seventy six is a wonderful thing because 1976 is the year the personal computer kind of comes in agent you want to be 21 right and so gates and jobs and bill joy and all these characters the guys at Sun Microsystems they're all born in 55 Eric Schmidt at Google and that's not a coincidence so that's a kind of an additional advantage that we don't sort of think about so he has back going from him and he also has you know jobs is born in Mountain View or not boy he's raised in Mountain View he my favorite story about jobs is as a kid you know he goes to he hangs out at all these flea markets in Mountain View mountain you is of course the epicenter of Silicon Valley right at a flea market in Mountain View in the 70s and the late 60s is a place is a it is not what they sell you know bad oil paintings and and clothes from the 40s it's a place where they sell computer parts so he's like he steeped in this world he's getting is 10,000 hours in from this high and this is building little sets and at one point he um my favorite story about him is um he he whoops he's um he's trying to build some little gizmo in his basement and he can't find a part and so he calls on the phone the guy down the street who he's you know one of his neighbors and that guy down the street is Bill Hewlett of Hewlett and Packard right so now so you know this guy doesn't come from anywhere right I mean it's another another example of how excellence is grounded in specific environments and Bill Gates if Bill Gates grows up in Butte Montana if Steve Jobs grows up in the middle of Montana he's not the head of Apple right you you have to have that you had he's from Mountain View and that matters in his very very in fact I saw a documentary on Steve Jobs and the first thing out of his mouth which is interestingly was the first thing out of Bill Gates's mouth when I gonna get him from my book and the first thing out of his mouth is I am the luckiest guy in the world and that's what he means that he was lucky because he here's a computer pioneer who's born in the town that invented the computer practically really but that invented that you know that was the epicenter of of computing in the 1960s and 70s and we're bill Hewlett and Packard are down the street right and that's a that's a incalculable importance in understanding you know why who why he is who he is what was your unique opportunity that you attribute as your tipping point was it your 10 10 10 thousand hours at Washington Post in New Yorker and the unique and wonderful parents Graham and rejoice what was my well I did get I mean I have a 10,000 things really resonates with me because I I spent exactly 10 years at the Washington Post and when I started I was not a very good writer and not a very good reporter and when I left I had learned those two skills and there is no more I mean when people talk about 10,000 hours they talk they use this wonderful term called deliberate practice which says that it is not enough merely to do something for 10 years in order to be good it must be it must take the form of deliberate practice in other words it must be a kind of intensive feedback rich mentor filled highly kind of intensive environment right it's playing the piano with your you know 70 or old piano teacher from Vienna standing over your shoulder wrapping you on the knuckles when you make a mistake it's learning surgery at the hands of a master surgeon who when you make a mistake you know sits down after the surgery is over and makes you practice that thing five or six or seven times until you get it right that's what we mean by deliberate practice so it wasn't that I was sitting in my room writing on my laptop I was rather I had this extraordinary tuning to be at an institution where I had was surrounded by incredibly expert role models where we're going to say Bob Woodward's desk was was ten yards from in the newsroom of The Washington Post and where my editors were people who had been working in newspapers for 30 years and if you did something wrong or dumb or ill-formed they wrapped you on the knuckles and they you couldn't go home until you got it right and that went on for 10 years and that is how you learn to be good at something and you know that was a you know I did not create that opportunity for myself it was given to me for the most by the way random of reasons it it's not worth going into now but it remains slightly mysterious to me how I ever got that job but having got it I was like Steve Jobs in Mountain View you know I was in an environment that allowed my particular and you know that was thinking a lot about it was thinking about that that in part kind of led me to to want to write this account of success because I'm so keenly aware of how it took that form in my life I think one of those interesting things raised and like is when you talk about when people describe the ideal mate they only can describe the trades of which they're consciously aware but because they could easily meet someone who needs all those trades but the chemistry is just not right because there's so many things which not consciously aware which are unconscious could you talk a little bit more about how that mechanism mechanism works in some different ways to play into everyday life Wow take me back to a book I haven't thought about it six years well you don't actually ties in very beautifully up to what I've been talking about just now so if you think about so here's a quick puzzle when we meet somebody for the first time this is actually the way part of much blink and outliers can you meet someone for the first time there are certain things that you are really really good at instantly figuring out about that person and certain things that you're really bad if any of us meet someone to whom and we're asked the question are you attracted to that person we can answer incredibly accurately incredibly quickly right in fact we can do it in less than a second why are we so good at that because we've had 10,000 hours of practice what do you spend your teenage years doing right all day long over and over again in the most deliberate way imaginable the most intensive feedback rich like everything I was talking about before endlessly going through your mind this little loop about am i attractive after breakfast what am i attractive by the time you're like you know what 1718 you're really really good at that and you will remain good at that for the rest of your life same thing with extraversion what do you learn from the first moment as a child when you relate to other kids what do you what's the question you ask do I want to play with that person does that person make me laugh right those are questions that we asked from this point all the way on every time we go to a group we gravitate towards those people who can promise us that experience right so of course we're good at that now what are we not good at well we're not good at knowing whether someone is conscientious we're not good at knowing whether someone is honest intelligent thoughtful all those kinds of other much more complex tasks why because we don't have 10,000 hours of practice for those kinds of things we judge making those kinds of much more complex judgments they're really hard to make we don't have the kind of feedback necessary you can't have deliberate practice on conscientiousness because in order to judge someone's conscientiousness you've got to be able to see them in very specific circumstances over and over and over again we don't have that you know with the vast majority people we meet we never have that ability that opportunity to practice so that's why you know that is why it explains both our extraordinary strengths and our extraordinary weaknesses when it comes to the judgments we make about both mates and also you know about you know higher job hires or you know any kind of personal transaction is both enabled and limited by those facts about about what we've been able to practice just Justin I hope you Mai Cheers Oh bah and how you fixin to your success yeah um I was gonna censor it I was a hard one too there's a couple of interesting things you know one of the in the second half of the book we didn't talk about this here but in the second half of the book I talk a lot about culture and about what are the ways in which our cultural Heritage's on influenced the way we behave and influence our ability to achieve and so I talk to chapters one which talks about how your cultural heritage affects your ability to do math and another is about how your cultural heritage affects your ability to fly an airplane safely and in both those cases I believe and argue that almost nothing is more relevant to the discussion of what it takes to be good at math and what it takes to be a good pilot as the cultural background of the math student or the pilot and so it's an exploration of just about how extraordinary influence real culture is and then I have a chapter on my parents or my mother's family my mother is is a brown skinned Jamaican and that chapter is all about what does it mean to be a brown skinned Jamaican and what are the and it turns out there are a whole series of advantages rooted deeply in the peculiar history of Jamaica that accrue to people who are of mixed race background in Jamaica among them the fact that the British colonial presence in Jamaica if you were the offspring of a slave and a a landowner as my great-great-great great-great great-grandfather was you were freed you weren't pushed back into slavery as you were in the in America in Jamaica in the West Indies you were freed because the British wanted to they were so outnumbered they wanted to kind of gather as many hopefully friendly faces around them as possible so they may actually educate mixed-raced offspring and this and the argument there is that this kind of pattern of advantage that goes back 300 years matters today it helps to explain why my mother has been as successful as she has it helps to explain why her mother was a successful and on well I I'm one is I'm very tempted to make that kind of argument with Obama I don't know enough about I'm not in a position to make it in a kind of sustained way but it is more than significant that he is the product of it that his father is African Kenyan and not African American and I don't mean that in any way as a way of denigrating African Americans and up you know and holding up Africans I'm simply saying look these are two profoundly different cultural Heritage's and to these once we are honest and open and acknowledge that our cultural Heritage's matter we have to I think we I think we have to say look surely it is significant that this man comes from this particular kind of background and was not as a result saddled with so many of the particular and I think exquisitely meaningful burdens that come with being an african-american and you know along the same lines I've always thought it was well I'll stop I'll stop at that but I I it's um it's a difficult thing to discuss in a in a kind of open way but I think it's it's it is um it's it's it's it's it's it's worthy of consideration you make love well society can make luck so the question was can you make luck individuals can't make luck but society can so when you know to go back to that example of of hockey and we choose the January first cutoff date and so we then bestow luck upon kids born in January February March right we could if we wanted to create system that bestowed a lucky break on anyone who wanted to play hockey we could have three parallel hockey leagues one for kids born in first four months of the year one for kids born in four to eight and one two kids born in nine to twelve right that would be a way in which we could even out the distribution of opportunity we choose not to do that for reasons that I don't understand we could simply do the same thing in you know right now we in a school system we are kids who are the relatively oldest in their elementary school class are given muck still we stow a lucky break on them if we wanted to we could have three parallel streams in elementary schools divided up by a month of birth right a real simple way to even out luck so that's a something that as a society we can address very easily but if you're the kid who's born in December in the January first cutoff date great one classroom you can't do something you can do right and and it said it reminds us that our over emphasis on individual responsibility for achievement is a way of evading responsibility for our collective efforts and on behalf of success Mountain thanks for being here the square your theory of 10,000 hours success don't forget something with the notion of by many employers that I don't care about experience by is personality not experience area yeah his personal example in hiring executive assistant I care less about someone who's been an executive assistant for 10 years $10,000 and more that they work in a bargaining table the telephone calls are coming in well remember with 10,000 hours we are describing we're talking about continuity complex tasks so it's most applicable when we're talking about being a surgeon being a computer programmer being a chess grandmaster as we move kind of further down the kind of the the cognitive complexity ladder it's less of an issue and so I think you're absolutely right when you hire an executive assistant you do hire for temperament and because you believe that the things that cognitively complex tasks they need to master are not so complex that they will require 10,000 hours unless you're running you know a really extraordinary operation over there I would imagine that Bernie Madoff's executive assistant might well have had to have 10,000 hours but it is but your criteria would shift dramatically if you were hiring at the upper end if you were hiring if you were hiring up a chief surgeon at Mount Sinai we would ask a very different set of right you don't hire on temperament there in fact you probably would do well to ignore temperament down my experience with surgeons at Mount Sinai is that they do in fact change the way work hours are and I was wondering if you think that there is a difference to the quality of the fourth hour that you spend practicing thirty-six yeah yeah well this is this is actually you're upset about to bring it up this is a beautiful illustration of this very debate we're talking about so we have this extraordinary robust data on 10,000 hours and it says that as far as we can tell there are no shortcuts so you simply need to do a certain number of repetitions of some difficult task before you can master it so given that fact that there doesn't seem to be a shortcut we haven't found one yet you cannot be an expert surgeon unless you've put in that number of repetitions so we have this question of now lastly we have this question of how do we how do we choose to to get those to structure those that necessary minimum number of repetitions do we want to do it where you stay up 36 hours in a row or is there a way that is more a better way to do that now that is a that is a kind of that is a question that is that demands a kind of careful experimental analysis I don't know whether we know that I mean a surgeon I having never stayed up for 36 hours in a row I have no idea how good my learning ability is in the 36th hour but certainly given the fact you've got to get a certain number of reps in there's no way around the onerous nature of medical training but the question is you know is there a way to is 0 is there some kind of balance that we could strike between between the necessary number of reps and a humane learning environment like that's the issue this is interesting thing about class advantages which is it's a constant Vantage is a u-shaped curve right so it sucks to be at the bottom it gets better as you come towards the top but waiting at the very top it sucks again right in fact if this gets so this it's like there's a matrix there are advantages that are advantages there are advantages that are disadvantages there are disadvantages that are advantages and there are disadvantages that are I forgotten last time whatever you don't have thing so if you are Warren Buffett's kid that's an advantage that's a disadvantage right because if you're so rich that you have no reason to ever like it's really hard to put in ten thousand hours for example if daddy has twenty billion dollars right it's a lot easier if daddy has two hundred thousand dollars right in fact you probably daddy probably has to have two hundred thousand hours two hundred thousand dollars if you got to get that kind of ten thousand hours in so you had this depending on where you are in the curve you can either be richly advantaged or it can spin around and start to hurt you again and is this lovely I'm strained this is a huge idea is really big in the 19th century in the Henry Ward Beecher who was a very famous preacher in 19th century New York and had a very wealthy congregation after one of the devastating financial crises of I think the 1870s he addresses his congregation of wealthy Wall Streeters and he says to them how lucky they are that their children will have a chance to escape the you know enervating effects of wealth he was delighted he thought that it was the best thing possible the children of these potentates should be free of the yoke of economic advantage and should have to kind of you know actually work for a living and you know there's something to that because these kids were not being pushed into absolute deprivation but they were just being pushed back to the fat part of the curve the point where they were just rich enough to be able to get to get advantages but not so rich as to have their own ambition completely enervated success by gender well this a it's a it fits in very beautifully into this theory right because what I'm saying is that when we look at patterns of achievement we need to pay attention first of all to the social and environmental and generational preconditions for that achievement and not at the individual right and not ask in other words I want us to stop asking questions about people's innate abilities and ask questions first and foremost about their social advantages the kinds of things that put them in a position to do something when it comes to the achievement of women in certain kinds of fields there is a tendency of the population that wants to rush to the innate argument right there are all kinds of people who will make all kinds of fancy arguments about how well the reason women don't excel in math is because their brains don't do this particular thing and you know bla bla right to which I say wait a minute you're putting the cart before the horse long before we have we even considered that question we should ask ourselves are the social preconditions for achievement in math and science equal for men and women right and if we can identify a difference in those social preconditions then then that's what we should that's what we should spend our time and attention and if after we've equalized those conditions there continues to be a difference in performance only then should we ask the question about innate ability I mean this goes to this was a very kind of beautiful way of explaining this question that is this idea that the psychometrician James Flynn um has we talks about capitalization and capitalization is the word he uses to describe this the question of what percentage of people who are capable of doing x end up doing x right so suppose we could define any way we want so supposedly went to Harlem and we said what is the professional basketball capitalization rate for the black teenagers of Harlem in other words what percentage of Harlem black teenage Harlem basketball players who have the talents the ability to play in the NBA end up playing in the NBA right that percentage is the capitalization rate for black kids in Harlem or you can ask the question what percentage of kids who have the intellectual ability to be a professional a doctor or a lawyer end up being a doctor or a lawyer and Flynn does this really wonderful work where he shows that that the professional capitalization rate differs enormous ly by ethnic group so among the ethnic group with the highest capitalization rate for the professions is our Chinese Americans who have a cap rate of seventy eight percent which is astonishing it says that seventy-eight percent of all Chinese American immigrants and their children in America who have the brains to be a doctor or a lawyer become a doctor or a lawyer right that is a an extraordinary achievement it says that within that community they have managed to exploit their intellectual capital to a degree that almost no other group in human history has ever done right it's a powerful and beautiful thing that we should learn from the same number for white Americans would be I think is in the 50s and the same number for African Americans is in the public in the teens right and that says so we're not talking about at all about the native levels of ability in all those different groups right we're completely uninterested in all we're interested in is how good are you looks are at exploiting the talent that you've got and what we see is there are enormous differences from group to group right so another great example this is Canyon distance runners you go to the World cross country championship next step next March the top the first ten people across the finish line will be Kenyan or Ethiopia and some people say oh that's because they're innately better distance runners than Westerners to which I say nonsense what that says to me is their capitalization rate for distance running is probably 99% they have found and exploited the talent of every single you know young Kenyan or Ethiopian who wants to run our capitalization rate for distance running in the United States is probably 1% right I mean within this room there may well be people who have the talent to be a world-class distance runner who have never run a step so we can't even begin to talk about whether they are innately better than us until we have a capitalization rate that's equal to theirs until we have social structures that are in place to allow us to see how much talent we have right and that is so the capitalization rate for female scientists in this country is a fraction of what it is for male scientists that's the appropriate way to think about that question ladies and gentleman isn't be a reception in the back which drinks for everybody and Malcolm is an assigned books and interact with people so please join me in thanking for brilliant
tl;dr: Hard work and LUCK