each year Microsoft Research hosts hundreds of influential speakers from around the world including leading scientists renowned experts in technology book authors and leading academics and makes videos of these lectures freely available okay so mr. Gladwell is here today to discuss his new book outliers outliers is a book about success it starts with a very simple question what is the difference between those who do something special with their lives and everyone else the book explores this question by examining the lives of the remarkable among us the brilliant the exceptional and the unusual through his book we learned that the way we think about success is all wrong Malcolm Gladwell is a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author of two best-selling books the tipping point and blink please join me in welcoming Malcolm Gladwell to Microsoft so no pleasure to be here you know I don't work in a office I work at home and I I forget what offices are like and I was around the corner and I I saw this big open refrigerator with all kinds of subjects I was like how cool is that I am I so I'm done with my new book which you know there are many things in it and I can say all kinds of things about it but I I thought I would talk about an idea that is actually not in the book but that I've been thinking about a lot since writing it and which encapsulate Sal OTT of what the book is about and it's um it's this idea that's called a capitalization and it is a concept that a very brilliant psychologist named James Flynn has written a lot about those of you who know something about IQ research will have heard of the Flynn effect that's James Flynn's idea and he's written a lot about this content of capitalization which is what is the rate at which a society capitalizes on its potential and it was what percentage of people who are capable of doing something actually end up doing that thing right how efficiently do we make use of the talents within a given group of people so let me give an example um you know how many of you read Michael Lewis's book The Blind Side which is this extraordinary book about a young man in East Memphis a teenager who's six foot six and 350 pounds and he's discovered by and adopted by a wealthy white family and they realized that he's an extraordinary athlete and they they work with him until he becomes one of the finest offensive lineman in the country and in fact he's about to be drafted into the NFL's as many years later and make a kajillion dollars and they it's this extraordinary story but the part of it that always stayed with me when I read it was it right at the very end the kid whose name is Michael Oh her says he's from the slums of Memphis he's Memphis and he says if everyone who I grew up with who was who was into football who had real ability in football actually ended up playing football they'd need to have two National Football League's and what he was saying was that that East Memphis did not do a very good job of capitalizing on its athletic ability right and so Lewis actually follows up on this and he he does this he talked to some people in the he spent the school system and he asked them what percentage of kids in East Memphis who get a college athletic scholarship actually end up going to college and the answer was one in six which absolutely floored me because I would have thought that when it comes if there was one thing in America that we were really good at doing it would be exploiting the athletic ability of our youth in particular of our of our african-american youth I would have thought that in an inner-city area the capitalization rate for sports would have been 90% but in fact what we learn in East Memphis is that the capitalization rate is one in six it's 16 percent right so now think about it if in something that we care about as much as sports right something we there's possibly nothing in American society that we devote more time and attention intellectual resources to then the maximization of the professional sporting experience in something that we cared that much about our cap rate is 16 percent so how high must it be in things that we don't care that much about right that's a very sobering notion and it says that as a society we have an awful lot long way to go towards properly maximizing the human potential of our members and so I realized when I thought about that book that outliers is really about that question it's about identifying sources of constraints on capitalization rates and figuring out how how to remove them so what I thought I do is just to talk about a variety of these constraints what are the kinds of things that lower cap rates in any number of different areas of human endeavor so one obvious one is poverty when that kid Michael her who grows up in East Memphis talks about what a tiny fraction of the kids he grew up with who had athletic ability actually end up going to college what he's talking about his poverty East Memphis is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States and we know that that that kind of poverty makes it very very difficult for those who have an ability to do something to actually end up doing that very thing and that's of an obvious constraint on capitalization but one of the things I think is is true of poverty is that we tend even as we acknowledge its importance in constraining capitalization we underestimate just what a powerful constraint it is and let me give an example in the book I talk about the famous German study that was done in California and this is a study done in the 20s began in the 20s in California and Turman who is a psychologist at Stanford in fact determine who was the first Dean of engineering at Stanford in fact isn't there a hall called terman hall at Stanford how many would Stanford that's this guy's son anyway the side fact for those of you into Stanford he does this thing where he he gives an IQ test to 250,000 California schoolchildren and he basically identifies the top 120 points Oh kids with IQs of 140 plus genius level essentially and he tracks those kids for the rest of their lives for 50 years and he's trying to figure out what happens to them and it's his notion starting out that he said yet he thinks because he's so invested in the notion that IQ is the single most determinant of life success he thinks what he's done is identified the cohort who will turn out to be the leaders in academia in academia in industry in the people who will end up you know running all the organizations and being the top politicians and the top intellectuals right so he follows them and follows them for over the course of 20 and 30 years and 20 and 30 years in he realizes actually it's not true at all and that these kids turn out as when they turn out to be adults they have a variety of strikingly different fates there a small group that does very well the top 15% do actually occupy positions of real prominence in society then there's a big group in the middle who have pretty average lives and remember these are kids with adults with genius-level IQ and the majority of them do they're kind of like have moderately successful professional lives and then there is a chunk at the bottom who have who are by any measure failures who have whose lives turn out by by any kind of occupational yardstick to be massively disappointing who make dude who dot do not seem to make use of their extraordinary human potential at all and the question that Turman has to wrestle with is why did that group fail what's the difference between this group who did beautifully well on this group who did so poorly at the bottom and he runs through I mean this question obviously obsesses him and he runs through every conceivable explanation for that difference and he says that their personalities it's not he says is it there is it there their habits is it there and it goes on and on down the list and he realizes in the end that the answer is really really simple and that is that the kids who did best these genius kids who ended up succeeding in the world were the ones who came from wealthy households and that the genius-level kids who ended up utter failures in life were the ones who were born into poor families right born into families where parents hadn't gone to college where they weren't books in the home where there wasn't the kind of cultural and institutional support for a habit of learning and a habit of intellectual activity what he was saying in other words that even if you endow a child with a brain that is a one-in-a-billion brain that is not sufficient to ensure the success of that child that poverty is such a powerful constraint on capitalisation that it can reduce that genius child to a lifetime of worse than mediocrity a lifetime of really profound on disappointment so that's the that's the first constraint like I say it's the obvious constraint but I think it's important to impress on on for all of us to understand that poverty is probably a bigger constraint than we think particularly those of us who are not intimately connected with it we may tend to underestimate what an extraordinary impact that has on on limiting people's ability to do well so let's look with some other constraints that are maybe less obvious I got really interested in this book in looking at the composition of elite sports teams and and if you do that you find all cut find out all kinds of strange things so at one point I looked at the roster of the 2007 junior Czech hockey team now I did not pick that team for any I picked that team at random I just was interested in the that's an elite team it was the second or third best junior hockey team in the world after of course the Canadiens I'm Canadian and so it's a it's a really elite team these are the kind of kids who go on to play in the NHL or in the illegal adult leagues in in in Europe so I'm going to read to you the birth dates of the members of that national Czech team 2007 January 3rd January 3rd January 12th February 8th February 10th February 17th February 20th February 24th March 5th March 10th March 26th April 22nd May 5th June 6th July 2nd July 19th July 20th August 15th August 25th August 31st November 29th and December 31st now what's strange about that list did you notice 11 of the 20 names are born in January February and March it is a massively skewed distribution of birth dates towards the first three months of the year now that is not something idiosyncratic to the 19 to 2007 Chuck junior hockey team in fact if you look at any elite hockey team anywhere in the world and for that matter any elite soccer team anywhere in the world you will see the same skewed distribution you will see that an overwhelming number of the members of those teams are born in January February and March now why is that the answer is that the eligibility cut-offs for age class hockey and soccer throughout the world is January 1st and in both those sports we very very aggressively recruit the best and the brightest kids at a very early age so we go and we look at a had a a group of 10 year olds we watch them play hockey or soccer and we picked the best right and we select them out we put them in all-star teams and we give them a special coaching and extra practice time and more games and encourage them and encourage them right thinking that is the best way to capitalize on the talent pool in that particular sport but think about it when you're 10 years old who's going to be the best at a particular activity physical activity the oldest kids right the kid who is born in January has ten months of maturity on the kid born in October and when you're ten years old ten months is an extraordinary long period of time it can be that it can be three or four inches in height it can be a difference between between being clumsy and being massively coordinated so we think we are picking the best and we're not we're picking the oldest right and then we take the oldest and we give them special coaching and all kinds of extra opportunities and all kinds of extra games and lo and behold ten years later they really are the best right but it's a self-fulfilling prophecy we created the conditions that made them the best and foolishly thought we were actually identifying real talent now you only have to look at that and realize what an extraordinary constraint on capitalisation that is right logic would tell us that the distribution of hockey ability or soccer ability should be even throughout the year there by rights should be as many great soccer players or hockey fairies born in December as January but when we look at these teams that we see they're overwhelmingly weighted for the first three months of the year that suggests that we are that the capitalization rate for hockey it's must be less than 50% right we are leaving all the talent born in the second half of the year on the table now there's clearly a very easy solution to that problem and that is that when we put together leagues of four soccer soccer and hockey and at her support in the h-class arena we should have different streams for kids born in different months we should have three parallel leagues one for kids born in the first four months of the year one for kids born in the middle for months and one for kids born in the last four months right and have them develop independently until they're in their mid-teens and then select it's a really simple way and if we did that we would double or triple our capitalization of talent in that particular realm now why don't we do that right because we refuse to admit that our own rules arbitrary rules constrain capitalization and we cling to a naive belief that these meritocracies that we have constructed in this particular realm are entirely rational and efficient and fair so this is a second constraint on capitalization it's the stupidity constraint right there's our inability to understand that there is something deeply arbitrary and unfair in the way we have written the rules on which a meritocracy exists now for those of you who think that that is a minor issue and that so what if those kids can't play hockey you know why can't they just play another sport let me remind you that this is true of many sports I'm gonna I'm gonna give you the the birth dates of the 2007 check junior soccer team ready January 1st January 3rd January 5th January 12th January 26th January 27th February 1st February 14th February 20th February 1st February 9th April 16th May 20th May 26th June 22nd June 24th August 18th and September 26th but if that's not a contest ability constraint on capitalization on football ability on soccer ability in a country by the way that cares more about football than you know perhaps anything I don't know what is that's a and I you know we need to take in other words very seriously the question of how we choose to structure systems of America meritocratic systems and this also you can apply this exact same logic to educational opportunities if you look at how well kids do in school based purely on their birth dates on whether they fall into the youngest oldest or middle age cohort in their class you see exactly the same patterns in fact there's a beautiful study done recently that tracked thousands and thousands of kids across the West and tracked them all the way through to their university level and found that kids born in the relatively youngest cohort of their age class were 11 percent less likely to go to college than kids born in the relatively oldest cohort of their of their age class 11 percent is a huge difference and it says that we are that is 11 percent of kids whose opportunity is being whose whose whose human potential is being squandered right completely foreclosed why because we are so stupid as to organize our elementary school education without reference to the obvious fact of biological maturity right it is another it is a glaring example of how stupidity constraints dramatically limit the capitalization of human potential so third constraint and I can go on about constraints but I'll stop with the third one this is in many ways the most fun one and the most controversial one but but I think it's it's worth digging into and it's it's what I what I would say as an attitudinal constraint on capitalization so one of the I have a whole chapter in my book which is about this question of why it is that Asian kids do so much better at math than their Western counterparts now the numbers here are irrefutable and they're extraordinary the differences in mathematics performance between kids in Singapore Hong Kong South Korea Japan and kids in America Germany England or what have you though fact we just got of results from these international math test comparisons I think a couple weeks ago and we're talking about the difference is not this the difference is is that and if you look closely at trying to figure out why it seems to be the case that the difference the reason for that difference has to do with attitudes it has to do with what is the attitude with which the child in those two sets of cultures approaches a math problem and it seems to be the case that when Asian kids sit down and face a high school math problem they have a different expectation of what solving that problem entails they have an expectation that if they apply effort to the problem the problem is solvable whereas when we look very closely at the attitudes of Western children they seem to have the attitude that their ability to solve that math problem is a function of their ability of their innate ability something they either have or they don't and that attitudinal difference seems to make a profit have a profound effect on the ability of kids to do well at math because as it turns out the Asian approach to mathematics is the correct one when I say correct let me give an example so these international math tests that we give to kids around the world they're called Tim's we give the Tim's every four years it's the same test two kids all over the world and and that's how we come up with these rankings of how countries do well when we give the Tim's to kids at the same time as we get them to math test we give them a questionnaire and the questionnaire is really long it's 120 questions long and it asked them all kinds of questions about that it will be useful to researchers so how many hours do you study do your parents encourage you do you like man you know all those kinds of things but it's really really long and it's so long in fact that most kids don't finish the questionnaire it's just too too long right so a couple years ago this really brilliant guy called rolling ball at Penn I decided he would rank the countries of the world by what percentage of questions on the questionnaire their kids finished right now you know what he found when he did that ranking and compared it to the ranking of countries on the world by what percentage of questions on the math test their kids got right the two rankings were exactly the same and when I say exactly the same I mean there was a correlation of point nine point nine in the history of social science there has never been a correlation of point nine between two it's the same thing when we if you want to know how good a country doesn't mathematics in other words you don't have to ask that those countries kids any math questions you just have to make them do a task that requires them to sit down at a seat for an extended period of time and focus on a task wait and if they can do it they're good at math really really fascinating in other words what we're saying is when we look at Asian cultures what we are seeing is this this difference in mathematical ability what we're seeing is not some underlying difference in talent or aptitude for mathematics but a difference in capitalization that Asian the Asian cultural attitude about work has the result of being a far more efficient way of capitalizing on math ability than Western attitudes towards work and that tells us where the deficit in our mathematical education in the Western world lies it's not in our curriculum it's not in the quality of our teachers it's not in the size of our classrooms it's not in the amount of money we spend on schools it is the attitude in the head of the child as he or she sits down in 11th grade and does algebra or calculus right and by the way nor is it a problem in our genes as some people would like to say of there's a whole bizarre argument that Westerners have I'm an inferior set of genes when it comes to mathematics then Easterners you know a totally ludicrous and unnecessary step in this argument no it's about culture it's about a difference in attitude and about their ability to far more efficiently capitalize on the abilities of their kids now why now why does this the case I mean this is a I'll just address for a moment a really really interesting question is okay if Asian cultures have profoundly different attitudes towards effort when it comes to mathematics why right why does that come from and nobody knows but in my book I venture what I think is a plausible explanation and that is that I think it has to do with patterns of effort laid down in in historical agricultural practices that when you look what what is the thing that Hong Kong South China South Korea and Japan all have in common and that is they are historically rice-growing cultures right and what is distinctive about rice growing it is the most labor-intensive and cognitively complex form of Agriculture known to men we know so my my my father's European ancestors in the Middle Ages in northern England probably worked a thousand hours a year as peasant farmers so that meant was they worked from from dawn to noon five days a week on the weekends they drank themselves silly and during the winter they slept basically and they got lots of I don't feel this but a peasant in medieval England got lots and lots and lots of holidays that peasants counterpart in South China or Japan in the same period would not have worked 1,000 hours a year they would have worked 3,000 hours a year for the simple reason that rice farming is just a whole it is not not a difference not a that's not just a difference in degree from wheat farming is a difference in kind it's a whole different way of working it demands that you wake up at dawn and work all the way until dusk and demands that you work on the weekend in fact there's a wonderful Chinese proverb that I quote in the book which is a man who works dawn to dusk 360 days a year will not go hungry right which is encapsulate the difference between eastern and western agricultural practices no my peasant ancestors in northern England it would be inconceivable they could call that a proverb they would have said the man who works a hundred and seventy five days a year dawn to Allah and may or may not be hungry well my argument is if your culture does that if that's what you guys what you do for a thousand years that attitude is a deeply rooted part of your makeup and win your kids even if they didn't themselves work in a rice paddy when they sit down and face a calculus or an algebra problem that legacy that attitude towards effort and persistence translates beautifully to that most modern of tasks and that and means that your culture will do a far better job of of capitalizing on on on its innate ability now is that the whole story I don't know probably not they're probably all kinds of other explanations as well and I get into some of them but I think it is important that when we look at things from this perspective to try and add to try and answer questions using history and culture as our guide when you think about problems in other words from the perspective of capitalization I think you look for answers in different places then when you have a far more simple or more reductive approach to these kinds of things now why is this capitalization discussion of capitalization so important because I think when we look at why certain people or groups succeed in the world our default explanation is always of those differences in success reflect underlying differences in ability and we forget about how much poverty stupidity and attitudes are far more important constraints on on capitalization you know remember I'm a I'm up happy I'm a runner and I observed like most runners have over the last 25 or 30 years how utterly dominant the Kenyans and the Ethiopians have been in long-distance running and this has prompted all kinds of people to say that this must represent some fundamental difference in underlying levels of ability that there must be something peculiar about the genetic makeup of East Africans that makes them better runners than the rest of us that's and explanation right but a far more elegant and persuasive and simpler explanation for them is that they have a higher level of capitalization than we do Alberto Salazar who's the great American marathoner he recently pointed out that in Kenya there are probably a million schoolboys between the age of 10 and 17 years of age who run but over ten around 10 to 12 miles a day right a million boys running 10 to 12 miles a day between the age of 12 and 17 the same number in the United States is probably 5,000 if that right so our capitalization rate when it comes to distance running what is it is it it's surely less than 1% right it's probably point 0.5 percent how many kids who are capable of being great long-distance runners in the United States ever discover whether they have that that that ability they never do because I never actually do the work necessary to find it but in Kenya how many great distance runners do they miss if they have a million school boys running ten miles a day almost none their capitalization rate is probably 95% that's the difference right the difference has to do with what does the culture value and where does it spend its time and attention and how good is it at finding and make and exploiting that kind of human potential they're really good at that when it comes to distance running and we're not and I think when you think about things that weigh it powerfully clarifies how you go about improving our use of human potential it means that you don't give up means that you don't say look at a group that's not succeeding and say they are incapable of success and say that the problems that they face are too powerful to an eight to ingrain for us to do anything about the capitalization argument I think enables us it empowers us it tells us that we can actually make a profound difference in how well people turn out if we choose to pay attention to the constraints imposed by poverty by stupidity and by attitude so that's a little glimmer of the kinds of things that I'm resting in his book there's many more but I would be happy to answer any questions then how many of you have I don't know if you mentioned people more over 40 or 50 can't spin spin thousand I was doing something will you suggest to us oh this is that the question is in reference to I talked about in the book at one point about um how long does it take to be good at something and the this observation by many psychologists that that to master a cognitively complex task whether it's playing chess at an elite level or being a brain surgeon or a Cosco music composer or a good computer programmer requires seemingly without exception 10,000 hours of deliberate practice so 10,000 hours is roughly four hours a day for ten years so you need to put in that kind of time before even the most talented of people innately talented people can ever achieve an elite status but I would actually the and what I don't think this argument that observation suggests that people who are older in life this is closing doors to people who are older life on the country I says it I think it suggests the opposite that it says that at any point in our lives if we are in a position to apply ourselves in a formal and rigorous and intensive way to a problem we should be able to see fruits of that it says in other words that what is special about people who do highly extraordinary or creative acts is not that they are there's something special of something inherent in their mind some particular genius or that there is some magical property associated with youth right on the country it says that know what sets them apart is that simply that what we are seeing is the the the necessary and predictable outcome of applying oneself rigorously to a task something that can that is available to anyone at any point in their life if they choose to apply themselves in that way so if I think it's a my liberating observation so the question was about Little League baseball literally baseball has a cutoff in mid summer or early summer and in fact if you look at the distribution of birth dates of baseball players professional baseball players in in America you will see that they are highly clustered in the late summer months most baseball players are June July August or July August September I forgotten exactly where the so we see the same effect very clearly with baseball what does the kid who is born on an April 27th do well in a certain way nothing there's nothing you can do this is I mean this is some one of the things that I would that I were in writing this book was objecting to was this strain and American thinking that says that all obstacles are ultimately overcome a ball by individuals if that individuals simply chooses to be determined enough I think that's very true and I'll persistence determination are incredibly important components of success but we also have to understand that when it comes to stupidity constraints there is very little that individuals can do that's the reason that's why we call them stupidity constraints because they have been stupidly appo imposed on a collective level and are powerful enough to overcome even really really determined individuals there are certain things that can only be done at the society level right and you know it is only our naive like I said I only our naive faith in the efficiency and fairness of Metacritic systems that prevents us from seeing this the only thing you can do for the kid born April 27th who wants to be a baseball player is do what I talked about is create parallel leagues based on on physical maturity that's the way you do it and it is that if you look when I read that roster list for those Czech teams you know there are lots and lots and lots of kids in check in in the Czech Republic who want to be successful soccer or hockey players but who happened to be born at the end of the year and you can see there's the evidence they're not getting it they're not making it right it's not enough to ask the individual to I'm to try harder sure so I was kind of wondering as I read through the book if you know given it it's kind of about constraints placed are someone arbitrarily and if you came across any examples in your research of sort of outliers of those theories in other words people that managed to succeed in certain things despite those constraints yeah so yeah this is a very interesting question so there's something I've thought about a lot subsequent to this so the book identifies I'm really interested in this book in advantages that are advantages meaning the kinds of opportunities and advantages that end up putting you further ahead than you would have been otherwise right but that's clearly only one of four conditions there are also advantages that are disadvantages so if your father is worth a billion dollars do you think that you would be as a kid better off or worse off today right then you then you would be if your father made $100,000 I would rather have a dad who made a hundred thousand than have done a billion I think they're having a father with a billion dollars would actually be quite crippling to your motivation and so that's an advantage that's actually a disadvantage right so then there's also disadvantages that are disadvantages so that would be that's condition three and that would be to grow up the child of a single mother who's addicted to drugs in you know in East Memphis is a disadvantage that's a disadvantage you really you know almost no one overcomes that right but what you're asking about is the fourth condition which is are there disadvantages that are advantages now that is the most fascinating one of all so for example one of the most fascinating observations that's been made in recent years is that someone did a study recently that pointed out that 30% of American entrepreneurs have been diagnosed at some point in their life with a profound learning disability and you know you only have the list of people who fall into this category so the dyslexic you know Branson's a dyslexic Charles Schwab is a dyslexic the guy who founded Kinkos is a dyslexic I can go on I mean the list is like this long right so why is that well the argument is that it's not a coincidence is in fact it is a direct function there entrepreneurialism is a direct function of their disability so how do you succeed if you cannot read or write from the very earliest stages in your elementary education you compensate for that if you're the ones who make it a lot of kids don't make it but those who do composite how do they compensate well from the very earliest age you learn how to delegate so kids who make it through school kids who make it to school who can't read or write you know how they do it they do it by having others do their reading reading and writing for them right you learn you compensate by being a really good oral communicator you can't write or read so you your talker right you learn how to problem-solve right because your life is one big problem you're in an institution asks you to do two things and you can't do either of them right and you learn how to be a leader you have to do all those things problem solved delegate oral communicate you learn how to lead in fact there's a beautiful saying that was also done that said that pointed out that of dyslexic entrepreneurs 80% of them were a captain of a high school sports team versus 30% of non dyslexic entrepreneurs that's the character type right so when you go down to the real world and what is a required of an entrepreneur that they'd be a good leader that they delegate that they'd be a problem solver and that they'd be good oral communicators these people have been spending their whole life practicing the very the four skills that are at the cornerstone of entrepreneurial success now you talk to those people and you ask John Chambers dyslexic but it's difficult reading his own email you asked all those guys what did you know what role did this Lexia play in your success they would say it wasn't an obstacle that I had to overcome it was in fact the reason I'm successful it is a disadvantage that ended up being an advantage now I am actually this category to me is the most fascinating one of all I'm saluting the other example one of the most striking findings in educational research is that there's almost no payoff that we can find to reducing class size even though all parents are obsessed with class size right irrationally so if your kid is in a class size of 25 and you hear that at some other school it's 19 until you pay $25,000 a year to get your kid at the school with the 19 kids instead of the 25 right in fact reams and reams and reams of academic studies have failed to show any advantage to smaller class sizes except for really disadvantaged kids in very very early grades for everyone else it's a total wash why is it a wash because it makes no sense why would you do just as well in a class where the teachers not paying you enough as much attention right shouldn't shouldn't be a correlation between teacher inputs and student performance I yes but only if there are there is no such thing as a disadvantage that can be an advantage what if the disadvantage of being all in a large classroom is something that you compensate for what if it's like dyslexia what if if you're one of 30 kids you compensate and learn self-reliance and that self-reliance in the end is just an important a trait has the thing that you would get from a heavy amount of teacher feedback right we are resolutely uninterested in the category of benefits that fall into that fourth category right we can't even talk about them no one wants to talk about what are the things what are the kind of customized disadvantages that we might introduce into our school system that might have a positive effect right and we're we're all we operate under this extraordinarily psychologically naive no that the only thing that matters in school are advantages that are advantages right as if everything else didn't exist like I would love to see for example and now ranting on and on but it is not like I live in Manhattan in Manhattan we had these super super super fancy private schools the most advantaged private schools in the world right the cost 30 grand a year high schools I'm not convinced that that isn't a that those schools don't fall into the category of advantages that are disadvantages I would love to see I would love to know on a kind of see a systematic analysis of whether you're helped why is it the case that you're better off going to that school then learning how to cope in a far more heterogeneous rough-and-tumble public school environment I don't it's not obvious to me why that's in fact most of the successful people who send their kids to those schools went to rough-and-tumble heterogeneous public schools so it is this massive act of cognitive dissonance that you turn on the very thing that clearly made you successful and deny it to your child right in the name of what right the same grandfather who says that he walked seven miles to school every morning barefoot drives his kid his grandchild in the SUV two blocks to school because it's raining out if it worked for you grandpa what isn't it work for me possible cultural explanations for success like you prepared an Asian to Western but even within my fingers off I've read a lot of studies that try to explain for example if its genetic or cultural it now there are more Nobel Prizes about Jews or any Western European Jew each turn your few Jews yeah is there any way to debunk that yeah so um a lot of advantages Jewish advantages are shared by other ethnic groups who have are in a similar sociological position so the parsees in India the Lebanese throughout the world the ethnic Chinese in Southeast Asia in Malaysia and Vietnam and I mean I could go on but there's a whole series of groups that if you look closely at their the roles they have played and the success they have achieved right so they're all they're all doing the same thing so Jews are not an anomalous they're not anomalous at all they are part of a pattern of accomplishment that is common to this these discrete ethnic minorities within larger countries and a lot of that has to do with the kind of extraordinary set of there are series of disadvantages that come with being in that position but there are also a set of advantages so outsider status being this kind of minority outside our group is incredibly useful if you would like to play any sort of middle man role right which what all those groups do lebanese Parsi ethnic Chinese and-and-and Jews always play in very end up playing this entrepreneurial middle man role which is something that is uniquely available to the outsider because the outsider as an outsider is allowed to do things that you can't do if you're a member of majority you can be tough you can say no you're gonna be a banker right where you're where you're I mean this does not apply to the bankers on Wall Street and over the last 10 years but historically if you were a banker your success depended on your ability to say no right and to be mean to say to someone who is not paying you got to pay right it's really hard to do that if you are a member of the majority culture because you risk your social standing when you stand up to someone and put your foot down but if you're a member of a minority group that's outside the general culture you can be tough you can say no right so that's why you see banking as always dominated by those four groups throughout the you know my mother grew up in Jamaica the Jamaican it's funny actually Jamaica is a perfect sample this the entrepreneurial commercial class of Jamaica is ethnic Chinese Jewish and Lebanese an exact indication of this very thing so we could play with that idea and and I and come to an understanding of all kinds of of patterns of accomplishment in those groups because all those groups also have disproportionate professional success and disproportionate intellectual to some extent into a business portion of intellectual success as well I feel like I'm discriminating against the back of the room referring to them yeah what is it to be successful in today's time trading where we're at right now as opposed to well that's an interesting question I mean the I think it's easier in the sense that there are just so many other there are so many such an array of things to be good at now right success was narrowly defined in the 30s as being a doctor or a lawyer today we have you know 25 different things that we would give a cord that same status to or at least after the meltdown on Wall Street 24 sorry mr. Foster Diggs so in that sense you know if you think about the kinds of things that are available to those who are willing to put ten thousand about hours of practice in the list is just longer now and so in that sense I would say that where I'm at an advantage you know how Bill Gates works is achievement and you know three and six and you dub programming and that seeing that success before it actually became what we're all here tonight now oh I see well it's always gonna be yeah well we're in this is you know that kind of question is unanswerable because it requires us to know what the next you think about people that Bill Gates's generation was that they were getting their 10,000 hours in in a discipline before the rest of the world realized that that was the discipline that mattered right by definition we do not know what that discipline is today only the 15 year old equivalent of Bill Gates does so those of you with 15 year old children should ask them but you know I'm not gonna know sure yeah so I have a in the culture section of the book I am I talk about I try to Kondo I talk about um I try to so it's a I'm trying to set up the discussion of Asians in math because the hard thing to understand about the kind of cultural explanation I give for Asian mathematics superiority is this notion that the kids who are doing well in math today in South Korea or Singapore or where have you an are not themselves rice farmers nor are their parents nor in some cases are their grandparents right so why how is it possible that rice farming could be the explanation for the way they are well in order to buy that you have to buy the idea that cultural models and codes and rules persists then long after the circumstances that created them have gone away those things are still in the air they don't they don't they don't peter out or vanish they're actually they stick around and so I I describe I give an account at an explanation for why Appalachia in America has always been the most violent part of the United States and the explanation for that is not in the particular immediate conditions of Appalachian life it has to do with where the ancestors of those living in Appalachia come from and they all they many of them they that that Appalachia was settled by people by the scotch-irish people from the borderlands of the united kingdom who had developed in their time there are hundreds of years there in that most kind of lawless and dangerous and barren existence had developed this thing called a culture of Honor which was a culture where your where your honor was everything and where you would do anything to defend it and that is precisely the kind of culture that leads to lots and lots and lots of violence but it was a that whole section of the book is is preparing us for the notion for the seeming the counter intuitive notion that what your great-great great-great grandparents did for a living could make a difference in how you see the world which is not an obvious it's a difficult point I think for many people to grasp sure well you made a great case for the 10,000 hours of work it takes to become exceptionally good and it's something and then also poor people are basically a disadvantage but I'm wondering what were you temps with the loss to society we only have so many slots so for instance if you have a better pathway from the Czech team so the people were fully distributed would they have a better team yeah I think it stands to reason that the Czechs so suppose the Czechs have what the Canadians use the Canadians inside Canadian suppose the Canadians did had three parallel leagues then their denominator of kids that they're choosing from I think if you look at the distribution now you can make a a reasonable inference that they are the cap rate is 40 percent right if we can raise the capitalization rate to 80 percent we have doubled the number the available pool of kids that were choosing from for the most elite level so it doesn't change the same number of people are is only a limited number of slots in the National Hockey League but it stands to reason if the pool that you're pulling from is twice as big the average level of talent should be higher that you should in other words be able to to raise the median level of talent in the league if you've increased your if you've increased your you pull your fishing I know I'm about to get like totally smoked but go ahead you would expect that the people that were born later in the year on the Czech team of all these seniors with possibly better than the ones are born over yeah that's yes here's how it starts to get really really interesting you might so they have overcome well there are several things there remember though they may simply be maturational anomalies that is to say not all if you look at a group of seven year-olds they don't all mature at the same rate it is mostly the case that the kids born in January are going to be bigger and stronger than the kids born in December but some of the December borns at the age of 10 or 11 are going to be as mature as those born in January I think what you're seeing is that those are the kids who end up making the in each other just ones whose whose growth curve was a little bit accelerated I think that's the I don't know it's a very good question you'll be worth looking into but I did look at the list of like the greatest hockey players ever and you know they're almost all January February March - the ability to cap rate the ability to take advantage of like here talking about being he's that kid runners the million that have their but their system is not able to do anything with that so yes the quality of the the ones who make it through it's a great conversation that's happening here aggressive Microsoft around innovation and part where the ideas is you know how do we dig in and find innovation where it is it's it's not always just coming out of MSR there might be we're bad it finding ideas great innovation at other parts of the company somebody that's in operations or support that's a great idea but if there's not the mechanisms to pull that out and do something with that and so we're there's this downward pressure on the stupidity factor not allowing us to find those ideas yeah as well as the upward push yeah sure those yes well this is a good point so to go back to your point as well so one way imagine you know it as a thought experiment let's just use hockey for example suppose we wanted to increase the cap rate in hockey in the in Canada one way to do it is to talk about what I'm talking about which is not to increase the number of slots in the National Hockey League but simply to increase the number of developmental leaks to have this kind of but another way is to is to increase the slots suppose as a thought experiment we double the size of the National Hockey League and we say we're not going to have 30 teams right would that be would the would the expansion of that end have the effect of forcing a higher if greater efficiency in the capitalization of hockey teams in of hockey in the developmental leagues in other words can we are there two ways to do this can you do this bottom-up or can you do this top-down the only I would be curious I'm curious about the top-down version because we have a version of it in this country right now right where you have companies like Microsoft which whole tier of high technology companies which are in perpetual have a perpetual shortage of very very talented people right they're always complaining we can't we can't find enough people who to fill these kinds of slots we got to go overseas without always kind of and so in this case it has not had the this this perpetual shortage of very talented people has not really had the effect I think of dramatically raising our capitalization rates when it comes to math and science in fact over the course of the last 25 or 30 years the relative performance of the United States in math and science seems to if I if I have my numbers correctly seems to have if anything eroded so that suggests that maybe top down that's up that that supply side up or demand side approaches how does get the mixed up one of them you know I'm talking about increase the number of slots at the top may not be the best way to do it I mean but it's open to it's it's worth you know thinking about all these various common scenarios sure math programs and all this that a lot of that efforts gonna be wasted because to societal underpinnings are yeah yeah you need to have a kind of I mean there has to be like to go back to the the the Kenyan runners for example so they do have there's an awful lot of it's actually incredibly wasteful to have a ninety percent capitalization rate for distance running you don't actually want a million of your twelve year olds running ten miles a day because you only have four spots on the Olympic team or whatever three spots and metric team you want them to be doing something that has some kind of ultimate payoff so especially that's actually not a it's not a model we want to emulate probably a good thing that we have a one-percent capitalization rate but we just shouldn't whine about our performance in upon this is running but as a result but um but there are a whole series of like here's that this is a totally wacky idea that I've been talking about with some people which is I suppose you rewarded in suppose you set up a system that allowed individuals or groups or nonprofits to profit from raising cap rates so I go into suppose like go into the sector to South Central LA and I have a class of us a first grade class right now I know actually speaking looking at the those kids in their socio-economic background that the amount of federal tax those kids will pay like actually twenty thirty years hence is probably close to zero right you have to join you to really be a member of the middle class to to pay taxes these days and the the number of kids in a the worst part of South Central who end up in the middle class is very very small so suppose I said to so the cap rate if we define capitalization as joining the middle class and paying federal taxes the capitalization rate in a bad neighborhood in South Central is pretty much a zero okay so what if we said to anyone that if you can raise the capitalization rate in that group I'll give you a cut of their federal taxes so what if you said just like you it's like a you could you could venture capital groups of kids right now obviously this is a as a kind of as a kind of thought experiment so we know we're getting so why do you because we're getting zero federal tax dollars now what would be so wrong to say if you Joe Smith want to invest in this class of kids for the next 25 years I'll give you a fifty percent of the tax revenue in perpetuity and if you so in other ways if you can get you know three computer programmers and two doctors out of this class of thirty kids you're gonna be a very very rich man and by the way society will be way better and the kids will be happier because they will have what they don't have now which is someone who is actively interested in and capable of of increasing their capitalization right of getting the rate from zero to whatever it is ten fifteen twenty thirty five percent I seen I have no I dissolve people you know when you tell other people late very often people think oh that it's just sound so blue you know what it's whatever problems are oh that idea it's a lot better than what we have now which is no one caring for the kids right but the point is that capitalization strategies change the discussion they move us away from this I am so sick of this relentless absurd exhausting focus on ability which is just beside the point and and they moves away from that and move us towards on this focus on the exploitation of the ability that's already there and that's just a far more rational place to start if we had if we did everything in our power to exploit ability and we still saw differences in outcomes then we can talk talent right if we had if in America we had twenty five million high school kids running twelve miles a day and we still were getting you know smoked at the Olympics in the ten thousand meters I will entertain every genetic argument you want about difference in us in East Africans but until we do that it's a pointless argument right that's what I so that's why I think we need to be much more inventive in our in our thinking about capitalization what if that runners playing soccer hockey lacrosse football baseball basketball right like we spread our many more sports then indeed yes yeah yes was my point that it's apples and that because of those very very differences great differences in the way in which talent athletic talent is capitalized in these two cultures you can't draw any conclusions about innate ability comment that he's gonna have to leave the building cuz he has to go do a talk at the Gates Foundation where I think he's gonna be convincing them to make that investment in those kids so I know everybody you know what's the book and I did have a Malkin those pre signed tons of copies the books so my question to you is we can have Malcolm answer questions for all of us for the next 15 minutes and then get in the car and get over the bridge or he can sign and personalize books for a very few of you so I'm thinking we're moving toward the questions yeah this is a disproportionate amount of sprinkles do you think that fall to do the same thing even though they have a small people were available yeah well has some as you know I'm half Jamaican so I'm powerfully disposed to answer this question in the way that reflects most flatteringly on Jamaica from Jamaica is it's a beautiful example of this right so in this long-running debate about nurture versus nature in running in sprinting especially you know that the quote unquote gene pool of Jamaica isn't any different than any number of other countries around the world and yet Jamaica utterly dominates sprinting this is a clear case where cap rates for sprinting in Jamaica are must be very very close to 90% and I I have no real evidence for this other than anecdotally I was just in Jamaica for Christmas who's me my cousins and I am a runner so I go was I would go running around you know in the little Hills around my aunts house and it was this hilarious things never have to be anywhere else that the sight of someone running in Jamaica is just ignite some kind of thing in all passers-by so here I am you know running along down the road and like people like slow down wave and think some guy will be trudging along back from work and he would say he would like you go run run run oh ok run after me I like run with me for like it was just like this and I realize like this is it's an obsession right it's a complete obsession and there is so much status associated with the act of running that if you have any you know even remote ability in this area you exploit it right and you know Usain Bolt at this point is if he is a you know not since Bob Marley has has there been someone who has ignited this degree of so I think it's a beautiful illustration of of what I'm talking about this is all based on pepper society values yes how long it would take a societal value change to impact the capitalization of the other folks artists and we're going to enter a new phase of political life here I think a lot of us are hoping this new value yeah yeah yeah so I I'm a real optimist in I believe these kinds of shifts can happen really quickly and let's let's stick with sports Ramona because Sports is a just a an elegant way of if you think about what happened after title 9 is a timeline so I was just with I saw a friend of mine the day who has 12 year old daughter so she's 40-something and she was talking about the difference that is between her upbringing and her daughters and my friend is a he's an athletic person in the sense that she's you know has no there's no but she did not play any sports at all as a kid so she grew up in an upper middle-class family in Providence Rhode Island not some you know sticky play like you know eastern seaboard it never even occurred to her to do sports none and in her daughter's life sports is everything I mean not everything they they do the same amount of schoolwork she did but they play so many organized sports she can't keep track of it that is a capitalization or capitalization rate for women and soccer or basketball 20 only 25 or 30 years ago was what 5 percent 2 percent 3 percent today it's 50 60 70 percent that's one generation it's an incredible shift in what we think of in our kind of priorities in that particular area that makes me profoundly optimistic about our ability to shift our capitalization the the focus of our interest in other more consequential areas because let's face it that's not a very consequential area but if we can do it with you know with soccer I feel like we can do it with all kinds of other things the culture mistake slavery for example is for the longest impact of slavery and what are you talking about outliers that community black in fact with me how long yeah so the question was about on the opposite side thinking about how things like the legacy of slavery have impacted opportunity and so I in the last chapter of my book is a personal chapter and it's about my it's the story of my mother's family and it attempts to answer this very question so my mother is a brown skinned Jamaican and one of the points and I she has had this what what I what anyone would consider a successful life she grew up in a little tiny cottage in the middle of the Hills of Jamaica and ended up a upper-middle class professional in Canada right and I tried to tell her story using the ideas of the book and focus not on her own pluck and intelligence but on the what are the kinds of opportunities that allowed her to do that and one of the things that I got into was the peculiarities of being a brown skinned Jamaican and I traced my mother's family history back to in the 1700s as a plantation owner from Ireland comes to Jamaica and takes as his concubine basically I'm sure just bought and raped an African slave and that's the beginning of my that their son a guy named John Ford was the the beginning of my mother's line right so in Jamaica the offspring the mulatto offspring of a mixed-race Union in the 1700s was not put back into slavery the way that that child would have been in the in the American South on the contrary the Brits did this very very different thing which was if you were mixed race you got welcomed into the ruling class so John Ford one generation removed from a slave ship was a preacher he was a literate educated man who was a free was a free man in 1790 whatever it was and whose kids were free and on and on and if you traced my mother's family history down along with the history of all these other parallel brown skinned Jamaicans you see a legacy of privilege that goes back generations upon generations upon generations you see people who are members of the entrepreneurial and commercial and professional classes going back to the earliest earliest days of the 19th century right now that has given them a status and a set of opportunities that are denied to people who who were pushed back into slavery their equivalents in America who weren't plucked out in 1790 and allowed to get an education but were pushed back in and enslaved for another three generations there is a world of difference between starting from where my mother started from and starting from where she would have started from if her ancestors have been in Georgia or Alabama you know interestingly as well along those same lines skip gates the professor of african-american studies at Harvard did this really fascinating set of genealogical studies of prominent and successful African Americans and discovered that almost without fail if you look back several generations into the families of these success stories what you find is either someone who was who was a freed slave so freed before emancipation or a freed slave who managed in the first generation after emancipation to own land in other words you see the same thing that success in the present day is a function of an opportunity that was created two three four or five generations previously right and that is that when we're talking about this flipside it reminds us that of how the shadow of slavery those who were denied that kind of of get-out-of-jail-free card on that my mom got or that you know these other people that skip gates looked at card to be denied for your ancestor to be denied that get out of jail free card matters even today so now you asked about Obama what is the success of Obama tell us about the continuing significance of that legacy nothing right nothing listen I mean I love him as much as anyone I could not be more thrilled about what's gonna happen on Tuesday right I mean a relief of cataclysmic I might even become an American citizen now but but let's be let's be clear his victory does not mean that this issue is over right it it you know and if that is how we interpret it then yeah well that's the you know I wish I could give you a kind of complete and satisfying answer to that and I don't know I mean in my book I talked a little bit about just on this narrow question of how can you teach math to inner-city kids and can you can you get an inner-city kid to think like an Asian when it comes to math and the answer is we think the answer is yes we've seen extraordinary results with with teaching math by changing attitudes about work and that makes me think that we have all kinds of opportunities in other areas but what that effort looks like I don't know it's sort of it's the kind of thing that I hope others will I'm sure others already pursuing but that I think we need to know more about as a as a society I will have I have many many ideas one um one I'll give you a little preview of my next New Yorker article which is uh whether it's to in works one is an attack on to kill a mockingbird because it turns out if you read no one has read this book since you were like 12 years old right so what do you know when you're 12 nothing reread it so I'll tell you and you discovered Atticus Finch monster and they're coming soon and another the other one which is will be even more near and dear to your hearts and I can't give you details but I'll give you the outline and by the way this is such a cool story I have never won this cool a long time I met this guy from your world software entrepreneur whatever and you know the type he's like came from Mumbai went to Caltech or MIT you know three dollars in his pocket makes a name for himself in Silicon Valley here's a daughter and his daughter wants to play she's 12 years old she wants to play basketball right now he isn't doing about basketball he's a software programmer from Mumbai but he decides I want to coach my daughter's basketball team so he goes to a basketball game and he observes it right as an outsider would right we're talking about outsiders he's an outsider you know he observes it and he comes away shaking his head thinking why do they play this game in such a mindless fashion and so he decides to to teach his daughter and her teammates to play the game his way right and what happens now keep in mind this team is a team of girls taken they're all from like Mountain View and their fathers are all people like this guy they're the children of software programmers they are not big huge hulking mesomorphs with bulging muscles they're like little skinny girls with pigtails right what happens they almost win the state championship they don't win the state Senate because they actually they get cheated in this outrageous way which is one of the great parts the story but the whole point of this it's just so on every level genius it all has to do with what happens when a really really smart guy from Mumbai des sized to coach basketball and the answer is nothing that you've ever seen on a basketball court before now only through his last little factoid which is during the games when he's doing this thing that he does and is these little girls with big tail but only they're not good basketball players PS they're not gonna go and play like division one cut they're like little skinny girls who spend who are gonna they're all gonna take physics at Caltech they don't even in faster than sports that much but they're like under the tutelage of this masked genius mad genius during the games as they're coaching the other the opposing coaches who are the ones steeped in the older paradigm of basketball get so enraged by what's happening that they start by like you know just kind of sitting there and it's done silence then they start screaming at their own girl these 12 people screaming at their own players as if it's their fault right and then like invariably they challenge this guy to a fight in the parking lot after the game anyway so look for that one - thank you all
This is pretty good. From 7:00-9:30, Malcolm Gladwell talks about the Terman study, and how Lewis Terman, at Stanford, in the 1910s or so, administered his IQ test to 250,000 children, and then followed those scoring 140 or above (or something to this effect) to see how they turned out as adults.