An entertaining but flawed formula

The Story of Success

By Malcolm Gladwell

Little, Brown. 297 pp. $27.99

Reviewed by Crispin Sartwell

Success in life is a matter of talent, environment, hard work, values, connections and lucky breaks.

One might think that an observation like that - a restatement of the common wisdom - wouldn't call out a "dazzling" tour of empirical data and case studies. As so often before, one would be wrong.

Malcolm Gladwell is a successful practitioner of what we might think of as a new wave of social science - sociology, economics, psychology, history - for a general readership. Books of this kind present the reader with a problem that is an interesting intellectual knot. Then, with a hyper-bold and counterintuitive stroke, they suddenly solve the problem, leaving you inspired by the author's intelligence, and your own, by virtue of the fact that you now know the solution, which you can recall using the mnemonic of the book's one-word title, as in

Blink

, Gladwell's previous book about sudden intuitive insight.

It's as though you yourself suddenly solved the problem in a flash of intuition. The idea is to present intellectual or scientific life as the arena of genius, in which the intuitive contrarian eccentric always turns out to be Einstein, i.e., right. And you are smart enough to understand it all.

This formula makes, in Gladwell's hands particularly, for readable and entertaining prose. But it has drawbacks.

Gladwell makes the interesting claim that "it matters where you're from, not just in terms of where you grew up or where your parents grew up, but in terms of where your great-grandparents and great-great-grandparents grew up and even your great-great-great-grandparents grew up." But in evidence he describes a truly farcical "study" in which Northern and Southern college students supposedly reacted differently to a particular insult.

And there he leaves you: diverted, entertained, but hardly in a better position to evaluate the truth of the claim.

A good deal of the book, as it happens, could be described as an attempt to answer the question "Why are there so many Jewish lawyers?" The political implications of Gladwell's redeployment of a series of ethnic and regional stereotypes are blithely deferred to another occasion.

Vaguely, you're supposed to think that Gladwell's conclusions are "scientific"; they come with charts and executive summaries of demographic studies. But if the standard is clear or decisive empirical support for his hypotheses, Gladwell falls short by miles in every single case he discusses, and often the evidence amounts to no more than a few wild generalizations from a couple of stories, each specifically constructed to support the foregone conclusion. One set of important assertions is apparently based on the (no doubt rigorous) observation by Gladwell of his (successful!) agent.

Every point has to come with a story, character, and so on; every claim comes with an example. Thus: The crash in 1990 of Avianca Flight 052 is chalked up to the culture of its pilots (who were Colombian). But does the story of the crash help establish the generalization? Or does the generalization (Colombians are deferential to authority) explain the example? Neither, as a matter of fact.

As Gladwell flirts with stereotypes about Colombians, or Asians, or Jamaicans, he jumps with both feet into the basic fallacy underlying stereotypical thinking: generalizing wildly from specific cases, then applying these generalizations boldly (and fallaciously) to further cases.

This could be forgiven as freewheeling speculation, if Gladwell were drawing shocking or useful conclusions. But though the solutions are presented with an air of wizardry, a certain

voila

, they are extremely pedestrian, commonplaces of the literature of success and our everyday talk about it.

No doubt, the success stories Gladwell relates are inspiring, and the tales of success, whether about hockey players, computer geniuses, corporate lawyers or entrepreneurs, are narrated expertly. One receives little bundles of cool information, for example, about the Appalachian feud culture of the 19th century (Hatfields v. McCoys). Gladwell can sketch a memorable character in a few sentences.

But the lessons we are supposed to derive, while occasionally embodied by a story in a fun way, are in no way surprising or, for that matter, useful.

It is interesting if, as Gladwell asserts, it takes 10,000 hours to get really, really good at something. He has reasonable anecdotal evidence for that, sort of. But the only thing one might take away from this for your own success is that you need to work really hard. You knew that.

Now if Gladwell had asserted that success is primarily (or

exclusively) a matter of hard work, or that hard work is irrelevant, or that "talent" is a myth or is the primary determinant of success, or that qualities of character (such as, say, initiative) are irrelevant or decisive - that would be provocative. But his theory is, finally, eclectic: He thinks success takes an "enriched" childhood environment, intrinsic talent, ethnic or regional connections, and sheer, cussed luck.

If the account raises any controversy at all, it would be in Gladwell's insistence on the element of luck in every case he presents. (

Luck

is a term in need of a definition, and of a book by Malcolm Gladwell.) But in his hands, luck emerges as little more than the notion that the successful person was the right guy at the right time and place. And not only are successful people lucky, but they also seize the opportunities that come their way.

Hard to quibble with that.