Wait, you're listening to Radio Lab. Radio Lab. Shorts! From WNYC.
N-P-R. Hey, I'm Jada Bumran. I'm Robert Colewich. This is Radio Lab.
The podcast. The podcast. We should just say, as a sort of setting to the ground here, setting ground, does that not? Set the table.
Table, whatever. That we are on the cusp of delivering five really fantastic shows right now. So we're busy, busy, busy. Which got us thinking about a conversation that I had a few years ago.
Which is conveniently there, Radio Lab. With Malcolm Gladwell, we offer outliers and bling. I was over at the 90 seconds B.Y. in New York City.
Okay, just pull it to your mouth there. The subject was, how do you explain people of really unusual exceptional talent? Like, why are they so good? Yeah, what is the nature of being exceptional?
Is this working hard or in needability? Is it an accident? And as we all know, in America, there's a real hunt on. From a very early age to find the gifted and talented children.
And we have programs in our schools all over the country trying to identify exceptional kids. Malcolm Gladwell hates gifted and talented programs. Yeah, it's ridiculous. Why do you decide?
So a gifted program says that we identify a child and call that child gifted because they're performance at the age of whatever, 9 or 10 or 11 years old. Why do we care particularly how well a child performs at 9 or 10 or 11 years old? They're 9 or 10 or 11. They're a good 25 years for making any kind of substantial contribution to the world.
Why don't we wait? What's the hurry? And also, how do you know? So, like, you know, so one child learns to read it four.
One child learns to read it two and a half. Right? So what? Why does it matter?
Are the things that are being read between two and a half and four of such incalculable? No, no, no. It's just that normal parents responds to, oh, if he's reading it two and a half, think of the things he'll do and it's just an extrapolation. It's like reading is reading.
Once you can read, we're not. I mean, it's not like there's an infinite scale and that so-and-so reads better and better and better. And I can say, we can say today of Gladwell that he reads so much better than Crowwich. I know this is like what separates the two of us.
It's reading. I mean, like, well, there is also among your, you use the phrase the Matthew effect. What is that? Matthew fact is a phrase coined by Robert K.
Merton, the great genius sociologist of Columbia. He's the guy who says in the verse in Matthew, which says that to him who has much more will be given. And he uses this to describe the Matthew fact, which is this notion that a small initial advantage difference in a small initial difference in the performance of any two people will inevitably grow because the person who's a little bit ahead will get so many more advantages that they will end up being far ahead. So a good example, there's all kinds of great Matthew effects.
So if you're born, if you're a young boy born in October, November or December, who has designs on being a professional soccer or hockey player, the deck is stacked against you. There's not much you can do. You should probably give up. But you have to tell me about life, exactly.
Well, it's really an accident of birth thing. The month you were born in Malcolm thinks might make a huge, huge difference in your life. Here's his way of describing this. I'm going to read here a passage from his book, Outlives.
On page 23 of your book, you do a play-by-play. And I will do this. We're at the Memorial Cup Hockey Championship. I want to read what you wrote.
March 11 starts round one side of the Tigers, net leaving the puck for his teammate January 4th. He passes it to January 22, flips it back to March 12th, who shoots point blank at the Tigers' bully April 27th, April 27th, blocks the shot, rebounded by Vancouver's March 60 shoots, Madison had the fence on February 9th and February 14th dive to block the puck January 10th. Looks on helplessly, March 6 scores. Question is, why did you choose this peculiar kind of nomenclature?
Because I wanted to make this point that all, an extraordinary number of hockey players are born in the first three or four months of the year. 17 of the 25 players are from the Madison had team were born in those three years. Why? Because the eligibility cut-off date for H-Class hockey in Canada in the world is January 1st.
And we start recruiting all-star squads in hockey in Canada when kids are 9 and 10 years old. But of course, when you're 9 years old, the best one is the oldest one, right? So all you do is you choose the kids who are born closest to the cut-off date, and then you give them special coaching and put them on all-star squads until 9 extra games and extra practice until 8 and 9 years later, they really are the best. And by the way, we see exactly the same effects in school systems, right?
The kids, the relatively youngest kids in the class underperform the relatively oldest kids and that underperformments last into the college years. The kid born the youngest three months of their age cohort in school are something like I forget the exact number, 9 or 10% less likely to go to college than those born in the three oldest months. And we can fix it really easily. You've got three classes in an elementary school, right?
Typical elementary school. Divide them up by birthday, right? Well, doesn't that mean that you have to get, you have like a half dozen soccer moms to work out the logistical problems because you've not got four leagues, we're used to have one, and someone has to be in the Seward Park on Mondays and Wednesdays but who's gonna go to the principal? Is that kind of...
So you would, just for the sake of efficiency, you'd be happy to talk about the talent. Two thirds of... No, what I'm saying, no, but this is exactly, I brought this up with, I had a conversation with this hockey guy in Canada. Big deal hockey mocha.
I don't know whether they call them mocha's. You can call them mocha's. Yep. But absolutely.
And I say to him, look, you're Canada, you want to be the best hockey country in the world? Why don't you have the three parallel leagues? How hard is that? Every single town in Canada has like 25 different hockey teams.
Just divide them up. How hard is this? It seems like it's too difficult. Let me give you a harder one because just another successful from the book.
This office set up for you, it's about the Janklow family. So there's two Janklow's. We're going to talk about Maurice and Mort, but since those are named, this is called one Daddy Janklow and one Sonny Janklow. So Daddy goes to Brooklyn Law School class in 1919, sets up a practice in Brooklyn, elegant fellow, dresses in a Hamburg, Bruce Brothers clothes, drives a big car, moves to the Queen's, marries to the right girl, works hard, hard, hard sets up a business, goes nowhere.
The sun, baby Janklow, one 30 years later, gets a law degree, marries nicely too, works hard too, puts together a cable franchise, sells it to Cox Broadcasting, makes a fortune, creates a literary agency, Janklow and Nesbitt, signs you. Now he lives on Park Avenue, he has an endstone key for painting on his own airplane. So the question is, does the sun succeed, the father fails, why? Is this a question that happened?
Well that part of the book I'm really interested in generational effects. The worst year to be born in the 20th century is, you can all kind of sociologists take these things out, it's between 1900 and 1907, maybe 1910, that decade, because you get out of college and just as you're getting going to depression hits, you have nine years of depression, and just as you're emerging out of depression trying to make a go of it, you're shipped off to war for six years, right? And so by the time you come back and want to start your business, you're in your late 40s, right? So it's really, really hard for, whereas the best year to be born in the 20th century, if you live in New York City, actually, I think anywhere, but particularly in New York City, is 1935.
Because it's perfect, because you, it's the smallest birth year of the 20th century. You always want to be part of a really small birth cohort, because no one's competing with you, right? Think about it. So the difference between being a part of the smallest birth, the largest one, the difference between the smallest one is enormous.
It's like per capita twice as many babies are born in, you know, 1920 is 1935. So if you're in 1935, there's this huge generation before you. So what do they do for that generation? They build big, huge, shiny schools and hire tons of teachers, right?
Then there's no more kids. So you sail in, and all of a sudden, you know, your brother had 35 kids in his class, you have 18. Your older brother competed against a zillion people to get into city college, you competed against no one. You wanted to join the debate team, no one went out for the debate team.
You were captain of the debate team. Like, I always talk to people in this board, it's small course, and they always think you're talking to some guy, accomplished little guy, who opened the Bronx, white hair, and he'll tell you about his extraordinary high school experience. You know, I always captain of the basketball team, and you look at this guy in five foot two, and you say to yourself, this is a man who belonged to a small generation, right? Nobody was going out for basketball.
Like, so these guys, they haven't made a mistake, and then they come into the workforce, no, they go to Harvard Law School. Of course they go to Harvard Law School, right? No one's applying to Harvard Law School. Then they get out in the workforce, do they get a job?
Of course they do. Everyone's desperate for work, because there's no one out there. And then what's behind them? The biggest generation in the 20th century.
So they sail in the positions of authority, and they have in front of them, this enormous market to serve, right? It's just genius. You can even go more specifically. This is great thing that happens in quotation marks, in New York City, in the Depression, which is that a whole bunch of very, very, very able people can't get jobs, and the private sector, the Arnold jobs, and private sector.
So what do they do? They become teachers, right? And you talk to this generation born in 35 about their high school experience. And I lost count in the number of people of that generation who went to public schools in New York, who told me, for example, that their math teacher had a PhD in math.
And so here's a generation who, not only could they be captain of the basketball team, but their teachers were these extraordinary people who were, you know, by virtue of a lack of opportunity, ended up in the school system. So is that the difference between Janko Dan and Janko Son? It's just the explanation. The beginning of the explanation.
I mean, I never met Janko. I mean, you only go so far with this, but it helps you to sort of set the stage to understand, if you've got these two very capable people, one of whom achieved extraordinary success and one didn't. And you know, I think you have to go beyond the individual to make sense of that, right? So there is such a thing as getting an accidental boost.
And I mean, nobody chooses when they're going to be born. It's always mom and dad's fault. But there's something even bigger and even more important than good luck with your birthday. And you illustrate this Malcolm cites the example of Bill Gates, the so-called genius behind Microsoft.
What do you say? So called? Bill C? He's a lucky guy in the world.
And he's the first to tell you that. He goes to, he shows up for eighth grade in 1968 or nine at Lakeside Academy. And for reasons no one can remember, somebody on the parents' committee bought a computer for the kids. And a little teletype, hooked into the mainframe in Duntancio.
And Gates has essentially, now what that allows you is to do real-time programming. Everyone's programmed with cards back then. It's incredibly laborious time consuming. And you don't really learn how to program because it just takes too long.
He can do real-time programming the way we program now on this little teletype. And he does that starting in 1968 basically for his entire teenage life. And you mean that almost literally? Yeah, he told me this one story about he then goes to these whole series of things, finding other computers.
And at one point Paul Allen, his classmate at the school, discovers that there's a mainframe that's free at the University of Washington Medical Center between, it's free between two and six in the morning on week nights. And he's now 15 years old. And he sets his alarm for 130 in the morning. And he crawls out the window.
And he calls out the window. And he says, I was so hard to get up in the morning. So the question is, he's clearly a brilliant guy, no one's taken that away from him. But he has this other thing, which he, what's really remarkable about that story to me is when he does that, he's 15.
So he's a teenage boy. And all of us here know about teenage boys, right? What does a teenage boy want to do? What does a teenage boy want to do?
Well, what does a teenage boy want to do? What does a teenage boy want to do? Sleep! Here's a teenage boy who was willing to surrender his sleep.
You know, he's a teenager. Here's a teenage boy who was willing to surrender his sleep. You know, five nights a week to program from two to six in the morning. That is what's special about the audience.
And it accumulates, right? It gets, it's hours, it's three hours or four hours a day. And then five hours a day, whenever you can make it six hours a day, it's for years and years and years. Until he clocks in a lot of hours.
And Mozart, I guess, played the piano for lots of hours. And Tiger Woods just took off the lights. These people are all examples of what's called the 10,000 hour room, which is this notion that, it's kind of brilliant guy named Ericsson, psychologist, has kind of formulated this principle that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex discipline, it seems almost without exception that in order to be good, you must practice at least 10,000 hours. What sort of surprised me if you put the Beatles on this list?
Why are the Beatles? Because they go to Hamburg before they come to America as teenagers. They go to Hamburg and they play, they have a house band in the strip club, and they play eight hour sets seven days a week for months at a stretch. I mean, it's incredible.
I mean, you know, parenthetically, one cannot imagine a more dismal experience than playing, first of all, playing in a strip club. Secondly, playing in a strip club in Hamburg. And thirdly, playing in a strip club in Hamburg in the 50s. I mean, can you imagine?
It's just a game. So they learned in those hours and hours of playing every night, they learned just to play and play and play and play whatever. And somehow, because, I mean, there's, in the book you're arguing, I think, that, I mean, you could say, by the way, that the Rolling Stones, I don't think, went to Hamburg, and they're probably other Liverpool bands that did go to Hamburg and played in the same strip clubs and you do not know their names. It's a necessary, it's a necessary, not sufficient, I forget which way it goes, but whatever it goes, it's that.
Okay. So what we got here then is you have this talent plus the persistence versus this Matthew effect. That is, with the Matthew effect, you start with these little accidental differences, and then coaches and situations magnify them so they get bigger and bigger. But with persistence, what seems to be happening here is the accidental differences that may have given you advantage is getting narrowed when you add the practice.
Add the practice. Add the practice. Mode start at 13. You know, copying on the people's work.
Practice, practice, practice, practice. Mode start at 17, better. Mode start at 23, 24, oh my God. So, Lenin and McCartney, at 15, 16, 17, but when they make their jumps, they make leaps of a genius nature.
They're not available to other people. Isaac Newton, he goes home for vacation and thinks about how I'm going to measure this. He invents calculus. So, you were being accused of being a genius denier.
Are you a genius denier or are you simply a genius dislikeer? Well, so there's sort of this thing called talent, right? And it's the magic dust, right? It gets sprinkled onto persistence.
It turns a lot of hard work into something. Great. And the question is how large a role does it play and what does it consist of? I mean, it's a piece of what years ago from New Yorker.
I remember writing about Wayne Gretzky and reading a biography of Wayne Gretzky. And he's a kid. He's a great hockey player. Greatest hockey player of all time.
And as a kid, he was two years old. His parents would sit in front of the television. He would watch hockey games on Saturday nights. And when the game ended, he would burst into tears.
And it was this little glimpse into his future greatness. Because here he was at two and he loved this thing. He couldn't even play hockey, too. He could barely walk.
But he already has understood he loves this thing so much that for it to end is an unconscionable burden. And it's like the world is ending. He's just consulate. So what is Wayne Gretzky's talent?
Well, part of it is his extraordinary vision, his coordination, his whatever. But a lot of it is this guy loves this game so much that he would do nothing but do it and think about it and engage it and do all those things. Now, is this magic dust called talent? Is that all it is?
Maybe. I don't think that's denying or hating genius, though. I think that that definition of genius is far more appealing to me than the notion that it's simply some sky-high IQ or some. This is the genius which just won't quit and it won't quit you.
Sort of like break back the movie about the two guys on the mountain. I mean, we cast to get sort of like what? Break back, break back, you know? So it's the love of hockey.
Yeah. That will not speak its name. They're not speaking its name. Yes, I suppose.
That's not a... Well, let me try a different word to me. Maybe one of the things that I detect is that it's not that you don't like genius. It's that maybe you don't think we need them.
No, no, no. Why are people so hostile to the notion that what genius is an extraordinary love for a particular thing? Why is the love... So we hear the ability definition of genius, the rarer ability definition, and we think, oh, that's so plausible.
That's what he is. But then we hear the extraordinary love definition of genius and we say he's a genius to me. Why? Why is why so hostile to the notion that what separates the genius and the rest of us is that genius loves what he or she does.
But we have no problem at all that what separates a genius is that they have some... Well, because it misses the point. I mean, there are people like Paul McCartney who... Are you hostile to the notion of love, Robert Dattel?
I know, I just want to make an obvious point here that Harry Smith... No, that's a real privilege. Harry X could love writing songs, but Paul McCartney could love... Even the way you say love, though, is so...
You really have... Have you thought about this? Okay, come on. Other people.
Your Harry X could love writing songs. He loves writing songs so much that he can't stop, but for lunch and dinner and sometimes not even those. But next door is Richard Rogers, little Richard Rickey Rogers. He loves writing songs too.
But for some reason, Harry writes and loves writing. Rickey writes and loves writing. And Harry writes a memorable song called the Beveling Book, those two in flow, and Richard writes... Yeah.
...to the chant at evening. Well, no, so... There's a difference there. No, hold on, hold on.
The love doesn't get you. No, no, no, the love, but the love does. So think about this. He's a complete explanation.
Love is the way in. Because Wayne Gretzky loves hockey so much, he thinks about it all the time and does more than that. He engages the sport in a way that no one else had ever engaged in. So there's this wonderful...
Remember, when I was writing about Gretzky, there's this thing that he famously did once where he scored a goal from behind the net. And he flips the puck over the net, like, and it kind of does a whole thing and goes in. And the reason no one had ever done that before was not just that no one could do it. Lots of them could do it.
It had never occurred to anyone else before. No one had engaged the sport on that level. So why is Gretzky engaging in that way? Why is he thinking about it that deeply and creatively?
Because he can't get hockey out of his head. Whenever I encounter someone like that, I cannot get past that sense they give off that they have found their calling, that they are in love in almost a romantic way with this thing that they do. Absent that, you can't be a genius. I'm sorry, you can't.
Are you convinced yet? I'm still holding on for some chilly abstract, you know, Nietzschean notion of... No, I'm going to pull back for a minute here. We went on a little bit longer, but I think I can just shout.
Go Malcolm. That's what I say. I say go Malcolm right there. You know, I would say he might be short-changing the idea that there's a diversity of ability out there.
Inate, talent. Yeah, but I do agree with him though that the idea of genius, that old 19th century stupid idea does contain within a really dangerous thought, which is that our abilities are just sort of God given and so they're fixed. But his argument would be, you know, you need some talent and you need certainly a little bit of good luck. But what you really need is this strange love of the thing you're doing and it's the love for the determination to succeed.
If that's what love equals, it makes you just want to do it and then do it and then do it some more. Amen. We should thank the 90th century, why? And then get the hell out of here.
Thanks to them. Thank you to Malcolm Gladwell. And to you for listening. I'm Jada Boomeran.
I'm Robert Colvin. All new episode in two weeks. See you then. This is Alicia Suntzmo, Radio Lab listener from Grinnell, Iowa.
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