What I Read – “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell

Tags

excellence, greatness, intelligence, IQ, Malcolm Gladwell, mastery, Outliers, practical intelligence, practice, Story of Success, Success

Recently I read somewhere, that I should make notes of what I read and review them from time to time. I decided to give it a try, since I read a lot and I think making such notes will be for me a way of remembering best ideas, quotes, or whatever from my books and magazines. I also decided to share those notes with you, in edited form as some have gotten pretty long. In many cases I copied whole passages without noting the page numbers, which is against good reference practices, but of course I will list title and author of a book (or article) where I got the notes from.

I do that with hope that at least some of you will reach for mentioned magazine or book when you will find my notes interesting. Ach, one more thing: small number of notes do not mean that the book or magazine was not good…

Here is what I noted from the book “Outliers: The Story of Success” by Malcolm Gladwell:

[…] The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours. “The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert in anything,” writes neurologist Daniel Levitin. “In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

[…] Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.

[…] Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing that you do that makes you good.

[…] psychologist Robert Sternberg calls “practical intelligence”. To Sternberg, practical intelligence includes things like “knowing what to say to whom, knowing when to say it, and knowing how to say it for maximum effect.” It is procedural: it is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it. It’s practical in nature: that is, it’s not knowledge for its own sake. It is knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. And, critically, it is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of analytical ability measured by IQ. To use the technical term, general intelligence and practical intelligence are “orthogonal”: the presence of one doesn’t imply the presence of the other.

[…] Where does something like practical intelligence come from? We know where analytical intelligence comes from. It’s something, at least in part, that’s in your genes.

[…] IQ is a measure, to some degree, of innate ability. But social savvy is knowledge. It’s a set of skills that have to be learned. It has to come from somewhere, and the place where we seem to get these kinds of attitudes and skills is from our families.

[…] The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with.

[…] Those three things: autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward are, most people agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.

[…] Success is not a random act. It arises out of a predictable and powerful set of circumstances and opportunities.

[…] Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific.

[…] Success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed.

[…] Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.

[…] To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success – the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history – with a society that provides opportunities for all.

This book could be very sad – it gives you hope in the way as to state where is the limit of your hard work – sacrifice 10.000 hours on something, and you should be a world class talent (well, you cannot just stop there. You need to go on). Your kids can now decide if they want to pursue certain career. Actually, you can too, if you have enough time. But on the other hand, book also tells you that this may not be enough: you need to be born at the right time, in right family and at the right place, having right cultural background. That is beyond our control. Most of us will not have such luck as to have all those conditions fulfilled to achieve extraordinary success. Last sentence which I noted from that book is not possible to achieve – we cannot all have same chances and opportunities, we are different. So no hope here. But shall it all mean that we should not strive for mastery of subject that interest us? Shall we not pursue better lives? Of course we shall. Most of us will be in some way successful, we may not be exceptional, but small victories do count too. Let’s not forget that. It may now be easier to realize that what we have achieved with our own work is a great success of sorts – and if you will look at this book from that point of view, it becomes positive. It tells you, that despite you not having all those things outliers had, you still managed to achieve something. I know I did.

 

What I Read – “Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell

Tags

Blink, decision making, Malcolm Gladwell, thinking, unconscious thinking

Recently I read somewhere, that I should make notes of what I read and review them from time to time. I decided to give it a try, since I read a lot and I think making such notes will be for me a way of remembering best ideas, quotes, or whatever from my books and magazines. I also decided to share those notes with you, in edited form as some have gotten pretty long. In many cases I copied whole passages without noting the page numbers, which is against good reference practices, but of course I will list title and author of a book (or article) where I got the notes from.

I do that with hope that at least some of you will reach for mentioned magazine or book when you will find my notes interesting. Ach, one more thing: small number of notes do not mean that the book or magazine was not good…

Here is what I noted from the book “Blink: The Power of Thinking without Thinking” by Malcolm Gladwell:

The part of our brain that leaps to conclusions […] is called the adaptive unconscious, and the study of this kind of decision-making is one of the most important new fields in psychology. The adaptive unconscious is not to be confused with the unconscious described by Sigmund Freud…

This new notion of adaptive unconscious is thought of […] as a kind of giant computer that quickly and quietly processes a lot of the data we need in order to keep functioning as human beings.

…we toggle back and forth between our conscious and unconscious modes of thinking, depending on the situation.

We live in a world that assumes that the quality of a decision is directly related to the time and effort that went into making it.

The first task of “Blink” is to convince you of a simple fact: decisions made very quickly can be every bit as good as decisions made cautiously and deliberately.

…when should we trust our instincts, and when should we be ware of them? Answering that question is the second task of “Blink”.

The third and most important task of this book is to convince you that our snap judgments and first impressions can be educated and controlled.

“Thin-slicing” refers to the ability of our unconscious to find patterns in situations and behaviour based on very narrow slices of experience.

When we leap to a decision or have a hunch, our unconscious is […] sifting through the situation in front of us, throwing out all that is irrelevant while we zero in on what really matters. And the truth is that our unconscious is really good at this, to the point where thin-slicing delivers a better answer than more deliberate and exhaustive ways of thinking.

[…] what we think of as free will is largely an illusion: much of the time, we are simply operating on automatic pilot, and the way we think and act – and how well we think and act on the spur of the moment – are a lot more susceptible to outside influences than we realize.

[…] our unconscious attitudes may be utterly incompatible with our stated conscious values.

If you have a strongly pro-white pattern of associations, for example, there is evidence that that will affect the way you behave in the presence of a black person. It’s not going to affect what you’ll choose to say or feel or do. In all likelihood, you won’t be aware that you’re behaving any differently than you would around a white person. But chances are you’ll lean forward a little less, turn away slightly from him or her, close your body a bit, be a bit less expressive, maintain less eye contact, stand a little farther away, smile a lot less, hesitate and stumble over your words a bit more, laugh at jokes a bit less. Does that matter? Of course it does.

Have you ever wondered why so many mediocre people find their way into positions of authority in companies and organisations? It’s because when it comes to even the most important positions, our selection decisions are a good deal less rational than we think.

[…] just because something is outside of awareness doesn’t mean it’s outside of control.

Our first impressions are generated by our experiences and our environment, which means that we can change our first impressions – we can alter the way we thin-slice – by changing the experiences that comprise those impressions.

[…] when experts make decisions, they don’t logically and systematically compare all available options. That is the way people are taught to make decisions, but in real life it is much too slow.

How good people’s decisions are under the fast-moving, high-stress conditions of rapid cognition is a function of training and rules and rehearsal.

[…] focused on the mechanics and the process that they never looked at the problem holistically. In the act of tearing something apart, you lose its meaning.

[…] truly successful decision-making relies on a balance between deliberate and instinctive thinking.

If you are forced to consider much more than your unconscious is comfortable with, you get paralyzed. Snap judgements can be made in a snap because they are frugal, and if we want to protect our snap judgements, we have to take steps to protect that frugality.

When we make a split second decision, we are really vulnerable to being guided by our stereotypes and prejudices, even ones we may not necessarily endorse or believe.

Taking our powers of rapid cognition seriously means we have to acknowledge the subtle influences that can alter or undermine or bias the products of our unconscious.

Even though the book promises to teach us how to deal with ingrained, unconscious patterns influencing our decisions, I found it coming too short in that regard. The rest is fine and I knew some of the points made already – sometimes we do or decide things with which we are ourselves baffled. Well, that is our “unconscious mind” deciding. Secondly, delving too much into any process will cause you to lose the reason why you have it in the first place and that is something everyone should remember. For example, if you are processing material to make a decision, you forget to make it – and this should be the outcome of the process.

Character Judgement Error

Tags

bias, character, consistency, error, judgement, Malcolm Gladwell, The Tipping Point

I am reading now a book by Mr. Malcolm Gladwell called “The Tipping Point” (find it here at Amazon). The whole book is interesting, but I found one passage there which I wanted to share with you. This is namely a proof that we do judge character of our fellow human beings wrongly. It also explains, why we are sometimes disappointed or surprised by behaviour of someone we thought we knew. Not to mention, that in extreme causes this can also explain why seemingly “normal” neighbours become mad killers…

On page 160 in my book I found the following: “…The mistake we make in thinking of character as something unified and all-encompassing is very similar to a kind of blind spot in the way we process information. Psychologists call this tendency the Fundamental Attribution Error (FAE), which is a fancy way of saying that when it comes to interpreting other people’s behavior, human beings invariably make the mistake of overestimating the importance of fundamental character traits and underestimating the importance of the situation and context…”

The book gives examples of psychological tests to prove above statement, but we don’t really need those, do we? It explains why our friend behaves differently at home and at work. It explains why we are stunned when someone we thought we knew behaves completely out of character.

The most important lesson from this is: to truly know someone, we need to know him in many different settings. Only then we will be able to build a picture of his character and have a chance of being closer with our judgement to the truth (if such thing exists in terms of character). Of course it is clear that this is only possible with people you spend a lot of time with, namely your friends. It is also quite possible that friends become friends for us because they are consistent in their behavior in many different situations. At least I would choose my friends that way. Now I also know that this consistency of character is not an easy feat to achieve… maybe this is why we (or me) appreciate such people more.