Malcolm Gladwell: The Public Intellectual and His Theory on Success

Authors are public intellectual figures. They seek out new research, make new theses, and voice their opinions in a way where the average person can understand. But are public intellectuals a dying breed?

Stephen Mack, in his essay “Are Public Intellectuals a Thing of the Past?” denies the possibility of America turning anti-intellectual, and instead argues that the academic field still wields enormous financial, technological and cultural power. In addition, he stresses some of America's most cherished social myths, like the “American Dream” to indicate how we revere education.

There is a myth in America that America is anti-intellectual, and thus, not supportive of intellectual pursuit nor discussion. In this kind of myth, the common-folk can be compared to a kid for lacking impulse control. As Mack puts it, they're “exhibit A in nearly every hand-wringing, anti-democratic treatise in western tradition.” For example, Rick Santorum shows his evident distrust and distaste for intellectuals in a recent speech. He told a crowd with overwhelming applause: “We will never have the elite, smart people on our side [Republican], because they believe they have the power to tell you what to do. So our colleges and universities, they're not going to be on our side.”

This is, I believe, the kind of typical thinking that makes people worry about anti-intellectualism in America. It's a kind of open animosity to ideas, to scientific facts, a false sense of a power struggle. Since when did the elite, the “smart” people have to choose sides? And since when did having a college degree equate to having the power to tell people what to do (That's just wishful thinking).

Everyone has a role in democracy, to “keep the pot boiling”, and to make sure you're talking about something worth talking about. There is no war of intelligence going on. There are only stories to be told, facts to be discussed, and one public intellectual has definitely got something worth talking about.

This person is Malcolm Gladwell, who is the author of several books, including bestsellers such as the Tipping Point, Blink and Outliers. While he has made interesting points in his previous books, his ideas in Outliers are of particular interest to me.

Gladwell began to form his idea for his book when he noticed that people ascribe Bill Gates’s success to being "really smart" or "really ambitious." Yet there are lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and not worth 60 billion dollars, the way Bill Gates is.

Our understanding of success, he therefore reasoned, was very crude. There must have been something else. But what? As Obama famously has said of success: “You didn't get there on your own. I'm always struck by people who think I'm so smart. There are a lot of smart people. Or they think, I got here because I'm so hard-working. Somebody helped to create this unbelievable American system that we have that allowed you to thrive. Somebody invested in roads and bridges.” 

Malcolm Gladwell epitomizes what Obama sees, and what a lot of us neglect to see, either through blissful unawareness or because we haven't given it much thought: there is more to the successful person than just himself. Bill Gates had access to technology that wasn't available to most college students at the end of eighth grade. Steve Jobs, who grew up in Palo Alto, the hub of new inventions, asked the HP founder for spare parts so that he could work with them. Bill Joy played with computers when most places couldn't afford to buy one. What Gladwell is arguing isn't that they're not brilliant – trust me, I couldn't have invented Apple software even with all the right parts in front of me – but that their circumstances were also extremely exceptional.

Thus, in Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to the different levels of success. He delves in the causes of why most Canadian ice hockey players are born in the first few months of the calendar year, and how this increases their chances to play at better leagues. He looks into the Beatles' days in Europe, having to tour and play non-stop for days straight. He explains the 10,000 hour rule, which is a general rule that applies to how people – musicians, chess players, even him – can become a success in one particular field.

One of the most prominent examples that Gladwell gives to support his thesis that it is not just the genius, and not just the hard work and determination that one has to succeed. He chose to tell the story of Christopher Lagoon. Lagoon was one of those child prodigies – he got a perfect score on his SAT, even though he “fell asleep at one point during the test (Outliers 71).” He would draw things and they would look like photographs. He could read and comprehend heavily philosophical texts and Classics. He could brief a semester's worth of textbooks in two days, and tested as having an IQ of around 195. He attended Reed College on a full scholarship, which he then lost because his mother forgot to fill out her financial statement. Instead of accommodating his circumstances, the financial aid office simply did nothing. He went back to Montana, where he grew up, and tried to go to community college and work at the same time. He tries to move from a morning class to an afternoon class, but to no avail. He ended up owning a horse fram in rural Missouri. Gladwell points out that Langan has not reached a high level of success because of the environment he grew up in. With no one in Langan's life to help him (economically, emotionally, and in opportunity-wise) and with nothing in his background to help him take advantage of his exceptional gifts, he had a hard time achieving success.

Thus, what Gladwell stresses is that not no one makes it alone. Being smart doesn't suffice. Being hardworking doesn't suffice. There are a lot more variables, either generational, age-wise, by birthdate, by place of birth or occupation of their parents – that contributes to our notion of success. There are a lot more unseen factors than society cares to admit and not everything that happens to a person is up to that person.

I think his thesis and his ideas are particularly important to us as society because it sees success from a different light. It's from a perspective that tells us that sometimes, one person isn't enough, and that has it's pros as well as its cons. To me, Gladwell resonates to the millions (or at least, lots) of people who are both smart and hard-working, yet fail to make it big. But it play the opposite effect, where people will want to rely on others to help them, instead of working the amount they should, and resort to blame and finger-pointing when things do not go their way.

Gladwell himself is successful too. He was born in England to a Jamaican mother and an English father. He moved to Canada when he was six. He studied at one of the top universities in Canada, the University of Toronto, where he earned a bachelor's degree in history. After a series of jobs, he began covering the business and science for the Washington Post, and then at the New Yorker. 

Gladwell is a journalist and an author, and has written national bestsellers such as The Tipping Point, Blink, and What the Dog Saw, in addition to Outliers. The Tipping Point was named one of the best books of the decade by Amazon.com customers, The Guardian and The Times. It sold over two million copies in US. Blink sold equally well. His ideas have been interesting, as well as well-received. The Tipping Point talks about why and how some ideas can spread like social epidemics. Blink, on the other hand, was about the notion of a sudden, rapid cognition, and how we can understand them.

Gladwell was appointed the Order of Canada in 2011. Yet from what Gladwell makes of success, it is that everyone has had some sort of push. Gladwell himself may have been severely influenced by his father, who allowed him to wander around the offices of where he worked (as a mathematics professor at the University of Waterloo). Gladwell's interest in reading and libraries, he infers, may have been contributed to those days. How many children have the opportunity to be surrounded by intellectualism at such a young age? How many visited a college campus since they were a child?

Gladwell's book is prone to critcisms from other public intellectuals, and that is exactly the point of public intellectuals: to critique, to explore different options, to offer a contrasting and insightful opinion.

Yet as a public intellectual, our job is to think critically and examine beneath the surface (much like Gladwell's theory of success). Critics have often cited that as a journalist and not a scientist, Gladwell often oversimplies his work. He has also been criticized for his emphasis on anecdotal evidence over research to support his conclusions (example being the case of Christopher Lagoon). Steven Pinker has challenged Gladwell's approach to data collection and analysis, claiming that he cherry-picks evidence to support his thesis, leaving out additional or conflicting information.

Gladwell's critics all make interesting claims, but I think Gladwell's use of anecdotal evidence is an advantage - it helps the average reader to understand his basic idea. You see papers and books being written that are not tailored toward the public, but amongst others in other academic circles. Information and ideas should be shared, but they should be shared with everyone, not with just the few. Gladwell's greatest strength is that he takes scientific evidence, and he weaves the hypotheses and the statistical data and the strange science jargon, and he weaves it into a beautifully crafted story. He doesn't claim to be an expert, or a scientist. He simply tells us stories. 

It is up to us to not rely on other people to feed us evidence, to tell us "truths", but foster the ability to "prod, poke, and pester". We all need to keep the pot boiling. Intellectualism isn't dead, but people need to start thinking, and thinking rationally.