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Brooks on Outliers

David Brooks wrote a very thoughtful column in the New York Times yesterday on "Outliers." Much of what he said was very flattering.

I have just two comments in response.

1. Brooks argues that I "slight the centrality of individual character and individual creativity" by focusing so much on the cultural and contextual determinants of success. Successful people, he says, must begin with two beliefs--"that the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so." I completely agree.  The chapter on lawyers, for example, is devoted to the idea of "meaningful work," which is just what Brooks is talking about here, the perception that there is a connection in our daily life between effort and reward. It's such that I think that the belief in meaningful work is socially constructed. Those highly successful children and grandchildren of Jewish immigrants who are the subject of that lawyers chapter were not successful because each, independently, happened to be endowed with the magical genetic trait of self-efficacy.  They were successful because their very fortunate cultural circumstances gave them that belief in meaningful work. Nurture here is driving nature, not the other way around.

2. Brooks suggests that Outliers represents a kind of social determinism. But that's an odd comment to make in the context of a column championing the role of nature over nurture. It's only nature that is unchangable and deterministic. Nuture, by definition, isn't. And the last half of Outliers is devoted to showing that when we confront our cultural legacies--whether it's in the cockpit or the classroom--we can make a big difference in how well we do our jobs. 

Teachers and Quarterbacks

My latest New Yorker piece, "Most Likely to Succeed" is now up.

A couple of additional thoughts.

In some of the responses to the piece, I've seen some resistance to the idea that choosing  NFL quarterbacks and choosing public school teachers represent the same category of problem.  There are only a small number of NFL quarterbacks, and we are selecting candidates from a tiny pool of highly elite athletes. By contrast, we need a vast number of public school teachers and we're recruiting from an enormous non-elite pool to fill that need.  So, the response has gone, it's apples and oranges.

Precisely! But of course non-symetrical comparisons are far more interesting and thought-provoking than symetrical comparisons. If I wrote a piece about how finding good point guards in the NBA was a lot like finding good quarterbacks in the NFL, the comparison would be exact. And as a result, it would be relatively useless.  What new light does the addition of a second, identical example shed on the first?

 What makes an idea thought-provoking, to my mind, is the extent to which we are forced to make an effort to assimilate apparently contradictory or at least antagonistic notions. Roger Martin, the dean of the Rotman School of Management at the University of Toronto, has a wonderful book out on this very idea ("The Opposable Mind").  He argues that what distinguishes successful business leaders is their ability to reconcile apparently irreconcilable options.  So, for example, the genius of Izzy Sharpe, the founder of the Four Seasons chain, is that he was the first to understand that a hotelier doesn't have to choose between the advantages of a large hotel (breadth of services) and the advantages of a small hotel (intimacy). For years everyone assumed those were mutually exclusive categories. Sharpe realized that you can, in fact, do both. Martin's book made me think that there is value in pushing the envelope on comparisons.

All of this is a long way of saying that instead of resisting the implausibility of the pairing of NFL quarterbacks and teachers, it is actually more interesting to embrace it. And what happens when you do that? You discover that the psychological situation facing the gatekeeper in both cases is identical: that confronted with a prediction deficit, the human impulse is to tighten standards, when it fact it should be to loosen standards.

Second point:

One weakness of the piece, I think, is that I didn't spell out another of the parallels between good quarterbacks and good teachers. One of the obvious implications of the notion that the college experience does not predict professional quarterback success is that professional quarterbacking is a skill learned only in the pros. That is, what matters more than anything in predicting professional success is the quality of the learning environment that the quarterback is drafted into, not the quality of the experience he was drafted from.  (Think Matt Cassell's rather remarkable performance this year: surely that's a consequence of being drafted into one of the league's best learning cultures).

My brother, an elementary school principal, believes very strongly along these same lines: that effective mentoring of a new teacher can make an enormous difference in that person's ability to become a "star" teacher. But the problem, he argues, is that the process of mentorship is much too haphazard. As he says, "It's like training NFL quarterbacks by randomly sending them out to teams - some CFL teams, some Division III teams, some Division I College teams, some community teams, and a few to NFL teams." 

It strikes me that one very logical response to the quarterback problem is not just to lower entry standards, and be willing to make after-the-fact judgments of quality, but also to spend a great deal more time and attention on the issue of talent development. If Matt Cassell can thrive in the NFL, after essentially zero college quarterback experience, what exactly is New England doing right? And what can the rest of the league learn from them? Maybe that should be the subject of a follow-up piece.

Outliers update

In my new book "Outliers," I spend a chapter trying to explain why Asian schoolchildren perform so much better at mathematics than their Western counterparts. The principal source of data on international math achievement is what's called TIMS--which is a standardized test adminsitered to kids around the world every four years. At the time of writing, the results of the 2007 TIMS were not yet in. But now they are, and they reaffirm what I was trying to address in Outliers. The gap between the Japan, South Korean, Hong Kong, Tawian and Singapore--and the rest of the world--is enormous and growing. Here's the relevant paragraph from the TIMS executive summary:

Remarkable percentages of students in Asian countries reached the
Advanced International Benchmark for mathematics, representing
fluency on items involving the most complex topics and reasoning skills.
In particular, at the fourth grade, Singapore and Hong Kong SAR had
41 and 40 percent of their students, respectively, achieving at or above
the Advanced International Benchmark. At the eighth grade, Chinese
Taipei, Korea, and Singapore had 40 to 45 percent of their students
achieving at or above the Advanced International Benchmark. The
median percentage of students reaching this Benchmark was 5 percent
at the fourth grade and 2 percent at the eighth grade.

A more modest gap between Asian and the rest of the world could, I think, be safely explained with conventional arguments about differences in pedagogy, or school funding or some such. But 40 percent versus 5 percnet? Differences of this magnitude require more fundamental explanations, which is why I felt it necessary to make such a strong cultural/historical  claim in my book.