

"I want to convince you that the way we think about success is all wrong" - new Gladwell book - robg
http://800ceoread.com/blog/archives/007918.html

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arakyd
Based on that description it doesn't sound like he's looking carefully at
people who weren't successful:

"There is a silly book called A Millionaire Next Door, and one of the authors
wrote an even sillier book called The Millionaire's Mind. They interviewed a
bunch of millionaires to figure out how these people got rich. Visibly they
came up with bunch of traits. You need a little bit of intelligence, a lot of
hard work, and a lot of risk-taking. And they derived that, hey, taking risk
is good for you if you want to become a millionaire. What these people forgot
to do is to go take a look at the less visible cemetery — in other words,
bankrupt people, failures, people who went out of business — and look at their
traits. They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by
these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique
trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck." - Nassim Taleb

Gladwell's previous work on genius isn't that promising either:
[http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/05/gladwell-and-
genius.htm...](http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/05/gladwell-and-genius.html)

Finally, I doubt that the book will be better than this:
[http://www.scribd.com/doc/2926754/The-Mundanity-of-
Excellenc...](http://www.scribd.com/doc/2926754/The-Mundanity-of-Excellence)

~~~
briancooley
Taleb's statement about risk could be made succinct. Risk-taking appears to be
a necessary but not sufficient condition for financial success. That's hardly
a damning criticism of either book despite being disguised as such.

Phil Mickelson is a prominent example of the unbalanced view that the general
public has of risk-taking and its relationship to success. Before he won a
major, he was roundly criticized for taking too many chances. After winning,
he was renowned for his creativity. Little thought has been given to the idea
that his willingness to embrace risk and to accept the possibility of failure
might be critical to his success.

~~~
mlinsey
Taleb's statement is a much stronger claim than your summary that "Risk-taking
appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for financial success"

Your summary allows for the possibility that there are other factors besides
risk-taking that can help ensure success, and in particular your statement
leaves open the possibility that these factors could include working harder,
being smarter, etc. etc. Taleb's statement explicitly rejects that
possibility, arguing that the factors which distinguish the successful and the
non-successful are ones you don't even have control over.

~~~
briancooley
I distilled Taleb's quote to what was worthwhile.

Saying that some smart, hard-working risk-takers failed is not a
counterexample, and that's all Taleb was doing, at least in the quoted
passage. It's roughly the same as saying that starting cards in Texas holdem
don't influence the outcome of the hand because AA sometimes loses. It
suggests that he doesn't understand the definition of risk.

You need to know only the basics of Bayesian inference to conclude deduce that
if hard work, intelligence, and willingness to accept risk are overrepresented
among successful people versus the general population, those traits are
probably influential to success.

Maybe being smart and working hard doesn't make you a lock or even likely to
succeed. But you'd be naive to think that your chances wouldn't be better than
a competitor who was dumb and lazy.

~~~
arakyd
You would also be naive to buy a book from a guy who gives you an explanation
for something and conveniently neglects to mention, or perhaps doesn't even
realize, that his explanation only accounts for 5% of the variance. A guy who
tells you that hard work and risk taking will improve your chances from 1% to
5% in a one field but will improve them from 1% to 50% with less risk in
another is giving you information that is actually worth something.

------
gruseom
Gladwell is a good storyteller. He weaves disparate things together in a way
that seems convincing and brilliant at first but dissolves on inspection. When
challenged, his answer is, Oh of course I never said that anything was _true_.

I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, entertainment is fine,
Gladwell is an intellectual entertainer, nothing wrong with that. On the other
hand, his narratives do depend on an implicit claim to being true discoveries
about how the world works; they're not nearly as valuable and interesting if
they're not.

If you look up the definition of "charlatan", Gladwell is perilously close to
it.

~~~
aantix
While trying to pin down what exactly Gladwell is concluding is generally
difficult, you're certainly right, his gift is definitely in the story
telling.

And honestly, that's good enough for me. While I believe that I am up to date
on the latest in Computer Science I am not well read on the any of the recent
or popular studies going on in social psychology. And Gladwell brings that
research to the forefront.

Gladwell was the first to expose me to Paul Eckman's work; a man that has
dedicated his life to recording and interpreting the micro-expressions that
individual faces take on as different emotions escape us.

This led me to think "Oh, this would be greatly if I could interpret these
expressions and use them in my weekly poker game." And sure enough Mr. Eckman
offers a training CD. <http://www.paulekman.com/cds.html>

Gladwell is dusting off the basement academic journals, painting them with
great story telling, and shining a spotlight on the research. And that has
merit.

------
mynameishere
_too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their
family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their
upbringing._

Those things, of course, are all that pop pyschologists ever look at.

