Over the Christmas break I managed I read Oscar Wilde’s “The Picture of Dorian Gray” and re-read Malcolm Gladwells – “Outliers – The Story of Success”.
Two very different books but I was intrigued about the role of characters in both books and their connections and relationship with the culture of the day. In 1890 issues of class were more obvious but as Outliers makes clear our cultural history may well be more influential than we think.
In The Picture of Dorian Gray (Spoiler Alert) the Dorian of the title has a portrait which ages while he stays looking the same as he was when the portrait was painted. The novel was first published in 1890 and as you may expect from Oscar Wilde the book comes across now as a series of densely written dinner party philosophy rambles but is still completely striking.
There are many familiar quotes in Dorian and some of them were used again in other works by Wilde. What I liked about the novel was the central idea of the portrait which showed the wear and tear of experience rather than the person. (I’m understating the writing which is well worth the time investment.)
So imagine a photo of yourself at 18 and then reflecting on that image after 20 or more years. What stories can your face tell and what do others see when they meet you? It turns out that while physical appearance is arguably important what is much more significant are the things we can’t see easily – like cultural legacy.
On page 20 of Dorian there is a very modern sentiment
“The aim of life is self development. To realise one’s nature perfectly – that is what each of us is here for.”
I don’t have a photo of Dorian but I do have one of the Beatles from 1957 “when George Harrison was 14, John Lennon was 16, and Paul McCartney was 15.” Paul is the easiest one to recognise now.
Source: https://twitter.com/HistoricalPics/status/414817905323560960/photo/1
Many of us know a fair bit about the Beatles story but in Gladwells book he mentions that before they broke through in the UK they got in their 10,000 hrs playing in clubs in Hamburg. I blogged about the “10,000 hrs idea” back in 2007 before Gladwell published his book.
I remember that when the book came out it was that 10,000 hrs (of practice) that got the headlines but after re-reading the book the case for cultural connections making much of the luck and good timing possible for individuals is what struck me.
I particularly liked the chapters on airline safety – the power distance ratio between the pilot and his flight crew turns out to be extremely important for example.
As Gladwell himself says – about the book during a Q & A
“What I came to realize in writing Outliers, though, is that we’ve been far too focused on the individual—on describing the characteristics and habits and personality traits of those who get furthest ahead in the world.
And that’s the problem, because in order to understand the outlier I think you have to look around them—at their culture and community and family and generation. We’ve been looking at tall trees, and I think we should have been looking at the forest.”
Of course it is often only possible to identify the best timing for new discoveries or big opportunities in hindsight. We don’t have a a time machine so we can’t go back to a particular place and time that we now know is pivotal so what can we do.
- / Hard work + talent to a level of mastery takes time – about 10,000 hrs for complex disciplines.
- / Lucky breaks – including timing, culture, location and other resources such as other people who can help.
Looking back I can see why most readers instinctively highlighted the 10,000 hrs rule because that is something that we can individually work on and it is also much easier to understand and to action.
The part 2 – working on your luck and cultural influences is much less direct but there are things that we can do. Ask any parent and many of them are trying to make connections and opportunities available to their children.
It seems like a smart idea to do a stock take on our own cultural connections and what differences that might make to ourselves and our families. We don’t like to talk about “class” but there are groups of people who don’t see opportunities the same way that others might.
They might think they are blocked from certain options and maybe they are. Certainly individual talent and hard work will help anyone get noticed but usually there are some other enablers along the way
Incredibly even though the Outliers book came out in 2008 a related story by Gladwell was one of the top posts at the New Yorker in 2013.
“No one succeeds at a high level without innate talent, I wrote: “achievement is talent plus preparation.” But the ten-thousand-hour research reminds us that “the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.” In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room, straight out of a surgical rotation, and does world-class neurosurgery.
And second—and more crucially for the theme of Outliers—the amount of practice necessary for exceptional performance is so extensive that people who end up on top need help. They invariably have access to lucky breaks or privileges or conditions that make all those years of practice possible. As examples, I focussed on the countless hours the Beatles spent playing strip clubs in Hamburg and the privileged, early access Bill Gates and Bill Joy got to computers in the nineteen-seventies. “He has talent by the truckload,” I wrote of Joy. “But that’s not the only consideration. It never is.”…
In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals.
In today’s world we are used to technology success being associated with Silicon Valley but there was a huge amount of activity there for decades and by thousands of people before the “right” conditions came together for large scale business success.
As Kim-Mai Cutler (@kimmaicutler wrote recently in Silicon Valley Lost, And Found Posted Jan 4, 2014 about 3 generations of her family in Silicon Valley the personal story is very much one of re-invention.
“In classic Valley fashion, my grandfather never really accumulated too many possessions beyond some antique clocks because of his fascination with ultra-precise time-keeping. Ever the engineer, he would do quality assurance on Thanksgiving dinners by testing a prototype turkey ahead of time. Then after a BART crash in Fremont in the 1970s, he was asked to design a better system that would prevent train blockages. So in a way, he contributed to both the immaterial and very physical fabric that binds Silicon Valley together.
The point of bringing his story up is that we are standing on the shoulders of giants. The consumer Internet era owes itself to the proliferation of PCs in the 1980s and 1990s, which then owe themselves back to basic research efforts and funding that formed the foundation of Silicon Valley back in the 1930s and 40s.”
Each new year is a time when we often make resolutions to change something about ourselves. When we do that and include a better appreciation of our culture and our connections – anything is possible.
