Malcolm Gladwell Is A Dipshit

[Vigilante]

P astute of you, bruhski. I read Walden and learned of Transcendentalism in high school and since evolved. You're reading this rather late for your age. You'd also know that Thoreau was a staunch anti-materialist and was against technological innovation. Arguably anti-capitalist even, to a point. This goes into detail on it: http://popandlocke.blogspot.com/2007/10/thoreaus-anti-capitalist-message-more.html

I attached a picture of his thirty million dollar net worth and asked you to compare. Since some snowflakes here are sensitive to "haters" I found your title...Daring, hypocritical even for a power-trip mod. The going assumption is that the hating is a result of envying said individuals wealth.

I don't measure people by the zeros in their bank account. That's a huge difference between you and I.

If I did, I would have dismissed one of the posters from this forum that became a best selling author long after her first post.

If I did, I would have gone all in on the richest man I ever knew. He now occupies a 10x8 cell in Leavenworth where he will spend the rest of his life.

If I did, I would have written you off when I learned you were a 25 year old kid living in a van.

If I did, I would have missed the front row seat I have had to several success stories that I witnessed personally that emanated from the pages of this forum.

The older you get, the more you will realize that there's a lot more to life than measuring the value of others by your perception of their net worth. That is a fleeting variable that changes by day.

If I did, I wouldn't be responding to your post. Lastly, if I were a power tripping mod, you wouldn't be here.

Now this thread will move back on topic.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

A lot of people pretty much regard the "10,000" hours thing as fact now.

I don't interpret it literally -- I interpret it as "Work your f*cking a$$ off more than the other guy."

 

[Vigilante]

So last year I picked up the book David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits, and the Art of Battling Giants
by Malcolm Gladwell. Three chapters in, and I literally got up from the chair I was sitting in and threw the book in the garbage. He spent the first three chapters of the book I would never finish talking about how once you have reached a certain amount of income, then unhappiness and discontent follows. I can't remember his specific junk science, but the amount for maximum happiness was somewhere south of $100k (I want to say $80k).

Now comes this. A statistic I have quoted many times about "10,000 hours of practice" from Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and it turns out Gladwell got that wrong also.

http://www.inc.com/nick-skillicorn/...iginal-stu.html?cid=sf01002&sr_share=facebook

From the article:

"...the authors behind the original study on which Gladwell based his figures now claim that his interpretation wasn't actually very accurate."

"Fundamentally, 10,000 hours of practice will actually only keep you level on average with everyone else working toward your same goal. At most stages in your life, if you're committed to practice and improvement, that figure means you'll be ahead of about half of your competition, but still be behind the other half."

There's merit to understanding the original study, and like in all things... trust but verify. It comes as no great surprise to me after reading his fundamental errors chronicled in David and Goliath that a portion of his lifework manifesto was based on faulty understanding and interpretation on his part.

But hey... it sells books.

I haven't read it yet but here is a new book by the original creators of the study by which Gladwell created his errant summation:

https://www.amazon.com/dp/0544456238/?tag=tff-amazonparser-20

 

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[GIlman]

This greatest harm I see is that Gladwell is giving an excuse to people...and people mop it up. It's the perfect excuse not do to X, Y, and Z...plus A, B, and C. Because people say and think "I don't have 10,000 hours to learn that"

I've seen this even here on the FLF. In particular I remember it thrown out several times in the "is learning to program stupid or smart" thread. The 10,000 hours is offered as a reason not to learn.

But, you know something....I'm probably only a master at 1 thing...but I'm competent and even extremely competent 15-20 things (probably even more depending on how you categorize it). And the only reason is because I didn't ask if I could I just started doing.

And competency is not 10,000 hours. Depending on the skill (and your own aptitudes) it may only be 20 hours, maybe 100, but certainly I can hold my own in most things within at least 200 hours. And I'm willing to bet this is the extreme majority of people, I doubt I'm special in any way.

Am I the world greatest pilot, accountant, programmer, manager, marketer, business man, scuba diver, etc, etc, etc...without a doubt NO.

But am I competent and GOOD enough at these things? Hell yes.

And I'll take competence any day over ignorance.

 

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[350z]

People spend 10,000 hours living and yet, as crazy as it sounds, some people live better than others.

Maybe it's not about the quantity of hours, perhaps it about the quality of hours.

You can set a goal to drive 10,000 miles but who's going to get to their goal faster, the one going 20MPH or the one going 200MPH?

It's called the fastlane for a reason.

 

[MJ DeMarco]

if I were a power tripping mod, you wouldn't be here.

He has one pinky finger left here at the forum. The rest of his body is out the door. And his sycophants can go with him. I tired of reading his omnipotent snark in my house, and now, directed at my moderators.

That said, this post is the rope... lets see how long it takes to get it hung.

 

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[RHL]

I can't remember his specific junk science, but the amount for maximum happiness was somewhere south of $100k (I want to say $80k).

Scumbag Gladwell: "Knows" more money makes you unhappy; still publishes new books after selling over 10,000,000 volumes and being worth $30,000,000.

This is the essence of the "goo-roo" paradox. Do what they do and not what they say, folks.

 

[Fox]

I never thought the ten thousand hour rule made sense. What about the worlds best skydiver? The max you can get in one job is 60 seconds freefall. So to be the best I need 600,000 jumps. Sure thing.

Like MJ I just took it as a general rule to work your a$$ off. Nothing changes between hour 9,999 and 10,001.

I was listening to Ready, Fire, Aim last night and the author says in the intro he took some quiz in a Seth Godin book that said he wouldn't be suitable as an entrepreneur. This is after he had set up multiple 100 million dollar companies.

How much do you work? As much as it takes.

 

[ChickenHawk]

I attached a picture of his thirty million dollar net worth and asked you to compare. Since some snowflakes here are sensitive to "haters" I found your title...Daring, hypocritical even for a power-trip mod. The going assumption is that the hating is a result of envying said individuals wealth.

Suuuuuure, because a guy who is already successful, and who has created literally thousands of posts here, helping aspiring entrepreneurs, is really just a power-hungry dude, eaten up by envy. Oh sure, he's made 7,465 posts, has 32,117 likes, and donates his time and energy to make this forum a great place, but obviously, this was just a ruse to fool us all.

Since you made your post near-midnight, I can only assume this was drunk-logic. BTW, nice try with the phrase, "the going assumption." It's a pretty slick way to imply that you've got a big crowd of people who think the same way. Too bad you don't.

 

[blackbrich]

Around 90%(also arbitrary) of the time when non-scientists cite scientific studies its bullshit.
Non-scientists tend to go much further with their conclusions on very small-scale studies than a scientist would ever go based on extensive multi-year multi-experiment multi-assay research that he himself presided over.
Reading and understanding a scientific study is a skill.

 

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[Andy Black]

What I normally find to be a good gauge is if something goes "mainstream", then don't bother.

I'm pretty sure its one of the things @MJ DeMarco mentions too, to paraphrase; "if you see everyone else doing it, do the opposite".

What goes mainstream these days?

Viral content - Oh look a cat doing something hilarious! Also, gossip and other celebrity related garbage = Waste of time.
Books with no real context or actionable advice - Gladwell's stuff, Brene Brown, The Secret, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying up = Gooey "feel good" nonsense the lot of it.

The list could be made longer, but that'll do. I don't need to tell people here do I?

There was a tip in Seth Godin book too, he said he only reads books that most people don't/wouldn't. I haven't tried that out myself yet.

I instinctively go the opposite direction. Call it stubborn. Call it contrarian. I've been called both, and I've found it a valuable instinctive reaction.

If the herd's going left, then there'll be less BS and arseholes going right...

 

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[csalvato]

In the book Zero to One Peter Thiel called Malcolm Gladwell as inaccurate. I forgot the exact reason (I will have to check again).

maybe Peter Thiel is also jealous of Malcolm's net worth...

oh, wait...

 

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[Vigilante]

A lot of people pretty much regard the "10,000" hours thing as fact now.

If you repeat it so many times (as I did) it starts becoming "fact."

 

[Digamma]

I didn't read Gladwell's stuff specifically, but I do have a piece of advice regarding books.*

Ask yourself: has the author walked the walk on the subject?

If the author is a "non-fiction author", don't read it, it's crap.

I'm yet to see myself proven wrong on this.


* = which is the reason I didn't read Gladwell.

 

[CJZee]

Malcolm Gladwell is a good at finding concepts and crafting stories around them. It just so happens his stories don't accurately represent the concepts that he's interpreting.

Anders Ericsson, the researcher who crafted the 10,000 hour rule, strongly disagrees with Gladwell's interpretation. He says Gladwell just throws out this 10,000 hour number without any context. Ericsson's theory involves the concept of "deliberate practice." That's why a person who hires a golf coach with a detailed training regimine can improve faster in 2,000 hours than a weekend warrior who hacks away for 10,000 hours.

Gladwell just perpetrates the myth that all you need to do is put in the time and in the end you'll be rewarded.

But hey, he's a good storyteller and that's what sells books. Unfortunately people believe it.

 

[ilrein]

Peter Thiel does a great job assessing Gladwell as an author, and I can't help but agree.

Thiel describes him as a pessimist. Gladwell agreed the greats worked their asses off, but he was convinced they were beyond lucky in their circumstance and therefore, we shouldn't really compare ourselves to them because our own situations are not so fortunate.

After Outliers I decided not to read anymore of his work, as I could sense the deterministic tone. I like romantic writers.

 

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[BStaff95]

My sociology teacher who talked about the government hacking her email every class made us read this and take an exam on it. She really believed in the contents of this book and touted them as fact.

I'll be able to sleep much better tonight knowing that my university is doing its job properly preparing me for the world.

 

[LifeTransformer]

What I normally find to be a good gauge is if something goes "mainstream", then don't bother.

I'm pretty sure its one of the things @MJ DeMarco mentions too, to paraphrase; "if you see everyone else doing it, do the opposite".

What goes mainstream these days?

Viral content - Oh look a cat doing something hilarious! Also, gossip and other celebrity related garbage = Waste of time.
Books with no real context or actionable advice - Gladwell's stuff, Brene Brown, The Secret, The Life Changing Magic of Tidying up = Gooey "feel good" nonsense the lot of it.

The list could be made longer, but that'll do. I don't need to tell people here do I?

There was a tip in Seth Godin book too, he said he only reads books that most people don't/wouldn't. I haven't tried that out myself yet.

 

[Ubermensch]

If you repeat it so many times (as I did) it starts becoming "fact."

Pretty crazy.

Scientists Debunk The Myth That 10,000 Hours of Practice Makes You an Expert

The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real -

"
A [URL='http://scottbarrykaufman.com/wp-content/uploads/2014/07/Macnamara-et-al.-2014.pdf']new meta-analysis, however, indicates that the 10,000 hour rule simply does not exist. As Brain's Idea reports, authors of the new study undertook the largest literature survey on this subject to date, compiling the results of 88 scientific articles representing data from some 11,000 research participants. Practice, they found, on average explains just 12 percent of skill mastery and subsequent success. "In other words the 10,000-Hour rule is nonsense," Brain's Idea writes. "Stop believing in it. Sure, practice is important. But other factors (age? intelligence? talent?) appear to play a bigger role."

[/URL]

 

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[csalvato]

if you want to hone your BS meter, read a few of his books. In outliers he all but says Bill Gates was just "lucky" to become CEO of one of the biggest tech companies in history...

 

[limitless_c]

Obviously there isn't such thing as a rule of hours to master something but I think its a good motivation for some people.

Maybe someone reads the 10.000 hours rule and the next day they start chasing what they want. Like Poor Dad Rich Dad, its not true but it has motivated thousands of people.

 

[GuestUserX09]

I remember listening to this audio book a few years and being engaged in an interesting way.. out of anything the 10,000 hour bit is all I remember but my question was always, "so what happens at 20,000 hours?" "What happens at 5,000 hours" over what period of time? Etc.

@350z is right. I don't know where I read it but some author or interview somewhere mentioned that the hours don't matter, it's all about the quality of the hours. So with that in mind, I do follow 10,000 hours as a rough estimate, being in the non-literal context like MJ said "Work your f*cking a$$ off more than the other guy." ..But as Gladwell attempted to put it, I don't see it as a actual finish line or "rule".

I think it's more of a reminder to have deep domain expertise and saying "10,000 hours" just happened to be a better way of putting it to sell books.

 

[Vigilante]

Never been a fan or believer in Malcolm's work.

FWIW, I've enjoyed your take down of popular books including Ready, Fire, Aim.

I really want to like these books. I feel though that a lot of best sellers are packaged for consumption by people that are searching for the Fast Lane, but looking for a shortcut. It's been a long time since I have read an entrepreneurial book that had more than a few takeaways.

I am tending to go back towards classic literature, and little modern business non-fiction. Reading works by Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, and others provides me more intellectual growth than reading Gladwell's misinterpretation of a study. I also confess I wasn't intellectually curious enough to jump from Gladwell's screed to the original study to fact check Gladwell's work. It sure took these guys a long time to debunk it though.

I learn more from random occasional posts here on the forum than I do from most of the business best sellers on the market. There's always the classics (Blue Ocean Strategy, Art of War, MFL, Rich Dad, 4HWW, Discipline of Market Leaders, Steven Covey's stuff, Steven Keys book(s) and several others) that form the nucleus of my recommended business library. I haven't added a book to my recommendations in a LONG time.

 

[Vigilante]

Kek. Care to compare?

Compare your writing vs. his?

His. For a LOT of reasons.

The easiest of which he doesn't use 14 year old teenage girl slang like "kek."

 

[Digamma]

In the book Zero to One Peter Thiel called Malcolm Gladwell as inaccurate. I forgot the exact reason (I will have to check again).

He cites Gladwell several times, and the feeling I get is that he thinks Gladwell is a dipshit. The topic is relative to Gladwell's idea that successful people are "lucky".

 

[jon.a]

I can't remember his specific junk science, but the amount for maximum happiness was somewhere south of $100k (I want to say $80k)...

Princeton University said $75K
http://content.time.com/time/magazine/article/0,9171,2019628,00.html

 

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[AllenCrawley]

Never been a fan or believer in Malcolm's work.

FWIW, I've enjoyed your take down of popular books including Ready, Fire, Aim.

 

[splok]

This whole thread seems like missing the forest for the trees. Ok, so I agree that most scientific studies are bad, some REALLY bad, and the popular reporting on them is almost universally REALLY, REALLY bad. Sadly, the terrible reporting is all the popular awareness that studies ever get though, since the vast, vast majority of people aren't going to track down and read the actual studies in question. However, I think lumping Gladwell into the pile of shitty bloggers is a bit much. He may take some liberties with his interpretations of the research, but when I read his stuff, it seems more like he's trying to distill practical lessons from research and present it in a way that the average person will actually find useful.

Now comes this. A statistic I have quoted many times about "10,000 hours of practice" from Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success and it turns out Gladwell got that wrong also.

Ok, here are a few quotes from the book:

The students who would end up the best in their class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve, sixteen hours a week by age fourteen, and up and up, until by the age of twenty they were practicing—that is, purposefully and single-mindedly playing their instruments with the intent to get better—well over thirty hours a week.

The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any "grinds," people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks.

Ok, so he seems to be saying that hard work makes you better and that people shouldn't blame success on talent or luck. I think everyone here would pretty much agree with that, right? If he's cherrypicking a nice round number just to get a point across, does that make him a dipshit and invalidate everything he's written? (Also note the bold. He isn't leaving out the concept of deliberate practice, he just didn't use that specific term.)

However, even if it's cherrypicked, it's not exactly arbitrary:

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 the 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.

Also, a excerpt from Gladwell discussing the critiques: http://www.newyorker.com/news/sporting-scene/complexity-and-the-ten-thousand-hour-rule

Forty years ago, in a paper in American Scientist, Herbert Simon and William Chase drew one of the most famous conclusions in the study of expertise: There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade’s intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions…

In the years that followed, an entire field within psychology grew up devoted to elaborating on Simon and Chase’s observation—and researchers, time and again, reached the same conclusion: it takes a lot of practice to be good at complex tasks. After Simon and Chase’s paper, for example, the psychologist John Hayes looked at seventy-six famous classical composers and found that, in almost every case, those composers did not create their greatest work until they had been composing for at least ten years.

The Ericsson article talking about how Gladwell got everything wrong (convenient time to play up the problems since they've just released a book of course) mainly complained about his use of the number, not the concept. If you read Ericsson's actual study, instead of using the "10,000 hour rule", he basically uses the "10 year rule". Ten years isn't any more magical than 10,000 hours, but the point is that the best people work the most. Here's the original study in case anyone wants to bother reading it: https://graphics8.nytimes.com/image...f/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf

In their classic study of expertise in chess, Simon and Chase (1973) observed that nobody had attained the level of an international chess master (grandmaster) "with less than about a decade's intense preparation with the game"

we know of only a small number of exceptions to the general rule that individuals
require 10 or more years of preparation to attain international-level performance

J. R. Hayes (1981) confirmed that 10 years' experience is necessary in another domain, musical composition.

Simon and Chase's (1973) "10-year rule" is supported by data from a wide range of domains: music (Sosniak, 1985), mathematics (Gustin, 1985), tennis (Monsaas, 1985), swimming (Kalinowski, 1985), and long-distance running (Wallingford, 1975).

expert performance is not reached with less than 10 years of deliberate practice.

So after all of the complaining of wrongness, the conclusion of Ericcson's study says essentially the same thing as I got from Outliers:

Contrary to the popular "talent" view that asserts that differences in practice and experience cannot account for differences in expert performance, we have shown that the amount of a specific type of activity (deliberate practice) is consistently correlated with a wide range of performance including expert level performance, when appropriate developmental differences (age) are controlled.

We attribute the dramatic differences in performance between experts and amateurs-novices to similarly large differences in the recorded amounts of deliberate practice.

 

[juan917]

A lot of people pretty much regard the "10,000" hours thing as fact now.

 

[JokerCrazyBeatz]

People spend 10,000 hours living and yet, as crazy as it sounds, some people live better than others.

Maybe it's not about the quantity of hours, perhaps it about the quality of hours.

You can set a goal to drive 10,000 miles but who's going to get to their goal faster, the one going 20MPH or the one going 200MPH?

It's called the fastlane for a reason.

SOMEBODY GIVE THIS GUY SOMETHING!! Lol best post for this thread goes to this guy ^^^^^^^