Peter Jones: We can all be successful, with a little help from our friends

Published on Saturday 18 October 2008 19:41

In the face of the most threatening economic times we have known, are we doomed to mediocrity?

WHY are other people a success, and ourselves relative failures? If we haven't discovered the genius within by the time we are in our twenties, are we doomed to be also-rans for the rest of our lives?

In the face of the most threatening economic times we have known, such bleak thoughts can nag depressingly. If our special talent, or that of our kids, doesn't swiftly become obvious, maybe we are doomed to mediocrity.

Actually, your thinking about yourself or your kids might be all wrong. This is the message of an eagerly-awaited book out next month by Malcolm Gladwell, opposite, himself a big success story. At the age of 40, with an already impressive journalistic career, he found international fame with a book whose title has entered everyday language: The Tipping Point.

It explained why change – in society, business or politics – can happen swiftly and unexpectedly. His big insight is that, as new ideas percolate through people's minds, they behave like an epidemic – steadily infecting more and more until a tipping point occurs and they spread like wildfire. The book that followed, Blink, is an exploration of why snap judgments are often better than those reached after mountains of research.

So the thirst for his new work – Outliers, a study of why some people do something really special with their lives and others do not – is huge. Gladwell is already offering some teasing leaks. He says: "In examining the lives of the remarkable among us – the brilliant, the exceptional and the unusual – I want to convince you that the way we think about success is all wrong."

Some of what he writes will be no big surprise. He says that your innate abilities matter a lot less than where you have come from – your parents and your home life. Rather obviously, a home that encourages creativity and exploration is more likely to foster an innovative person. More interesting is the insight that being a child prodigy is no guarantee of being an adult genius. The child prodigy is, by and large, only mimicking what they have seen their adult teacher do. To turn that into bravura performances in adult life requires originality, something not many prodigies are able to muster.

Hard work matters too. No surprise there, you may think, but Gladwell believes hard work can also produce extraordinary talent. Picasso, he says, fits the popular image of the artistic genius – someone who between the ages of 20 and 30 produced the best of his inimitable work. Cezanne, on the other hand, painted for 30 years before he produced pictures now acclaimed as masterpieces.

Picasso was a conceptual innovator who had a brilliant insight. Cezanne was an experimental innovator, starting with general ideas and painstakingly refining them until, finally, hitting on something new and exciting. Cezanne had something else too: a long-suffering father who paid his son's bills; a childhood friend, the writer Emile Zola, who nurtured Cezanne's talent; and a great teacher, Camille Pissarro. It was a dream support team. And that's Gladwell's big insight – that with the right support, years of hard work can produce brilliant, exceptional, talent. There is hope for us all.