The Sweet Smell of Success
David Brooks critiques Malcolm Gladwell and the renewed interest in the considerable evidence that success is mostly due to good fortune:
Most successful people begin with two beliefs: the future can be better than the present, and I have the power to make it so. They were often showered by good fortune, but relied at crucial moments upon achievements of individual will.
Most successful people also have a phenomenal ability to consciously focus their attention. We know from experiments with subjects as diverse as obsessive-compulsive disorder sufferers and Buddhist monks that people who can self-consciously focus attention have the power to rewire their brains.
I think these are fine points, but they also reflect precisely the sort of misconceptions that books like Outliers and Fooled By Randomness are aimed at clearing up. We look at successful people and see that they share certain common elements. From that, it’s easy to infer that the successful succeeded because of these characteristics in a way that’s unduly strong. We forget to look at all the other people who also share those characteristics.
To get rich in the United States you pretty much have to work hard. But the idea that success is due to hard work ignores the fact that there are all these other people working hard and not succeeding. Hard work is much more common than success. And advantages of birth and dumb luck are making the difference — separating the hard-working partner at the corporate law firm from the hard-working guy who moved the furniture into the law firm’s office. Similarly, if you only look at the successful traders on Wall Street you’ll probably decide they got rich because they’re smart — these firms usually try to hire smart guys who went to good schools. But if you look at the failures, you’ll see that they’re smart guys who went to good schools, too. The difference between the two groups is luck.
57 Responses to “The Sweet Smell of Success”
Register
RSSLogin
Topic Cloud
ArchivesBlog RollAbout Matt YglesiasContact Me
Donate
December 16th, 2008 at 1:30 pm
This post is, as far as I can tell, a basic recapitulation of Jencks’ argument from the early 1970s Re: economic success, family background, cognitive ability, and, importantly, the vagaries of luck.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:38 pm
why define “success” in such an elitist way? i feel like people who work hard and are middle class are successful too, just not in the same way that people who make it to the top are.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:50 pm
There’s no either/or. It takes hard work to build on good fortune.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:53 pm
Ironic that this topic was sprung by David Brooks, who is as damn lucky to have his job as just about anyone.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:54 pm
Yeah but “luck” often comes thru nepotism or some existing network. Your successful family may convince someone to hire you, to give you the needed break.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:55 pm
To get rich in the United States you pretty much have to work hard.
I don’t know how true this is — there are some amount of people that become rich through pure luck and/or pure natural talent.
Its also worth pointing out that a lot of people in the United States need to work hard just to get by.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:58 pm
why define “success” in such an elitist way? i feel like people who work hard and are middle class are successful too, just not in the same way that people who make it to the top are.
Because this ‘middle class’ is a dying breed, one that certain factions (like Southern Republicans) are doing everything in their power to get rid of?
I went to a ’second tier’ elite school, Emory U, “the Harvard of DeKalb County”, “A Methodist School for Jews in Decatur”, and the rich kids I knew were a varied lot. A goodly number of them succumbed to drugs and a sense of privilege that the real world did not validate.
I grew up on a farm, have always worked hard, and have had some success in my field, but am struggling just now, after the death of my wife (who’s illness caused and was exacerbated by loss of a job and it’s insurance)and a lawsuit beyond my control, as well as a crappy economy. Success is sometimes just good fortune, not virtue or intelligence.
December 16th, 2008 at 1:59 pm
One way to express it is that these characteristics (e.g. hard working) are necessary but not sufficient conditions for success.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
I don’t know how true this is — there are some amount of people that become rich through pure luck and/or pure natural talent.
Its also worth pointing out that a lot of people in the United States need to work hard just to get by.
Therein lies the Gladwell/Brooks problem. Success, by any definition, requires a combination of hard work, talent, and luck. Any of those factors by itself may be sufficient, or it could be a combination of all three. Oddly enough, people’s lives are complicated and the aggregate of all people’s lives is very complicated. There isn’t any one (or two) phenomenon that explain success.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:03 pm
If both your parents have phDs and all you get is a masters you probably consider yourself a failure and so would those around you. All birth does is determine where the bar for success is set. It says nothing about your likelihood of achieving it. And terse is right your elitist definition of success ignore many middle and lower class successful individuals. That hard working mover probably earns more than a lazy mover and has respect from his family and community. There is no reason to assume he isn’t successful simply because his marginal product of labour is low.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:06 pm
But if you look at the failures, you’ll see that they’re smart guys who went to good schools, too. The difference between the two groups is luck.
Matt, what is with your unending hate on traders?
Listen, we understand, you knew a lot of folks at Harvard who went to NYC and made sh*tbags of money, and you were probably smarter than lots of them. We understand this is probably an unending source of cognitive dissonance for you.
However, can you at least admit, out loud, the possibility that some of them are good at their job/skilled in some sense. BANKS hire tons of smart people from good schools, and yet there are very few traders. Why? Why are math skills so important? There are tons of different kinds of traders, not all of them are Taleb-style punters. There are tons of different people in banks, not EVERYONE just got a winning lottery ticket.
Congrats you read Fooled by Randomness, do you ever want to back up your repeated assaults on finance, or are you just content that your readership cocoon responds fine to your attacks?
Let’s put it this way. You are right, you were phenomenally lucky to start blogging when you did, how you did. But you are also incredibly GOOD at your job, there are a million blogs out there, but your voice came across in a way that makes people want to read you again. It’s not all luck. Luck was neccessary, but certainly not sufficient.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:07 pm
I just find it bizarre that people actually believe hard work is generally rewarded.
Maybe they just have worked in different fields than me.
In my experience the employees that work the hardest get the most work dumped on them. And that’s about all they get.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:18 pm
We live in a second gilded age. The rich know how to take care of things. They’re smart and talented. We can leave it all up to them.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:20 pm
To get rich you probably have to work hard. Lord Yglesias proves though that to be rich you just have to be born with a silver spoon in your mouth, and a doorman holding the door for your limo.
If we were truly a progressive culture we would advocate 90% taxation rate on all benefits that pass from parent to child, then use that $$ to help out those born outside of the polity and level the playing field. I am talking about taxing private school tuition, college tuition, baby food, everything. Spreading that $$ around would be true progress!
December 16th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
This is idiotic. Studying successful people and determining their personality traits after they’ve been successful for years is completely pointless. Success (or failure) leads to major alterations is personality, outlook, etc, that will completely skew any study attempting to discern the “cause” of success (or, once again, failure). Anyone who has observed friends, classmates, or acquaintances prior to and after achieving success will discern obvious differences between the before and after.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:22 pm
I have not yet read Gladwell’s Outliers, though I suppose now I have to. Pardon my skepticism, but given that Gladwell’s previous works, most notably Blink, are devoid of empirical rigor, I’m not sure how reliant we should be on his conclusions.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
The most interesting part of Gladwell’s book is his dissection on the timing of events. Bill Gates came of age when the software age began. Imagine Michael Dell trying to start his computer business in his dorm room now?
Timing really does matter. Talent and hard work are the admission tickets. But you also need to be admitted to an on-going event.
December 16th, 2008 at 2:26 pm
Good point Alex, haven’t we just suffered through 8 years of the Blink president?
December 16th, 2008 at 2:35 pm
December 16th, 2008 at 2:56 pm
Matt:
Hard work is much more common than success.
Well put and it’s great to have a President-elect who recognizes this. I think Brooks should team up with Gladwell and Tom Friedman and they could write a book based on zero empirical evidence but it would have a cool, catchy title.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:11 pm
More simply, hard work is (almost always) a necessary condition for success, not a sufficient condition.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:23 pm
gordon gekko: “If both your parents have phDs and all you get is a masters you probably consider yourself a failure”
wait, what?? Just because my parents are academics doesn’t mean i want to become one too.
December 16th, 2008 at 3:32 pm
This argument is indicative of one of the major differences between conservatives and progressives. Progressives realize that we are never alone in the world and since our success is never solely because of our leet awesomeness, we should not take all the credit for it, monitarily or otherwise.
Conservatives, on the other hand, just look down and chant; “Try Harder” to those poor slobs without their inherent leet awesomeness (or family connections and/or wealth) since their success is obviously due only to the Herculean act of will on their part that allowed them to annihilate all the Fail in their lives.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:02 pm
our leet awesomeness
Spelling note, d00d: that’s “l33t.”
December 16th, 2008 at 4:05 pm
There’s no either/or. It takes hard work to build on good fortune.
Sure. Just look at Paris Hilton.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:15 pm
Re Matthew’s comment “The difference between the two groups [successful and failures] is luck.”
—————
Strange. I think that what distinguishes the successful is one of two traits:
a) In the case of people like David Brooks and President George W Bush, an obsessive compulsion to perform analingus upon whoever is their rich patron or patrons at the moment.
b) In the case of Wall Street, one needs to be a psychopath. It amazes me that some wealthy shitholes can do the financial equivalent of parking a truck next to the Murrah building and escape scott free. Why did we execute Timothy McVeigh?
Oh — I know. Because the two-faced whores in the legal profession –and sitting in the magistrates chairs — are paid to fuck the poor,not the rich.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:16 pm
Caroline Kennedy being seriously considered for Hillary’s NY Senate seat illustrates Matt’s points. She is, no doubt, hard working, intelligent, and dedicated, but if she didn’t belong to the Kennedy clan she would just be one of many others with the same qualities.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:19 pm
The Mob has it right: Anyone who plays by the rules in our society is a sucker. Trust fund schmucks, bar mitzvah bonanzas, nepotism, the whole putrid shebang. Any poor or working class hero with the clarity and guts to be gaming the system by any means necessary understands just how corrupt and morally repulsive a nation we are and always have been.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:23 pm
The people who brought on this oncoming depression committed an act of mass murder.
We have millions of people dying in this country from a lack of medical care.
There’s a conference in Washington addressing how people die years before their time from untreated diabetes. Die because they can not afford the colonoscopies needed to detect and cure colon cancer. Die from violence because our elites don’t give a shit about providing police protection to poor neighborhoods. Die from untreated high blood pressure because they can’t afford medical insurance and prescription drugs. Prescription drugs whose cost is deliberately kept artifically high by Congress.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:44 pm
If there’s ever a country that needed Mao in charge – it’s this one.
December 16th, 2008 at 4:46 pm
If forced to choose, we would all rather our children be poor with self-control than rich without it.
David Brooks is an idiot.
December 16th, 2008 at 5:01 pm
But a high-achieving idiot.
December 16th, 2008 at 6:04 pm
as a physician I can tell you that I find 2 truths here. first, certainly success depends upon circumstances. I was born to succesful white suburban educated parents. Medical School or something similar was expected and in fact 3 of 4 children in my family are docs. We all worked hard, but we all wouldn’t have been docs had we been born to southern sharecroppers.
the second truth is that almost every doc I have ever met believes that there was little luck or fortune in arriving at his position, that he earned it. for myself, I am sure that being motivated, adventurous and intelligent, that had I grown up in the inner city in the 1970s , that I would have surely , for at least a significant period of my life, aspired to the most lucrative available profession around me, and dealt drugs.
I think this is the point that Gladwell hopes to make, that we should be hesitant to judge others or congratulate ourselves so quickly, because our initial situations matter much more than we like to admit, and our character much less.
December 16th, 2008 at 7:55 pm
What’s “luck?”
Is Usain Bolt lucky or talented? Or is he lucky to be talented?
December 16th, 2008 at 9:39 pm
Re: If there’s ever a country that needed Mao in charge – it’s this one.
So we could reduce our surplus population through artificial famines and mass purges?
December 16th, 2008 at 10:01 pm
Usain Bolt and Michael Phelps are lucky to have the perfect bodies for their sport. (Bolt is tall, which is anomalous for sprinters, but he has amazing fast-twitch muscle, allowing him to couple long strides with frequent strides. Phelps’s abnormally long torso is well documented; you could just do a google image search.) I don’t know about Bolt, but Phelps worked hard, probably harder than his peers. I saw him on the Colbert show last night and he was explaining how he worked out 7 days per week when everyone else was only practicing 6.
You could also argue that Bolt was lucky to be born in Jamaica (and not, say, Senegal) so he could cultivate his sprinting abilities. Phelps was lucky to be born in Baltimore, a hotbed of swimming.
December 16th, 2008 at 10:32 pm
Matt is correct, but missing part of the point. To ascribe success predominantly to luck is not what Gladwell was getting at; the luck is involved in the accidents of your birth place, time, and family. These accidents combine to produce individuals who are more or less likely to be hard working, intelligent, socially adept, successful by whatever definition you choose, etc.
Gladwell’s point is that these factors don’t have to be completely accidental. Societies can create policies which cause these factors to be less predictive of an individual’s outcomes. So the means to get to a David Brooks-style meritocracy where individual will trumps all is through progressive-style social reforms to reduce the immense advantages some have by accident of their birth.
December 17th, 2008 at 10:00 am
Unsurprising to find this comment thread filled with the excuses of bitter failures
March 1st, 2009 at 6:01 am
viagra
If you have to do it, you might as well do it right
March 1st, 2009 at 7:00 pm
cialis
Incredible site!
March 11th, 2009 at 4:53 am
It is the coolest site,keep so!
March 12th, 2009 at 11:47 pm
Very interesting site. Hope it will always be alive!
March 14th, 2009 at 5:35 am
Great site. Good info
xanax
March 17th, 2009 at 2:32 am
It is the coolest site,keep so!
tramadol
March 22nd, 2009 at 6:24 am
tramadol
I want to say – thank you for this!
April 2nd, 2009 at 5:31 am
It is the coolest site,keep so!
buy cheap viagra
April 3rd, 2009 at 4:22 am
Incredible site!
cheap brand pfizer viagra
April 9th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
This is quite a hot info. I think I’ll share it on Delicious.