Defining Success
(1) In his 2008 book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell challenged our understanding of successful people. We tend to look at successful people, he noted, as freaks of nature, people who are so intelligent, or skilled, or talented that they were destined for success. Gladwell’s book, however, argued that this is a superficial understanding of what it takes to be successful. For someone to be successful, they have to have intelligence, skill, and/or talent. But for someone to find the kind of success that Bill Gates has found, or that The Beatles have found, a lot of other factors have to fall into place. Where you are born, when you are born, your cultural legacy, and a myriad of other factors have to line up for you to truly be what Gladwell refers to as “an outlier.” With examples of people all around us that have benefitted greatly from their circumstances, why do we still like to think of successful people as different than us, people destined for success because of their other-worldly intelligence or talent? The explanation for this mental block we seem to have against understanding what leads a person to success is both simple and tragic.
(2) The real reason we like to look at wildly successful people as “others,” people deserving of a success we could never hope to achieve because we lack whatever they have, is because this makes it easier for us to reconcile our own lack of success. In simpler terms, we would rather think that these people have something we don’t have than that we could have achieved their success under different circumstances. This is really a depressing theory about the way we think, not only because it reveals how far we will go to protect our pride, but also because it directly hinders us from finding the kind of success that we idolize. When we decide that a goal is unattainable right from the start, we more easily justify our own inaction.
(3) Accepting defeat right from the start only ensures that we will never find success. In this sense, Gladwell’s theories are both supportive and discouraging. While Gladwell argues that immensely successful people do not possess some other-worldly abilities, he also posits that all types of factors need to line up for someone to achieve this level of success. In this way, his theory is encouraging because it means that many of us have the potential to achieve great success, but it is discouraging in that our success is still out of our control. In his book, Gladwell discusses Bill Gates as he was growing up. Yes, he was a very intelligent young man, but the level of his success is just as much a product of Gates growing up at a time when computer programming was just becoming possible, living in a place where he had access to a computer that could program, and all the other factors that went right for him. If a child is born right now with all the same inherent intelligence as Bill Gates and potential for computer programming, she isn’t likely to reach his level of success because he was there at the beginning. It’s like the difference between buying stock in Apple right now and buying stock in Apple 30 years ago. Bill Gates was learning programming before anyone realized how valuable it was, and that’s why he isn’t just a good programmer with a good job. What we sometimes forget, though, is that success is not black and white. That good programmer with a good job is successful even if she never reaches the kind of success that Bill Gates has achieved.
(4) Our natural inclination to put things into schemas and turn everything into dichotomous groups keeps us not only from finding success in our lives, but from understanding when we have achieved success. People don’t belong in groups where Bill Gates is successful and anyone who makes less money than him is unsuccessful. There are studies that show that happiness isn’t tied to this kind of success. In a well-publicized study, Angus Deaton and Daniel Kahneman posited that a person’s happiness increases as his income increases, but only until he earns about $75,000 a year; after that, returns begin to diminish. In other words, we can attribute success to income, but is there any indication that Bill Gates is happier than someone with a good job and a good income? Once we start realizing that we can be successful even if we aren’t rich and famous, we will live much happier lives. We may not all have the specific opportunities that someone like Bill Gates has, but we all have the ability to achieve success as long as we maintain a reasonable definition of the word.
