Malcolm Gladwell Reveals the Secrets Behind "Outliers"
Malcolm Gladwell is known for his innovative writing style, which combines the ideologies of science, religion, and pop culture.His best-selling books “The Tipping Point,” “Blink” and “Outliers” remain some of the most popular works that redefine conventional wisdom and challenge the way we understand success in our society. In this interview, Dr. Oz deep-dives into the truth about Malcolm’s unforgettable work, and what conditions turn outliers into success stories. Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.comSee omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
And it turns out that the single most important predictor of a plane's likelihood of crashing is the culture that the pilot belongs to.
And the reason for this is that planes are designed to be flown when two pilots are in open and honest communication.
and when they don't communicate openly and honestly with each other, you get problems.
Hey everyone, I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast. I'm Dr. Oz and this is the Dr. Oz Podcast.
We've got a gentleman in the room today that I've been looking forward to interview for at least two years since I read his first book, which many of you have heard of.
It's called The Tipping Point.
I was late to the game, by the way, but I did get the book done.
He's got a new book out called Outliers, The Story of Success.
Malcolm Gladwell is his name.
Many of you have seen him, heard him.
He's won tons of awards and was named one of Time Magazine's 100 Most Influential People a couple of years back for great reasons because he has changed the way many of us think about the world around us, in part by focusing on the small things that seem to make a big difference, the leverage points.
And the newest book is on outliers.
So first, thanks for joining us.
No, I'm delighted to be here.
Teach me a little bit about outliers.
Why would you write a book about that topic?
Because I just got curious.
You know, I felt like we were in a period in our society where people who were successful were patting themselves on the back a little too vigorously.
Giving themselves rotator cuff injuries.
Yes.
And this book was conceived at a very different moment in our history.
And I just sort of wondered, you know, is it really the case that That if you've done really well in the world, it's all because of your own efforts and character traits and intelligence and what have you.
And so I got a little bit skeptical and wanted to write a book that tried to expand our understanding of why it is some people end up on top.
And that was the kind of genesis of the book.
So, let's start off a little bit with, if I could, about your own family autobiography, the Jamaican story.
And it seems there, as you tell the story, you could outline it to me, that it wasn't just all chance.
No, it wasn't.
There was a lot of industriousness.
And by the way, that's sort of the Puritan ethic, right?
You're supposed to work hard.
You're supposed to be rewarded for working hard.
I think that's what frustrates a lot of folks about the current economic climate.
It just seems sort of unfair.
Yeah.
Some, and people who did the wrong things didn't get punished appropriately.
We've been talking about the emotional impacts of that.
But walk us through your family and how that reflected into this book.
Yeah, so the last chapter of this book is this kind of an investigation of my family history, trying to use the lessons of the book to understand, really, my mother's story.
My mother grew up in a little cottage in the mountains of Jamaica.
You know, no electricity or running water.
Her father was a schoolteacher, was in a one-room schoolhouse next door.
And she ends up an upper-middle-class professional in Canada.
And I just thought, here I am telling success stories, and I've got one under my nose, you know, my mother, right?
So, why not tell that story?
And I, you know, it's funny, I didn't actually know much.
I knew the kind of five-minute version of my mother's history.
And it's strange, you know, you're raised by parents and you realize you've never, here I am 45 years old, I realize I'd never had a kind of extended in-depth conversation with my mother about where she was from.
All I knew were these little snippets that you get.
Just make one comment to that.
I just did this in my family.
And I think everyone out there listening, it ought to be one of the things you do in the new year.
Just sit down with the people who are still around from the prior generations and just write down their stories.
Because maybe from now on we'll be able to store it more readily.
but I'm telling you, we lose those things pretty rapidly.
And we know only, not only that, we have all these kind of myths.
Like, I had all these myths about my mothers.
I thought my mother was this kind of...
My mothers are very...
I will say, understanding that I'm her son, so this is all highly biased, but my mother is a very intelligent, hardworking person.
So I always assumed, well, my mother is such a kind of winner that she rose from nothing in Jamaica and made her way to England, got a college education, met my father, and now she's this great success story.
And then I sort of sat down with her and my mother's sister and cousins and reconstructed this family history and ended up going back...
250 years and talking to Jamaican historians and discovered a much more complicated story that, first of all, my mother, my mother's mother, who I knew only briefly, had died when I was very young, who I always assumed was this kind of Kindly sweet grandmother.
Turns out she's a dynamo.
And she decided, when my mother and her twin sister were very, very young, she decided, my children are going to get a college education.
Now, this is the 1930s in rural Jamaica.
There aren't even, there isn't even a university in the country of Jamaica, right?
And they don't even have high schools.
All high school is private.
And this is a family that makes, I don't even know.
I mean, what would in today's terms be?
They would be, you know, making almost nothing.
In fact, the only, I discovered that my, my mother ended up going to this private high school.
She got scholarships.
My grandparents could afford only to buy the uniforms and pay train fare.
That was it.
So my grandmother orchestrates this whole thing where she gets my mother and her sister into, she gets them tutored because they had to know Latin in order to get into the school.
And they get a scholarship and the scholarships started the year before my mother and her sister would apply for this private high school.
And they only were scholarships to the school because there were riots in Jamaica in 1938.
And the government responds to the riots by finally opening up educational opportunities to poor people.
So there's an example.
So we've added two things to the story of my mother, the heroic person, right?
We've added, oh, wait a minute, she's got a mother who's incredibly determined.
And now we've got this extraordinary lucky fact that there was civil unrest in Jamaica in 1938 where the government finally said, alright, we'll do something for people who are less fortunate.
So my mother gets this incredible...
She's the beneficiary of a government policy that finally recognizes that they need to give opportunity to people who are less fortunate.
And now we start going back even further.
My mother is brown-skinned.
She is part of, she is the descendant of an Irish plantation owner who takes as his concubine, buys an African slave in the late 18th century, We don't know whether it was a rape or whatever.
Anyway, they have a child.
Now, in Jamaica, unlike in the American South, the children, the mulatto children of slaves and white landowners were not sent back into slavery.
They were freed.
And they were given educations.
Because the British were...
In Jamaica, they were...
Jamaica was essentially a slave colony.
There were almost no white people.
And the whites there were so terrified of being...
Of slaves rising up in rebellion.
The minute...
Yeah.
The minute there's anyone who even looks remotely like them, they're like, come and join us.
So my...
Great-great-great-great-grandfather, who is the offspring of this union, is a preacher.
He's one generation removed from a slave ship, and he gets an education, and he's literate, and he becomes a professional.
And that is my mother's line.
It's this brown-skinned line that in Jamaica, unlike...
that if you were part black, you were allowed to get an education, to be free, to work hard and be rewarded for your hard work.
That's the thing you were talking about earlier.
So my motto comes from a line of generation after generation of people who were We're permitted to participate in the real economy.
Mark, can I just underline this for a second?
So am I correct in my assumption that the big issue that you have with hard work getting you success is that there are some places where hard work won't work?
Exactly.
Because you're not given the chance.
Yeah.
I mean, if you're a slave in colonial Jamaica, or even if you're someone working in the absolute bottom rung of the economy today, very often you can show all of the ambition and pluck and hard work you want, and you're simply not going to get anything back, right?
There has to be a system in place that rewards you for your effort, and that's a rare and wonderful thing.
So as you look...
At a series of kids, I don't even know what age you start looking at.
When can you start seeing signs that there's going to be success there?
And again, we can all define success in our own ways.
I won't tie you down to that unless you want to get into that discussion.
How can you tell if that 5-year-old or 10-year-old or 15-year-old is going to be successful?
I think one of the first critical things is, are they in a situation where there is, where this idea that if you work hard and persist at something, you'll get something back, where that idea is reinforced in many different contexts.
So, for example, if you go into the inner city today, and you talk to kids, to boys, and They understand that concept with respect to sports.
They know if you're going to be a good basketball or football player, you have to work hard.
There's no notion whatsoever that you simply get awarded that privilege.
But they don't get that same reinforcement when it comes to schoolwork.
So it's just in one little area.
It's not a kind of general...
They're not given an opportunity to see that principle played out in every aspect of their life.
And what I think is critical for kids is in every context in which they are operating, do they see that lesson reinforced?
That if I choose to put myself on the line to do something, will I get something back?
And when we can provide opportunities like that for kids, then I think you have the determinants of success.
How about flip it?
Because the opposite problem is you're born into a life of luxury.
You have every opportunity there is.
You're in a private school, tutoring, safety nets.
Even a little bit of effort results in...
And what we would today maybe equate with success, and yet it doesn't happen there.
What's the equation there?
What prevents some of these kids from turning on?
And they'd rather be in front of a video game for the 10,000 hours we're going to talk about in a second, rather than focusing on schoolwork.
Because it's too easy.
You know, at the end of this book...
I talk a lot about math.
What does it mean to be good at math?
And I talk a lot about the KIPP schools, these charter schools and the charter school movement that's going on right now in a lot of poor neighborhoods in America that I think is really, really brilliant.
And one of their basic notions is that if poor kids are going to catch up with their wealthier counterparts, they have to outwork them.
And so this is a school that starts at 7.30 and goes till 5, and they come in on Saturday, and they come in on the summer holiday.
And there that notion is, there is no pretense that there is a shortcut, right?
What they do is they tell these kids that if you want to succeed at school, at math, at any of these subjects, and go to college, you simply have got to work harder than your privileged counterparts, right?
And it's as simple as that.
And the kids accept that, buy that, and do that for the most part.
And that to me is, you know, that's what's missing in what you were talking about with what's missing in a lot of privileged homes is that it's too easy.
That the kids never grasp that notion of how much effort is necessary to get real rewards in the world.
They just think that because in so many contexts in their life, they've been rewarded just for showing up.
That they're missing on this...
You know, you miss this notion at the bottom end if there's no mechanism in place to give you a reward.
And you miss this notion at the top end if there's too much reward.
Yes, very insightful.
Because how can you get better than it is?
I went to visit a kid's school in Houston recently.
And I was struck by a couple of factors.
The first is, the kids were given a lot of responsibility.
And with that, they have the opportunity to fail.
So, you know, I was...
It was supposed to be sort of a big deal when I walked in there, and I get there, and there's some kids ready to take me around.
Then they take me to a classroom where I sort of share the platform with some of the kids there, and I could see that there was pressure on these kids to perform.
Now, I'm sure they fail, but a lot of times we put kids in a situation where they can't fail, and they can't get ahead.
It struck me a little bit because you mentioned this 10,000-hour rule in the book.
Maybe you can explain it to folks.
So the 10,000-hour rule is...
A couple of years ago, a group of psychologists, a particular guy named Erickson, a really brilliant guy named Erickson, wanted to ask the question, how long does it take to be good at something?
So when we look at world-class chess players, how long do you have to play chess before you can become a grandmaster?
Is there a kind of minimum amount of effort you have to put in?
Or if you want to be a first-class medical specialist...
How long do you have to work before you're good?
And they started asking this question in every conceivable field they could think of.
And they came back with this really interesting answer, which was that in almost every area they looked at, the answer was the same, that you needed to have 10,000 hours of practice before you got good.
Now, 10,000 hours translates to four hours a day for 10 years.
So it's called the 10-year rule.
Another way of saying it's a 10-year rule.
It takes 10 years to be good.
And so if you look at The greatest classical composers of all time.
In almost every instance, none of them composed anything of value until they had been composing for 10 years.
It's funny, I ask people in almost every walk of life this question, at what point did you become comfortable in your profession?
And they almost always say, about 10 years in, right?
It's a really magical thing.
You can add me to that list.
Yeah.
And what's interesting about that, of course, is how long it is, right?
If you would ask me, before I did this book, how long did I think it would take for most people to get good?
I would have said, at the most, I would say, well, I don't know, five years away.
I wouldn't have said, 10,000 hours is an astonishing amount of time to engage in something in an intensive way.
Well, if you do eight hours a day, you can do it in five years.
I'm not sure that's right.
We have a lot more questions to get to, but first, a quick break.
Let's get back to this 10,000-hour issue.
Whenever I have conversations with my kids about, and I've got four of them with Lisa, about what they want to do, the classic early discussions is I want to make money.
Which doesn't sound good, but I think it's also the wrong thing to aim for.
Because you're not going to give up 10,000 hours into something to make money.
Eventually, if it's a vapid pursuit, it loses its enticing elements.
Can you put 10,000 hours in something if you're not passionate about it?
Is that really what determines success?
Because if you're trying to do something, if I was trying to paint houses and I just wasn't passionate about it, I don't think I'd do it for 10,000 hours.
This is interesting.
This gets to this question of, what is talent?
So if it takes 10,000 hours to be good at something, what that says is that natural talent plays a smaller role than practice.
But it also suggests that maybe when we say that someone is talented at something, what we mean is that they're passionate about it.
Right?
So, I sat down with Bill Gates when I was doing this book and I was talking about his childhood, his teenage years, because he has this fascinating teenage life where he gets exposed to computers before anyone else does.
In 1968, when there weren't computers around, he gets his first computer.
And he was telling me about just how much time he spent He basically did nothing else.
And at one point he tells a story about how he's 15 years old and he discovers, remember, in the early 70s there's no computers anywhere.
The big issue is how do I get to a computer so I can practice programming?
And he finds out that there's a A mainframe computer that's free at the University of Washington.
He's living in Seattle.
It's free between the hours of 2 and 6 in the morning on weekdays.
So he's 15 years old.
He sets his alarm for 1.30 in the morning.
He crawls out the window and he walks two miles in the dark.
Remember, it's Seattle.
It's like raining, right?
He walks two miles in the rain to the University of Washington and programs every morning from 2 to 6, right?
And then he comes home and he goes back to bed.
And his mom famously says, years later, when she finds out he was doing this, she says, Oh, I always wondered why it was so difficult to get Bill out of bed in the morning.
But like...
You hear that story and you think, okay, so we had this notion of Bill Gates as a genius, and he's a super, super smart guy.
But maybe a huge chunk of his genius is he loves computing, and he loves it so much that he would do what, I'm sorry, as a 15-year-old, the chances of me doing that are zero, right?
And that's why Malcolm Gladwell does not have a talent for programming, because he won't wake up at 1.30 in the morning, right?
It's not some magical thing that, you know, specific to computers.
It is passion, right?
That's what he has, his passion.
And by the way, when he's 15 years old, he hasn't the slightest expectation that he's going to make a dime off this.
At that point in time, a computer programmer was this weird, obscure little corner of the world that didn't pay much money.
It was a kind of nice little profession.
So he's not doing it because he's dreaming of being a billionaire.
He's doing it because he loves it.
I mean, it's as simple as that.
So now let's go to Bill Gates' offspring, just metaphorically.
Yeah.
The computer's easy for them to get.
Yeah.
They don't have to have passion to use it, but it is right there, so they can use it for four hours a day.
But they also have a legacy now.
Yeah.
He's out there in front of them.
What's the role of the legacy, and are their odds actually worse, ironically, paradoxically?
Yeah.
Yeah.
Well, you know, I actually think about this.
The children of super privilege have a kind of a problem, and that is that, A, what we just talked about, how things are easy, but two, how do they interpret the legacy of their parents' success?
Do they see the right lesson, which is, my father or mother was passionate about something, and that has brought them great joy, and what I need to do is find that thing that I'm passionate about, or do they see...
My father and mother have made a lot of money.
That's what I want to do as well.
In the business.
In the business.
And that's, to me, the wrong lesson.
I hope they see the passion part.
But it's hard, you know, it's a kind of, you know, maybe, I don't know, but some part of me says it's harder to find your own passion when you have this kind of overwhelming success story right in front of you.
I don't know why I think that, but I kind of do.
I've seen anyway, and I don't know if you've shared this with some of the outliers you interviewed, that a lot of times folks don't want to go on that path because it seems like it's not the path they should be on.
But maybe they are passionate about it.
For physicians, this is very common.
You're raising kids, you say, okay, don't go into medicine just because I'm a doctor.
I know it sounds really cool and hip and people respect me and I get paid well in this society for practicing the art of medicine, but that's not the right reason to go into it.
And one colleague after another of mine has a discussion with their kids, the kids go off, they don't go into medicine, then three years later they're in a post-bacc program and soon they're off to med school.
Because they actually didn't, they were repulsed by it because it was the easy way to go and the natural instinct to run away from that takes power.
Yeah, yeah.
Although I, you know, The good thing about medicine, though, in that context is that it doesn't matter if your mom or dad is the greatest doctor in the world, you still have to go to med school, right?
Yes, that's true.
No one's giving you a job right out of college.
So you have to do the work.
As long as you have to do the work, you've got to start over in a certain sense.
So what are these seeds of success first planted as you look at these different outliers?
Well, you know, one of the observations, to go back to my family history for a moment, to use that as an example, the seeds of success are planted, you know, way, way, way back in time.
I mean, they're kind of deep cultural roots for some of these seeds of success.
You know, Henry Lewis Skip Gase did this I'm sure you're familiar with it.
He did that, and he used Oprah as one of his examples, where he did those family histories of successful African Americans, and found overwhelmingly they were the descendants of people who had gotten access to land either...
We freed slaves and had gotten land before, you know, before emancipation in the 1860s or right after, very soon after emancipation got access to land.
There was a pattern of opportunity that went back many generations.
And that argument, that says that, you know, we inherit opportunities from those who came before us in ways that we may not even be aware of.
And it wasn't until I looked at my family history that I realized I inherited this opportunity of the brown-skinned privilege of what it means to be brown-skinned in Jamaica.
That goes back hundreds of years, and that's part of why I've been successful.
So answer number one is...
You know, that the seeds are planted in some cases many, many years before.
You know, I also talk about in the book about that whole chapter about why Asian kids are good at math.
Oh yeah, let's do that.
And this is this astonishing fact that if you give...
Every four years, we give math tests to kids around the world, and when the results come back, they're always the same, and that is that kids from South Korea, Japan, Hong Kong, Singapore, do not just a little bit better than Western kids, but way better.
In fact, we just last week got the results from the 2007 test, and there's a level of proficiency in calculus, high school advanced math, 45% of the Japanese kids hit that level, and 45% of the South Korean kids hit that level, and 5% of the American kids hit that level.
That is an astonishing difference.
So the question was why, right?
There's not something magical about being Asian that makes you better at math.
I mean, you don't have genes that make you better.
I mean, that's nonsense, right?
It's cultural, and I try in the book to come up with an explanation, and I think it has to do with attitudes and Asian kids are willing to work harder at math.
There's all kinds of experimental work that has shown this is true.
If you give them a math problem, a group of kids in Asia, the same math problem as you give to a group of American kids, the American kids, if they can't get it, will quit after a minute and a half.
And the Asian kids will keep trying for, you know, for as long as you want to hold the experiment forever.
And I think that has to do with cultural differences that go back to all of the countries that, Asian countries that do well at math are countries that have practiced rice agriculture.
And rice agriculture is this really interesting form of agriculture that is incredibly labor-intensive.
On my dad's side, my European ancestors 500 years ago, who were like peasants working on someone's farm, worked 1,000 hours a year.
Their counterparts in China or Japan or Korea working in the rice paddies were working 3,000 hours a year.
And I think that if you have a culture that for a thousand years works that hard, that notion doesn't go away.
You know, you inherit that when you grow up in that culture.
And that's an enormous advantage because you sit down with that mindset in front of a math problem when you're in 12th grade.
You approach it differently.
You come from a culture that says we should work hard.
You make a very compelling argument about the historical roots of success, and I could even throw epigenetics in there, because there are factors that turn on and off certain abilities of the genome to work, which are based in utero.
Frankly, even before your mother knows you're pregnant, she's already doing things that will affect things like your intelligence.
So, I'll grant you all that.
But we still have the real problem in this country of public school education.
So, as someone who spends some time looking at outliers, do you have...
They're probably not quick fixes, but any fixes that sort of strike you as obvious ones we should be using in our public education system.
Yeah, so I talk in a book about...
The work of this guy called Carl Alexander, who's a really brilliant sociologist at Johns Hopkins in Baltimore.
He did these really simple, elegant studies where he was looking at what they call the learning gap.
Poor kids and wealthier kids, if you look at their test scores, there's a difference, right?
Poor kids consistently score below wealthier kids in school.
The question is why?
We always assumed it was because schools were failing poorer kids, and in some ways they weren't learning or being taught properly during school.
Alexander says, actually, no.
If you look closely, you see that the amount of learning that goes on during the school year is exactly the same, basically exactly the same for poor kids and wealthier kids.
The gap in achievement opens up over the summer.
Because wealthier kids go back home and they're surrounded by all kinds of learning opportunities.
There's books all around.
They go to summer camp.
They get tutors.
They continue to learn throughout the summer months.
Poor kids go home and don't have those same kind of opportunities, right?
They're in a much more intellectually impoverished environment.
So the learning gap between rich and poor kids opens up during...
Summer vacation, not during the school year.
So one of the things he and many others have started to argue is the summer vacation is too long for poor kids.
It's, you know, why do we have three months off in the summer?
Other countries around the world don't do this.
Well, it made sense in an agricultural society.
Because you could work your children in the fields.
Although, yeah, although...
If you were talking about agricultural society, you really want your kids to have the spring and the fall off.
In fact, I read this really wonderful book about summer vacation in America, which said that the real reason we've got three months off in the summer is that in the 19th century, there was this crackpot notion that if you overstimulated a child's mind, it would be a cause of insanity.
So they thought that they had to give kids—they were really concerned to limit the amount of schooling we had in America because they wanted to forestall, you know, this epidemic of insanity.
So we had this thing.
This is why we have three months off in the summer, because of this crazy notion in the 19th century.
And what's happening now is that it is one of the reasons poor kids are being held behind.
Because they are going home for the summer and they're being out learned over the summer by their upper middle class counterparts.
So first thing I would do, real simple, is I would do what the KIPP Academies do, which is I'm sorry, summer vacation is not going to be three months anymore.
If you are from a less advantaged background, we're going to give you an extra month of school in the summer.
And that is a chance, in other words, to keep pace and to get access to learning when you would otherwise not be getting that opportunity.
It's a really simple thing.
It requires us to pay teachers a little bit more, keep the schools open for another month in inner-city areas.
And also, it's not a shortcut, right?
There's no magic here.
It's a good investment.
There's lots more to come, but first, let's take a quick break.
So, we've been talking a little bit about what makes people different from everybody else.
And we've had that 10,000-hour rule, which is roughly 10 years of work for four hours a day.
Four hours probably of chi time, of really focused time, being creative.
Understood a little bit more about some of the historical roots.
Now let's talk about some of the sort of practical takeaways.
And there are a couple.
One was sort of a health story, the Rosetta mystery.
If you want to tell that story to folks, I think it's pretty cool.
Yeah, I opened this book with this story.
Years ago, I heard about, I read this little article, which mentioned this town in Pennsylvania where people were living these insanely long lives, right?
And it was this little town called Roseto in Pennsylvania.
eastern Pennsylvania, and it was a town that was settled entirely by Italian immigrants from a town called Rosetto in southern Italy.
And they'd all come over at roughly the same time, and they had basically reconstructed a medieval Italian town in the middle of Pennsylvania.
So, like, same, like, on a hilltop, you know, and they all spoke Italian, and they all knew each other, and they all hung out together.
And a doctor goes there, a doctor called Stuart Wolff.
who I met, I actually died, but I met him, because I went 10 years ago, I was so fascinated, got in my car, drove out there.
Matt Stewart-Wolf.
I was like, what is going on here?
And he explained this weird story, which was he discovered the town and realized that, and looked at their, he'd been told by a local physician that he'd never seen a heart attack from Rosetta.
Never seen one.
He's like, that's not possible.
So Wolf goes there and he gets the medical records of all the people in the town and he starts, gives them all EKGs and gives them medical exams and looks through the obits and discovers, lo and behold, it's true that No one gets a heart attack and it's down.
And by the way, their death rates are like half of the American average.
And then he says, well, why is this?
And he thinks, is it because of their diet?
And it turns out, no.
They have the worst diet imaginable.
They all smoke.
They're all overweight.
They don't exercise.
He thinks, is it genetic?
No.
It turns out other people from Rosetta who come to America don't have this incredible longevity.
It's the water.
Gladwell water.
It's coming out next year.
It's No, it's because they live in this incredibly supportive community, right?
There's no stress in their life.
They're all friends.
They all hang out.
They have a very, very powerful church.
They have lots of civic organizations.
They spend all this time on these back ports drinking their homemade wine.
I mean, they have managed to construct a community that is so strong and so tightly linked that they have removed the sources of Ill health.
And despite the fact that they are smoking and eating fatty foods and never exercising, they have this incredibly low rate of all forms of, not just actually, low rates of heart attacks, ulcers, mental illness, drug addiction.
I mean, all these things are virtually...
I find this...
I mean, I open my book with that story because I think it's a wonderful metaphor for The people in Rosetta are successful in terms of their happiness and their sense of community.
And I thought, well, this same principle, I think, holds true for all kinds of success, that it has as its roots community, generation, culture, all that.
So that's how Rosetta really started my thinking about, can we use the concepts that we understand in the world of medicine and health To explore occupational success.
One thing about medicine that's reflected in the book, indirectly, is the story you told about the Korean pilots.
And I'll tell you why, because within medicine, we often look at the airline industry as a pretty good benchmark for what success systems look like.
As you tell the story, I'm sure it'll come up, but there's one part of that which we have talked about frequently, which we still don't do, but go ahead.
I wanted to do a chapter on what it means to be a good pilot.
So I started investigating and talking to people in that world.
And I got really interested in sort of plane crashes, right?
And, you know, as one does.
Or Bits and Rosetta.
As one does.
And it turns out that the single most important predictor of a plane's likelihood of crashing...
It's the culture that the pilot belongs to, right?
Which sounds really, really weird.
It's not the plane.
It's not the, you know, the weather.
It's not the, you know, how good the maintenance crew is.
It's not air traffic control.
It's where the pilot's from.
And the reason for this is that planes are designed to be flown when two pilots are in open and honest communication, right?
It's a two-person job, right?
And when they don't communicate openly and honestly with each other, you get problems.
And because in the cockpit, one pilot's the boss, the pilot, and one pilot, the co-pilot, is the subordinate, in cultures where subordinates have difficulty speaking openly and honestly to their superiors, you have more plane crashes.
So you see this incredible pattern.
If you measure what's called power distance, which is, to what extent is a society hierarchical?
How much respect are subordinates required to show to elders?
In highly hierarchical cultures, you have more plane crashes.
So we live in America in a very, very non-hierarchical culture.
And so do, you know, non-hierarchical cultures are cultures like Australia.
Germany is a very non-hierarchical culture.
Israel is...
One of the most non-hierarchic.
If you've ever been to Israel, you can see that.
No respect for authority, right?
It was one of the beautiful things about Israel.
In fact, I have all kinds of funny Israeli stories I can tell on this very matter.
So those are cultures that have very, very few plane crashes, right?
But if you go to cultures that have deep respect, which, by the way, is a wonderful and beautiful thing, but it just doesn't work in the cockpit.
And so I tell the story of this.
Korea is a deeply hierarchical culture.
And that works beautifully in many aspects.
But it caused them to have incredible problems with plane crashes.
And in fact, Korean Air was having so many crashes that airlines almost at the end of the 1990s pushed out of business.
But the story is all about how they solved their problem.
And they are today a world-class airline because once they understood that the root of their problem was cultural and was a question not of how good their planes were or how skilled their pilots were, but how willing they were to communicate openly in the cockpit, once they could address it, and they did address that, they retrained their pilots To communicate properly.
You said in English.
And in English.
They forced them all to learn English.
Because you have to give someone, if you want someone to act outside their cultural model, you've got to give them another context, right?
But there's one part of this that I was going to come back to, because I heard this story not from the Korean experience, but I thought it was also true in some of the U.S. Armed Forces.
And if anyone out there is listening, please confirm this is true.
I've always been curious if it was.
But in surgery, we remember this because a lot of times we're sort of headed in the right direction, we think.
And the most common cause for plane crashes is programmed flight into the mountain.
Yes, that's right.
You think you're heading in the right direction.
So everyone knows the subordinate's not going to challenge the pilot, especially in the military.
So the first time he challenges you, you rebuke him.
The second time, you threaten the reprimands.
But anybody who's rational is not going to challenge their boss three times unless they're right.
Yeah.
I think that's the takeaway message, I thought.
So then in the surgery now, we sort of said, listen, if the third time you challenge me, I'm going to stop what I'm doing.
Because this is something that you're telling me I need to listen to.
Because you wouldn't risk me being as upset at you as I'm going to be if you're wrong.
Unless you're pretty much right.
And statistically that makes sense.
Yeah, that's interesting.
So that's a way in which the culture of surgery has adapted to this problem, right?
You've developed a rule which allows people to challenge authority without seeming to be impertinent.
Right.
Or subversive, right?
You say, if it's the third time, then we're going to take you seriously.
But there's another part of that, though, and that is that you also have to teach people how to challenge properly.
There's many ways to challenge, and I talk about it in the book about all the levels of directness you can use in speech.
And one of the big problems, particularly in hierarchical cultures, is they will challenge repeatedly, but they'll hint.
They'll do it so subtly and softly.
Perhaps.
Perhaps we should be heading the other direction.
Exactly.
Is that a mountain?
Oh my goodness.
Maybe it is.
Oh, it could be a cloud.
In the plane crash I spent a lot of time with, the Korean one, there's a Korean air crash in Guam in 97, and the captain is really tired, and he's flying the plane directly into a huge bad weather patch, and it will require him to change the way he lands the plane.
He can no longer land visually.
He's not responding to the fact that there's this huge bad weather patch right over the airport.
And so the co-pilot is trying to bring this to his attention.
And what he says is, instead of saying, you know, Captain, we're flying into a thunderstorm.
Take appropriate steps.
What he says is, he says, Captain, the weather radar has served us very well, don't you think?
Oh, golly.
It's a hint.
He's trying to say in this incredibly roundabout way, look at the weather radar.
It tells such a good job of saying where, you know...
Tat-tat looks like rain.
Yeah, exactly.
And that's, you know, we laugh about it, but it's a...
Terrible.
You know, you can't do that in a cockpit.
In other words, so, I mean, the reason I... All of this sounds tangential to my story, but it's not, because it says that when we want people to do a good job, to be successes at what they do, we can't just look at them as individuals.
We have to look at the cultural context in which they operate, right?
And, you know, it's the wrong move if you were trying to fix Korean Airlines.
And they didn't do this to their credit.
They didn't just fire all their pilots.
And that would have been a kind of knee-jerk response that people would have had.
Fire the pilots and hire new ones.
No, no, no, no.
They're not bad pilots.
But they're operating in a cultural context where it's difficult as a co-pilot to speak honestly and openly.
So just give them another cultural context.
Address that issue.
Don't write off people because they can't perform at the level you want, you know, right away.
Understand the sources of their failure and fix them.
Right?
That's what I want to get out of this book.
It's a great, great...
And you...
It's very clear, obviously, when we talk about creating, when you're bringing it closer to home, it becomes more challenging.
And we've had guests on...
Talk a little bit about the cultural differences between folks, even in this country, as they try to succeed.
And one great example you give in the book is in Harlem, Kentucky.
Yeah.
By the way, I think this does speak to racial issues in this country as well.
Because when I read this story, I thought, my goodness, I've had folks on the show argue that primarily what we're dealing with is a north-south issue in this country socially.
And until that's resolved and changed, we're going to run into problems.
So if it's okay with you, I'm going to hold you over for the post-op.
I was trying to understand this.
Curious fact that historically the South has been the most violent part of the United States.
When I say historically, I mean going back 200 years.
But violent in a very specific way.
Crimes of personal violence have always been higher in the South than the rest of the country.
So not muggings, not...
Burglaries.
But I know you and I kill you after an argument.
That kind of thing.
And lots of people spend a lot of time trying to figure out why.
And one of the arguments is that it's cultural in route.
That the South Appalachian in particular is settled by people who come from Northern England and Scottish Irish, from a particular part of the United Kingdom, which was a place that had what's called a culture of honor,
which is a culture where you're not farmers, you're herdsmen, you're living in a largely lawless area, and you're living in a culture where a man's reputation is everything, and where a man will do anything to protect his reputation.
And there are all kinds of cultures of honor around the world, but the idea is that people from that culture of honor moved to the American South, and those cultural notions persisted.
And so when you get the Hatfield and the McCoys, and all those kinds of feuds that go on in the 19th century in Appalachia, there are expressions of this very idea that people are operating in a cultural context that says, when my family is insulted, I am required to respond.
Otherwise, I am a proper person.
I have lost my honor.
That notion is not embedded.
That culture is not embedded in all parts of the United States.
But it's regional in nature.
It says that you can't understand patterns of criminality or violence in this country or in any country without spending the time to understand what are its cultural roots.
And that's a...
I mean, it goes to a lot of the...
There's also interesting studies that caught me off guard.
You actually were able to study how their instinctual responses to conflict would be different from someone maybe who grew up in, you know, L.A. laid back and just gelling out.
Yeah, so famous study at University of Michigan a couple years back where they take undergraduates and they insult them.
They put them in a situation where they're insulted.
Somebody calls them a bad name.
And then they measure their responses.
How angry do they get?
Does their level of adrenaline and cortisol go up?
Their stress hormones, do they rise?
All kinds of ways to see how upset they are.
And what they discover is kids from the North have no response.
I mean, within 30 seconds of being insulted, they're fine.
Like they kind of laugh it off.
But if you look at kids from the South, particularly from Appalachia, they have really, really strong responses to being insulted.
Their levels of stress hormone go up really high.
They get angry.
And it's totally involuntary, as you say.
And it says that, look, that patterns of cultural heritage matter.
They don't go away.
We are a product of where, in part, of where we are from.
And you want to understand those kids, you have to take that into account.
You can't just look at them as solitary individuals who make up, you know, their own world for themselves every day.
I think over and over again you see that when you look into, I think, the predictors of success.
Let's finish up with lawyers.
So what is sort of the unifying factor that you find in lawyers and outliers?
Well, I had a friend whose father is a very successful lawyer in New York.
And I would always talk to her about her dad and her dad's practice.
And I realized in talking to her that every single successful lawyer in her father's practice, her father is from one of the top law firms in the city, They're all the same biography.
They were all men born in the Bronx or Brooklyn in the 1930s and were the children of Jewish immigrants from Eastern Europe who worked in the garment industry.
It's that specific, right?
And then I started asking around and discovered, if we put the hundred most powerful lawyers in New York in one room, 50 of them would have that exact background, right?
It's weird.
So what happened?
So I spent a whole chapter figuring out how every one of those things matters.
Being born in 1935, 1935 is the best year to be born in the 20th century.
Why?
It's the smallest generation in the 20th century.
And if you're born in a small generation, you have an incredible advantage, right?
No one's ever competing with you at any step of the way through...
Schools, through colleges, through getting jobs, there's always a very small number of people who are vying for the same things.
It matters that they're Jewish.
Why?
Because up through the 50s and 60s, Jews were discriminated against in the major law firms in the city, which meant that they were forced to go out and start their own law firms, and also they were forced to do the kind of law that all they could do was the kind of law that the big WASP firms wouldn't do.
What was that kind of law in the 50s and 60s?
It was litigation, Bankruptcy, and most importantly, takeover law.
The big WASP firms didn't want it.
They thought those three kinds of law were dirty, right?
So the Jewish firms do those three kinds of law, and then in the 70s come along, and all of a sudden, the three most lucrative aspects of corporate law are bankruptcy, litigation, and takeover, right?
So what sounds like an incredible disadvantage being discriminated against becomes an incredible advantage.
And real quick, the garment industry, what was that story?
The garment industry is it was one of the Malcolm Gladwells, thanks for joining us.
