Outliers: Gladwell Weighs In

Greetings - I am interested in Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers." So I went to his website and he discusses it there - and since I have not read it yet I am providing some of his thoughts. I like to cover innnovation, creativity and ways that people approach life. In statistics, an outlier is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. Dictionary.com says an outlier
is a person who lives away from his place of work or an extreme deviation from the mean.

Here is what Gladwell says.

"I think this is the way in which Outliers is a lot like Blink and Tipping Point. They are all attempts to make us think about the world a little differently. The hope with Tipping Point was it would help the reader understand that real change was possible. With Blink, I wanted to get people to take the enormous power of their intuition seriously. My wish with Outliers is that it makes us understand how much of a group project success is. When outliers become outliers it is not just because of their own efforts. It's because of the contributions of lots of different people and lots of different circumstances— and that means that we, as a society, have more control about who succeeds—and how many of us succeed—than we think. That's an amazingly hopeful and uplifting idea.

"I write books when I find myself returning again and again, in my mind, to the same themes. I wrote Tipping Point because I was fascinated by the sudden drop in crime in New York City—and that fascination grew to an interest in the whole idea of epidemics and epidemic processes. I wrote Blink because I began to get obsessed, in the same way, with the way that all of us seem to make up our minds about other people in an instant—without really doing any real thinking. In the case of Outliers, the book grew out a frustration I found myself having with the way we explain the careers of really successful people. You know how you hear someone say of Bill Gates or some rock star or some other outlier—"they're really smart," or "they're really ambitious?' Well, I know lots of people who are really smart and really ambitious, and they aren't worth 60 billion dollars. It struck me that our understanding of success was really crude—and there was an opportunity to dig down and come up with a better set of explanations."

How Does an Iconoclast Think?

I like to cover stories about innovation on this blog, but I think this has interesting scientific merit so I am posting on WendSight, too.

From an Emory University press release we learn about a new book: Iconoclast: A Neuroscientist Reveals How to Think Differently (Harvard Business Press, 2008) - Gregory Berns, MD, PhD, shows us how the world's most successful innovators think and what we can learn from them.

Berns is distinguished chair of neuroeconomics, professor of economics at Emory University, and professor of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, Emory University School of Medicine. He focuses his research on human motivation and decision-making through a blend of neuroscience, economics and psychology.

"Iconoclasts are individuals who do things that others say can't be done," explains Berns. "An iconoclast defies the rules, but given the opportunity, can be an asset to any organization because of the skill to be creative and innovative despite adversity."

The book examines the stories of famous and not-so-famous iconoclasts to learn something about creative decision-making, innovation and creativity and the ability to control fear, and to look at the neuroscience behind those processes. Berns profiles people such as Walt Disney, the iconoclast of animation; Natalie Maines, an accidental iconoclast; and Martin Luther King, who conquered fear.

Berns says that many successful iconoclasts are made not born. For various reasons, they simply see things differently than other people do.

"Certainly there are people who are born this way, but what I have been able to learn about these individuals is that most successful iconoclasts are people who are skilled at handling failure and particularly at handling fear - fear of failure, fear of the unknown," says Berns. He also discovered a trait that ultimately distinguishes the people who are really successful is social intelligence.

"A person can have the greatest idea in the world - completely different and novel - but if that person can't convince enough other people, it doesn't matter," says Berns.

Moon and the Sun

The moon is in the west; the sun is in the east; over the lake. Tennessee summer 2008.

The Light Flickers Through the Trees

Now and then I like to think about a special moment when everything feels so right. Everyone has this kind of moment - sometimes it lasts a few seconds, sometimes for a few minutes, or sometimes even a few hours.

When I was 28 in 1978 and moved to Tallahassee with John, he started graduate school in September and I was awaiting the start of school for me in January. I worked at night waiting tables, but my days were free. I really mean free, and daydreamy and kind.

The special moments came frequently then, and I think it was because I could live energetically and creatively and quietly in the very moment. Here is how many days went: I would get up early, pack a lunch, pack a blanket, pack Sasha [Sasha Isadora Dylan, my sable collie] and Camus [Autumn's Moonhaze Camus, my tri-color collie] and jump in my fantastic speed demon navy blue metallic VW Rabbit and drive to the Gulf with my windows open and my hair blowing back.

About an hour's drive from Tallahassee was Alligator Point, a funky beach area where you could throw down a blanket anytime. To reach this beach, you drove along quiet two-lane roads that were bordered by sandy turf and scruffy trees common to the Florida Panhandle. By driving early you could see the sun flickering through the skinny pines.

Once at the beach the sun was up higher and the sky was a flat powder blue with an occasional wisp of white. The sand was white with a few shells coming in near a sandbar. Sasha, Camus and I would walk along the water's edge, playing and soaking in the sun.

After a few hours I could feel the hot sun tanning by body and warming my skin - such a fantastic feeling. With the sun high in the sky, I would make my journey home to take a cool shower and cover myself in a soothing cocoa butter, and then put on a soft, clean cotton shirt and shorts and a pair of flip flops.

Why Mark Rothko?

I have always loved the work of Mark Rothko in his mature years when he found the style he is most famous for painting. I like the brooding even in the brighter colors, and this was true of his life as an artist. He says of this:

"I realize that historically the function of painting large pictures is painting something very grandiose and pompous. The reason I paint them, however . . . is precisely because I want to be very intimate and human. To paint a small picture is to place yourself outside your experience, to look upon an experience as a stereopticon view or with a reducing glass. However you paint the larger picture, you are in it. It isn’t something you command!"

Thank you to the Jacques Hachuel Collection for the image.

Many of the "multiforms" and early signature paintings display an affinity for bright, vibrant colors, particularly reds and yellows, expressing energy and ecstasy. By the mid 1950’s however, close to a decade before the completion of the first "multiforms," Rothko began to employ dark blues and greens; for many critics of his work this shift in colors was representative of a growing darkness within Rothko’s personal life.

He began to insist that he was not an abstractionist, that such a description was as inaccurate as labeling him a great colorist. His interest was:

"only in expressing basic human emotions — tragedy, ecstasy, doom, and so on. And the fact that a lot of people break down and cry when confronted with my pictures shows that I can communicate those basic human emotions . . . The people who weep before my pictures are having the same religious experience I had when I painted them. And if you, as you say, are moved only by their color relationship, then you miss the point."

For Rothko, color is "merely an instrument." In a sense, the "multiforms" and the signature paintings are, in essence, the same expression, albeit one of purer (or less concrete or definable, depending on your interpretation) means, which is that of the same "basic human emotions," as his surrealistic mythological paintings.

"Since my pictures are large, colorful and unframed, and since museum walls are usually immense and formidable, there is the danger that the pictures relate themselves as decorative areas to the walls. This would be a distortion of their meaning, since the pictures are intimate and intense, and are the opposite of what is decorative."

At age 66 Rothko was in poor health, and friends found him following his suicide. His interesting life from Russia to the U.S. is document on the wikipedia.

In early November, 2005, Rothko's 1953 oil on canvas painting, Homage to Matisse, broke the record selling price of any post-war painting at a public auction at U.S. $22.5 million dollars.
In May 2007 Rothko's 1950 painting White Center (Yellow, Pink and Lavender on Rose), broke this record again, selling at $72.8 million dollars at Sotheby's New York. The painting was sold by philanthropist David Rockefeller, who attended the auction.

A previously unpublished manuscript by Rothko about his philosophies on art, entitled The Artist's Reality, has been edited by his son, Christopher Rothko, and was published by Yale University Press in 2006.