Brooks on Gladwell's message

OP-ED: "Lost in the Crowd," by David Brooks, New York Times, 16 December 2008.

Best critique I've seen yet of Gladwell's latest, which is an impressive book, but one that is likely to be misused for leveling attempts.

Basic bit:

Gladwell's social determinism is a useful corrective to the Homo economicus view of human nature. It's also pleasantly egalitarian. The less successful are not less worthy, they're just less lucky. But it slights the centrality of individual character and individual creativity. And it doesn't fully explain the genuine greatness of humanity's outliers. As the classical philosophers understood, examples of individual greatness inspire achievement more reliably than any other form of education. If Gladwell can reduce William Shakespeare to a mere product of social forces, I'll buy 25 more copies of "Outliers" and give them away in Times Square.

I am partial to this argument. Within my birth family, I am an outlier: married a non-Catholic (although one nominally converted for appearances' sake), which only one of my six surviving siblings did--quite recently; lived in the Eastern time zone since 1984 (one other sibling again); and abandoned the safety of big firm/government life for a purely entrepreneurial existence (the only one). I am simply not a joiner, not a go-along type, and I've never had anyone behind able to pull strings decisively in my favor. I have definitely had mentors who shaped me (and saved me when I got in trouble), but those have been people who looked past the fact that I simply don't play well with others. To hire me is to be--almost instantly--subjected to my inner impulse to get myself fired. Visionaries (meaning long-range thinkers) just aren't team players. They thrive only where tolerated, such that horizontal thinkers tend to have very horizontal careers.

To reduce all that square-peggedness to social factors seems awfully reductionistic. To the extent that I've succeeded in my career, it's been mostly improbable given my background (not a lot of Harvard PhDs from Boscobel WI), meaning I've had to be a vagabond of sorts and that lasting (truly active) friendships are rare (I've moved residences an additional 18 times since I left home at age 18 in 1982--that's a move every 17-18 months). In the end, my best compadres are like-minded, tilting-at-windmill types like myself. We network loosely, taking a lot of solace in each other's efforts and come together as it makes sense. Not a lot of people enjoy that level of ambiguity or can tolerate such a pick-up game mentality. I am very fortunate to work with people like Steve DeAngelis and Mark Warren, but then we're all weirdly similar, with Mark's and Steve's personal success being equally--if not more--improbable than my own. But like me they have pursued their individual definition of success with a strange determination--across decades. They don't see it as sacrifice; they simply cannot imagine being any other way.

The common link here is the one that Brooks argues:

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.

In effect, Gladwell's argument is profoundly deterministic: great people aren't so great, and--in effect--they can be socially engineered.

I find that argument both depressing and dangerous.