Outliers

I'm currently reading Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers. It is quite a fascinating book, which integrates some sociological theories to explain the structure of exceptional success. While I do not wholeheartedly support the premises of the hypotheses and question the generalizability of the data used to back the conclusions, I think it still does make for interesting reading and new perspectives on the social phenomena surrounding success.

I am particularly interested in what can change one's trajectory in society, and nudge people towards or away from success. Of the reasons, it does seem that the offspring of rich folk do have particular benefits, and that is an interesting but unhelpful observation: Not everyone is able to choose their backgrounds. However, it does seem that success is not just a matter of luck, but also of smarts. Terman's research on high IQ children and their development amply proved that high-IQ individuals are not necessarily able to become greats simply on the merits of their intelligence. There was a limit to how vanilla intelligence can push one upwards.

The other ingredient appears to be practical intelligence, or EQ or cultural savvy, or however one may want to call this other sort of intelligence. That is, the sense of entitlement which drives people towards desiring greater heights, and having the people skills to make that aspiration a reality. In fact, to some extent, EQ seems an adequate substitute for intelligence, given that one can simply persuade others to share the observations that the person is unable to come up with.

EQ is something that is usually not taught in school, and would actually be quite useful in the curriculum. However, a person who is all EQ and no IQ would not go far either, given that he/she is probably not going to be intelligent enough to spot opportunities as they arise. It seems that ultimately one just needs good-enough levels of both, as a foundation for the pursuit of success.

Besides the concept of success, the book also talked about culture. I think the idea of tolerance for ambiguity and Hofstede's Power Distance Index tie in nicely with the idea of strokes as the currency in Transactional Analysis. In fact, I believe it may be possible that the ambiguity tolerance and PDI serve as the score modifiers for stroke quotas. It can be expected that a society with high ambiguity tolerance will also have a low tolerance for overt actions. That means that positive strokes are not to be delivered in straightforward ways. This may mean larger numbers of subtle positive strokes. As for high PDI societies, stroke quotas are very likely much higher for superiors than in lower PDI societies. This represents a positive modifier.

The correct calibration of strokes can be one way to support people skills, or EQ. However, EQ itself is probably not taught because many of its precepts are quite tacit, and may not even be consciously learned. For example, knowing when to pull back in a conversation is often attributed to a "feeling", but is in reality a complex computation integrating observations of the other person's reactions. In all, I would say that a good way to calibrate strokes is simply through trial and error. When one pushes too far, one is likely to observe negative reactions from others. As these mental notes build up, one's calibration progressively improves.

This would evoke Gladwell's assertion of the 10'000 hour rule, whereby one becomes highly proficient at a skill after approximately 10'000 hours of farming skill points. It therefore stands to reason that simple social contact and attention can hone EQ just like that. It also explains why the social outcast types still have problems dealing with other people: the calibration is imperfect. This creates a vicious cycle that encourages avoidance of others, and preventing improvements in the calibration. Once that is achieved, along with the other factors mentioned and those that appear in Gladwell's book, one may finally have the actual formula for success. The caveat, of course, is that knowing the path to success does not imply an ability to achieve it.