All day long you are affected

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A New Book

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All day long, you are affected by large forces. Genes influence your intelligence and willingness to take risks. Social dynamics unconsciously shape your choices. Instantaneous perceptions set off neutral reactions in your head without you even being aware of them. Over the past few years, scientists have made a series of exciting discoveries about how these deep patterns influence daily life. Nobody has done more to bring these discoveries to public attention than Malcolm Gladwell.

Gladwells new book Outliers seems at first glance to be a description of exceptionally talented individuals. But in fact, its another book about deep patterns. Exceptionally successful people are not lone pioneers who created their own success, he argues. They are the lucky beneficiaries of social arrangements.

Gladwells noncontroversial claim is that some people have more opportunities than others. Bill Gates was lucky to go to a great private school with its own computer at the dawn of the information revolution.

Gladwells book is being received by reviewers as a call to action for the Obama Age. It could lead policy makers to finally reject policies built on the assumption that people are coldly rational profit-maximizing individuals. It could cause them to focus more on policies that foster relationships, social bonds and cultures of achievement.

Yet, I cant help but feel that Gladwell and others who share his emphasis are preoccupied with the coolness of the discoveries. Theyve lost sight of the point at which the influence of social forces ends and the influence of the self-initiating individual begins. 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 fortunes, but relied at crucial moments upon achievements of individual will. These people also have an extraordinary ability to consciously focus their attention. Control of attention is the ultimate individual power. People who can do that are not prisoners of the stimuli around them. They can choose from the patterns in the world and lengthen their time horizons. Gladwells social determinism overlooks the importance of individual character and individual creativity. And it doesnt fully explain the genuine greatness of humanitys talents. As the classical philosophers understood, examples of individual greatness inspire achievement more reliably than any other form of education.