Or maybe it’s simply that the Bible paints a picture of life that so rarely coincides with the culture’s most commonly held assumptions, that when the two match up, it’s worth taking note. It’s always interesting when non-overtly-professing Christians and/or non-believers come to diagnostic conclusions about life that are similar to the ones some of us hold because of our Christian faith. Of all the books this is the most personal in the sense that it really does represent my bedrock philosophy as a human being and that was very much formed by my upbringing in Canada. It’s a much easier argument to make in Canada that success is a product of many different factors and forces and environments and legacies working together. I think because as Canadians we’re far less caught up in the myth of individualism. Has this distance from American culture sharpened your perspective? I want to bring those kinds of hidden mechanisms to light as a way of helping us understand what we can do to promote achievement on a much broader scale than we do now. We make decisions every day over who gets to succeed and who doesn’t without realizing we do it. It obscures the extraordinarily important role that we, by which I mean society, can play in promoting success. Why shouldn’t you be richly rewarded? And that idea and that ethos has permeated virtually every way in which we think about achievement, and I think that that idea is completely false it’s worse than false, it’s dangerous!Īnd it completely obscures the real reasons why people succeed. You know, we have fallen in love with this notion of the self-made man, of the rags-to-riches story, of the idea that if you make it to the top of your profession you deserve a salary of 20 million dollars a year because you’re the one responsible for getting to the top.
I am, I mean, in some ways this book is somewhere between a corrective and a full-scale assault on the way Western society in general and American society in particular has thought about success over the last few hundred years. To a great extent, you’re debunking rugged individualism, the myth of American success, right? Excerpts from an interview with Malcolm Gladwell about his new book Outliers: The Story of Success:
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