I had been meaning to listen to Outliers for a while now because I really enjoyed Gladwell’s other books, Blink and Tipping Point. Gladwell has a gift for storytelling. He is one of the few non-fiction authors I know of who can create a feeling of suspense usually only experienced with fiction. (Jon Krakauer is another example.)

Gladwell’s books are largely about connecting patterns in human behavior (patterns we don’t always recognize) in an attempt to find correlations that expand our understanding of the world. He enjoys questioning the basic assumptions we make about ourselves and about others, and challenging us to see things differently. He doesn’t always present enough evidence to prove his hypotheses, but he lets the fieldwork of other psychologists and social scientists lead him closer to answering some of the more bewildering psychosocial questions of our day.

As I listened to Outliers, I found myself both fascinated and slightly offended. He is, after all, openly attacking the American idea of rugged individualism, the idea of a self-made man—the protagonist of the classic rags to riches story. Instead of an innate gift, he argues, extraordinary success is almost always the result of an equally extraordinary opportunity made available to the achiever.

Now, the achiever still must work hard and be prepared to seize upon the opportunity. Chance, as Louis Pasteur observed, does tend to favor the prepared mind. But, as Gladwell argues, extraordinary success can often be traced to a series of remarkable opportunities that resulted from somewhat random circumstances, like date and place of birth, parenting practices, family connections, socio-economic status, laws of the land, cultural norms and traditions, etc. The achievers are often unaware that the opportunities afforded to them could lead on to greatness. They seize upon a relatively small opportunity, such as the chance to practice playing music seven days a week for eight or more hours a day (as the Beatles did in Hamburg, Germany) and their hard work (literally thousands and thousands of hours of practice) pays off big.

That’s not to say choices, hard work, and innate talent don’t have prominent roles in success—Gladwell admits they do—but he wants us to see that external circumstances also play an important, if not equal, role. In other words, we are just as much products of our environment as we are our nature. As a result, the brightest among us sometimes fail through a lack of opportunity rather than lack of talent. If we can understand how our environments sometimes thwart the most talented (or potentially talented), maybe we can enable more people to reach greater levels of success. We do have more control over our environment than we do our nature.

He offers as an example the statistical fact that a large number of great Canadian hockey players (around 40 percent) have birthdays in January, February and March. This has to do with the January 1st cutoff date for joining an age-class league, when a child is at least 8 years old. Coaches will observe the 8- or 9-year-olds who join the league and will begin making coaching decisions for the more talented players, often giving them special training sessions and more practice opportunities.

A child who misses the January 1st cutoff date but who is born during the earlier months may gain as much as 10 to 11 extra months of practicing and growing before joining the age-class league. Naturally, the older players born January through March tend to stand out as better players. Hockey playing, of course, does not have that great of an impact on quality of life, but what about when such random factors influence a child’s educational opportunities?

Gladwell offers similar examples throughout the book and makes a fairly compelling case for what some people might call “luck.” Bill Gates, he points out, had access to a mainframe computer in 1963 at age 13—something most college professors didn’t have at that time. Of course, the young Bill Gates had to be talented and industrious enough to take advantage of the extraordinary opportunity.

Ironically, none of Gladwell’s findings negate the idea of the self-made man. Instead, they seem to reinforce it. There are two common elements underlying all the extraordinary success stories he cites:  hard work and an almost tireless drive to figure things out. In other words, successful people don’t give up.

Gladwell (and the social scientists he cites) observe that great success is almost always associated with a “10,000 hour rule”—that is, to be great at something almost always requires about 10,000 hours of practice. This level of practice typically takes 7-10 years to achieve. It’s having the opportunity (as well as focus and drive) to put in your 10,000 hours that provides the extra leverage that can later lead on to extraordinary success.

People who are extraordinarily successful often had an opportunity to begin putting in their 10,000 practice hours at an earlier age, so that by the time they reached their twenties, they were able to seize upon other opportunities that led to more and more opportunities to do what they were good at. Again, they had to be willing to put forth a huge amount of effort.

After listening to Outliers, I saw more clearly how the “victimhood” mentality is so damning in life. Instead of practicing an art, the victim wastes time blaming metaphysical factors (things they generally cannot change) such as the circumstances of their birth, their cultural baggage, their parents, unjust laws, etc.

Ultimately, to be great at something (or even just really good) you need an intense resolve to not give up, to keep practicing at an art and figuring things out. Eventually, hard work and dedication will pay off on some level. Sometimes we just have to create our own opportunities, or be better prepared and more open to them when they do show up.

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But, he just sent me this link that says Allison Taylor will be the new President on 24 next season! That definitely trumps my cartoon alter ego.

I’ve been catching up on 24 these past few months via Netflix, since last season was my first. I’m into the 3rd season now, and I’ve heard the 4th is even better…

If you have never seen Kiefer Sutherland’s Jack Bauer in action, you are missing out what my friend Anne calls “one of the great heroes of television history.”

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Incidentally, blogging has been slow these past few weeks as I adjust to longer days at work…

I’ve been researching conspiracy theories and reading Sam Harris’ End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason—an excellent read for anyone interested in learning about how faith is threatening the modern world.

Re conspiracy theories: I impulsively purchased a book a few months back called The Last Days of Democracy: How Big Media and Power-Hungry Government Are Turning America Into A Dictatorship by Elliot D. Cohen and Bruce W. Fraser.

I was interested in reading this book because I was familiar with Elliot Cohen’s work on using logic everyday to improve thinking and reduce stress. After reading it, however, I imagine Dr. Cohen is a pretty stressed out guy.

Some of the more egregious, conspiratorial claims made by the authors include:

• The U.S. masterminded the 9/11 terrorists attacks and uses “terrorist tactics…to strike fear into the hearts and minds of millions of innocent Americans.”
• We now live in a “matrix where freedom is largely an illusion.”
• The minds of Americans are “being polluted and programmed with propaganda and disinformation.”
• The Mainstream Media (MSM) is predominantly run by the Right, (including the New York Times and CNN.) There is apparently a conspiracy to tarnish the “liberal ideology.”
• The election of 2004 was rigged.

There are too many conspiracies mentioned in this book to list them all…but, I think they can be summed up fairly well by this statement on page 62: “We are all pawns of a politico-corporate media machine that has betrayed the American trust in order to amass power and wealth.”

(Wow. Think about that the next time you’re drinking your decaf mocha from Starbucks and talking on your Apple iPhone…)

If you get through the book, you find out the authors’ biggest fears are (gasp!) “global corporate privatization,” “deregulation,” and “globalization.” In other words, free market capitalism.

To be fair, I don’t think any system on the planet is a truly laissez-faire system, so what the authors are identifying is partly a hodgepodge of government regulatory controls and lobbyist agendas that are leading to more and more corruption as businessmen vie for favors, deregulation and tax cuts. When government does get in bed with an industry nothing good comes from that twisted union.

The Federal Government and many states, for example, are working fast to help “commercialize” the ethanol industry, regulate agriculture and legislate in favor of the “green” industries, which I predict will have disastrous results. We’re already seeing steep price increases in food.

But, getting back to the matrix of the “politico-corporate media machine”—what do Cohen and Fraser say we should do about it? For one, we should remember that we have the right to peaceful assembly and that sometimes civil disobedience may be necessary. The Bill of Rights should be our “guiding light.” That sounds great.

Then, they suggest that journalists should become unionized (!) and that no one should watch or listen to any MSM, which pretty much includes every media outlet except for the “alternative media” outlets.

(I guess you can tell which outlets are “alternative” or “indie” because they talk about the conspiracies and the politico-corporate media machine that rules everyone. I should mention, as of this writing, CSPAN is a safe media outlet, according to the authors, but PBS and MSNBC are suspected to be infiltrated.)

I’m trying to figure out the premises of the conspiracy theorists—who I think are largely Marcusean followers of the neo-mystic socialist Left. I’m wondering if this is a purely modern phenomenon.

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I want to write about Zimbabwe, too—yet another socialist experiment gone horribly astray. Marx fan, Mugabe, and his Zimbabwe African National Union had high hopes for engineering a “socialist pattern” for their economy…but, judging by this image of man escaping under barbed-wire, they failed miserably.

I’m sure the neo-mystic socialist Left will say that Mugabe’s socialist revolution wasn’t really socialism.

Anway, enough depressing talk…I’ll leave you with an image of corporate privatization, globalization and deregulation…Hong Kong.

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This idea of “democracy” in the U.S. is a bromide that needs to be stopped. As the reviewers note, the United States is not a democracy; it is a constitutional republic. The Founding Fathers went to great lengths to avoid a democracy or rule by majority vote. They did this because they knew that the majority is not always right.

Calling the U.S. a democracy is perhaps forgivable among the young, but Gore has no excuse. As a former Vice President, his error can only be specious. Of course, he would like nothing better than to have his ideas of expanded government control and mandated technology limits subjected to majority rule.

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I first heard about the book The Secret one morning as I was getting ready for work. I was listening to my usual AM radio show, and the host was talking with a physicist about the book’s powerful, secret message, which can also be heard on DVD. Of course, neither the host nor the guest could say what the secret was exactly, because, well, it’s a secret. It’s not just any secret, either. It’s the secret. The Big One that no one wants you know because it’s so big. Curious, I decided to Google™ The Secret to find out what it was.

According to Wikipedia, the secret of The Secret is this: the “Law of Attraction.” This is not the usual “opposites attract” Law of Attraction or “boy-girl-theory”—this law is a New Age law that states “one should never dwell on the negative, as the ‘metaphysical principle of life’ is embodied in a ‘law of attraction’ that states ‘you get what you think about; your thoughts determine your destiny.’” Some guy named Guy Redden wrote about the secret in Magic Happens: A New Age Metaphysical Mystery Tour, in the Journal of Australian Studies. (Other, more famous people have written about the secret before, but this is the one I remembered from Wikipedia…)

Now, I didn’t know exactly what the “metaphysical principle of life” was, so I searched the internet again. The metaphysical principle of life has something to do with the theory of how Individual Mind creates matter. Well, it’s not that simple. The Individual Mind relies on the Universal Mind, which relies on the Individual Mind, and then some processes go on with these two types of minds that lead to forms, like matter and minds, only the Universal Mind, or “the whole,” is really only the Individual Mind, or “the parts,” unless you realize they are really the whole in the first place. Once you get the whole picture, you can get anything you want.

Fortunately, you don’t have to understand all of this to get the secret. You just have to accept that thoughts reshape the physical world and that you can get anything you want if you will it strongly enough and just stop thinking negatively. And, anything means anything. The Secret’s author, Rhonda Byrne—a woman from Australia who got everything she wanted—believes that if you focus on something strongly enough, with Yoda-like concentration, you can actually alter reality and attract whatever you want to you. The secret seems to work particularly well with money and cars.

You can also eat whatever you want and not gain weight, as long as you truly believe that the food will not make you gain weight. Lottery numbers will come up what you think they will; you can have a Mercedes, etcetera. The principle works in reverse, too: Think too strongly about negative things, and they will happen to you. That’s humanity’s problem. People are too negative.

My initial reaction to all this mumbo jumbo, was, “Hogwash.” My second thought was that this is nothing new. People have been wishing upon stars for millennia, hoping the flood waters will recede, their lost loved ones will come back to life, lightning will strike their enemies, and on and on. This is just Descartes’ “I think therefore I am” dictum wrapped up with a bunch of quantum physics and a dose of the power of positive thinking. Still, The Secret haunted me all day.

Could it be that people in the past have just been too darn negative? Am I too negative? Maybe people just didn’t wish hard enough or truly believe. Maybe they didn’t understand the part about the whole being the part and the whole at the same time. Of course, I didn’t understand this either, but it was worth a shot. I decided I would put The Secret to the test that night, to see for myself. I would start small.

When I got home, I looked around my apartment, which had slowly been disintegrating into a mess since I’d been sick last week. I was really hoping the mess would just go away. I started to envision a clean apartment. I mean really envision it, and I mean really clean. I could picture the surfaces, the floors, the sparkling tub, the perfectly made bed, the kitchen—all of it tidy and spotless.

I envisioned the whole thing, too, not just parts. All my papers were filed perfectly…my books were put away…I closed my eyes and willed my apartment clean. I decided to not look at my apartment too closely after I opened my eyes because part of getting anything you want, according to The Secret, is to only look at the things you do want. Real reality can get in the way of what you really want and screw up the whole thinking-attraction thing. So, I just kept thinking how clean my apartment was. I decided if I was going to stay positive about this, I needed to get out of my apartment and go look at pictures of clean places, like in Better Homes and Gardens…or Good Housekeeping…

Now, I wasn’t exactly clear on how my apartment would get clean without me cleaning it, but I figured that was the Law of Attraction’s problem. Maybe the “metaphysical life principle” would somehow attract a maid to my neighborhood who would offer to clean it. Or, maybe a friend would stop by and decide that they wanted to clean it for me, as a gift. I didn’t want to get too lost in the details. I just wanted a clean apartment.

At that moment, a friend did call me. Maybe this was a sign. It was Karla. She asked me if I wanted to go to dinner and if we could meet there.

“Don’t you want to come by my apartment first?” I asked.

“Why?”

“Oh, I don’t know…I thought maybe you’d want to…clean or something…”

My voice trailed off. I didn’t want to jinx the secret, and she didn’t seem to know anything about my apartment.

“Uh, not really. Meet me at seven at Market Street.”

She hung up.

I guess you can’t rush the secret processes, I thought. I probably just hadn’t willed the cleanliness strong enough yet. I’d have to focus on it more. I thought about Yoda.

At the restaurant, I ordered my mango salad, my friend ordered her usual club sandwich, and we sat down to chat. She started talking about her friend Jen’s trip to New York and how the airport security lady wouldn’t let Jen take a jar of pickles through the gate.

“Can you believe that? But then the lady says she can dump the pickle juice out. She’ll let her through with just the pickles…”

As she spoke, I focused on my clean apartment. It made me happier just thinking about it. I smiled. I remembered the story of the Brownies—the little helpers who tidy up when you leave the house. I wondered who had the key to my apartment besides me anyway. It didn’t matter. My apartment was clean.

We swapped a few more anecdotes on airport security, and then I told her about my apartment and the secret. She seemed uninterested, even when I explained how the secret is being unleashed on the modern world now, opening up a whole new era for mankind.

“That’s nice,” she said. “Can you you wish for things to come to other people? I need a new car.”

We got into another conversation about The Simpsons, finished our food and headed home.

As I started up the steps to my door I was thinking about the perfectly made bed, the spotless kitchen, the organized books and papers. This secret is really simple. I wondered why no one thought of it before. Then I remembered someone had thought about it before, but evil people who don’t like other people to get what they want had suppressed the secret. I wondered if any people in Iran knew about the secret…I stood at the door and focused again on a clean place. A clean, well-lighted place, I added, but then I thought I’d better not confuse the Law of Attraction. Clean would be fine.

I opened the door—so far so good. The front hallway was in order, as usual. But, as soon as I entered the living room, I noticed the papers on the coffee table…my shoes were still in the middle of the floor…the trash had not even been emptied…my desk was still covered with notebooks and papers.

Everything was exactly how I’d left it. How long did I have to focus on a clean apartment before I would get a clean apartment? Didn’t the Law of Attraction know I wanted the apartment cleaned today? I started to get annoyed by the secret. I didn’t have time for this metaphysical principle of life to bring me a maid. I had an appointment the next day, and I needed to find my calendar, which was lost in all the mess.

I stumbled over the shoes and decided enough was enough. I began putting everything away. I washed the dishes. I emptied the trash. I reshelved my books. I filed my bills. I vacuumed. Then, I found my calendar on the couch and sat down to relax in my almost clean apartment. Tomorrow was Thursday…I looked at the day in my calendar and read: 2 p.m.—root canal—Dr. Bennett. Damn. I was really hoping I didn’t have to go that…

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You are beaten into submission throughout your young life. At one point, you are beaten so badly by a religious teacher and your own mother that you end up in the hospital for twelve days. Your siblings are also beaten regularly. You must obey every order given to you by adults.

You are told that you must have a man to protect you. A woman without a man, you are told, is like sheep fat in the sun — fly-covered, decaying, useless. You and your family live in abject poverty. You are uprooted time after time to escape the civil unrest of the countries you live in. You narrowly escape genocide. You are told that if you disobey the scriptures or defy the word of God, you will burn in Hell. All the evil in the world, you are told, is because of the Jews. You immerse yourself in your religion in the hope of finding peace.

When you are twenty years old, your father, who has been estranged from you most of your life because of political unrest, returns. One day, he tells you excitedly that he has found a husband for you. You have never met this man before, but it is your destiny. You will be married whether you are present at the ceremony or not, and you will move to Canada, where he lives. You are sent to Germany to await a visa from Canada, but when you step off the plane in Frankfurt you realize that everything you were told your entire life about the West may not be true. You see men and women mingling easily together. Everything is orderly and clean. You feel safe. There is hot, running water. Food is abundant.

You know almost immediately that you can never go back to the life you just left. You cannot live with a man you do not know. You decide to run away to Holland where, you learn, you can request political asylum. When your family learns of your defiance, you are hunted. Your family and your husband find you, but you know now that you have rights. You refuse to leave. They send tribal elders to hold a trial to discuss your fate. When they ask you why you refuse to leave Holland and be with your husband, you tell them, “It is the will of the soul. The soul cannot be coerced.” You are finally left alone.

This is a true story, and it is only part of the riveting life of Ayaan Hirsi Ali, an immigrant from Somalia who recounts her journey from Africa to Europe in her autobiography, Infidel (New York: Free Press, 2007).

As she tells her story, Hirsi Ali reveals her evolution from a world of faith and bondage to a world of reason and freedom. Her constant quest to understand the cultural and political differences between Islamic nations and the West led her to be one of the most controversial figures of modern times. Her life experiences gave her the strength to deliver her message to the West, a message that Westerners themselves are loathe to make at the risk of sounding racist — that women in Islam are oppressed and that this oppression is causing these societies to lag behind the West.

“Life,” she argues, “is better in Europe than it is in the Muslim world because human relations are better, and one reason human relations are better is that in the West, life on earth is valued in the here and now, and the individuals enjoy rights and freedoms that are recognized and protected by the state.” Hirsi Ali believes it is possible to change the state of the Muslim world, and it doesn’t need to take six hundred years of reformation. She believes people adapt quickly to good ideas and that it is “possible to free oneself — to adapt one’s faith, to examine it critically, and to think about the degree to which that faith is itself at the root of the oppression.”

As a member of parliament in the Netherlands, she risked her life to speak out about the plight of Muslim women in Holland and throughout the world. After the death of her friend, Theo van Gogh, the Dutch filmmaker who was brutally murdered for a film he made with her, Hirsi Ali was forced into hiding for several years. She now lives in the United States and works as a Resident Fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, where she continues her work on Islamic societies and women’s rights.

This book is not only an extraordinary story of triumph, it is a powerful lesson for anyone wanting to better understand the nature of the conflicts between Islamic nations and the West and for anyone who doubts the inevitable consequences of religious tyranny. Reminiscent of Salmon Rushdie before her, Hirsi Ali’s intellectual honesty shows us how precious our political freedom is and how our most sacred right — freedom of speech — is being threatened as we languish in guilt over our past transgressions.

Hirsi Ali has written elswhere that “Liberty does not come cheap.” She is right to wage a battle for free speech now. Without freedom of speech, the West as we know it, as a society that respects individual sovereignty, will cease to exist. The backlash over the Danish cartoons should be a potent augury of what may come to the U.S. if we do not defend our own Bill of Rights today. When people like Hirsi Ali are silenced in America, it will be too late.

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Assuming quantum physicists don’t destroy the concepts of self and consciousness, we may see psychology expand its knowledge base exponentially in the coming years. I’m heartened to see these books emerge on the scene: Train Your Mind, Change Your Brain by Sharon Begley and The Brain That Changes Itself by psychiatrist Norman Doidge.

The theme of both books is the idea that the brain is malleable and “plastic” throughout life. In other words, the adult brain is not necessarily doomed to stagnation and degeneration any more than the body is. For anyone who accepts the mind-body union principle, this may be a rather obvious point.

Matthew Blakeslee has a good review of these books in this month’s issue of Discover Magazine, in which he notes:

By recognizing neuroplasticity as a real and powerful force, we can tilt our theories of mind back into a realm where choice and free will are meaningful concepts, and where radical improvement to the human condition is possible using the right, scientifically proven techniques.

The empirical data supporting neuroplasticity may also shed light on why changing core beliefs and assumptions is effective in breaking habits.

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Blink is about–well, Mr. Gladwell, says it best:

It’s a book about rapid cognition, about the kind of thinking that happens in a blink of an eye. When you meet someone for the first time, or walk into a house you are thinking of buying, or read the first few sentences of a book, your mind takes about two seconds to jump to a series of conclusions. Well, “Blink” is a book about those two seconds, because I think those instant conclusions that we reach are really powerful and really important and, occasionally, really good.”

He goes on to cite numerous psychological research experiments, news events and other anecdotes that illustrate how humans make split-second decisions.

One of the more interesting illustrations to me was on the work of psychologist, John Gottman. You may recall Gottman was popular in the 90s for his relationship studies. He wrote Why Marriages Succeed or Fail: And How You Can Make Yours Last. Gottman’s work is largely based on Paul Eckman’s research on microexpressions that reveal human emotions. Gottman is able to “thin slice” his subjects’ facial expressions and determine (with almost 90 percent accuracy) whether their relationship will be successful or not. The secret lies in his ability to measure the ratio of negative to positive emotions revealed in the couple’s rapidly changing facial expressions. The higher the level of contempt revealed during the couple’s videotaped conversations, the less their chance of success.

Another interesting segment involves the advertising campaign of Pepsi. Remember the “Pepsi Challenge”? Everyone taking the Pepsi Challenge liked the taste of Pepsi better than Coke. This led Coca-Cola executives to doubt their product. Maybe, they thought, Coke should taste better. They brought out “New Coke,” and the resulting backlash from loyal Coke drinkers was disastrous. Coke fans hated “New Coke.” They hated “New Coke” so much that the company had to reintroduce “Classic Coke.” In this case, the two-second taste test was not necessarily indicative of a better product. Most people, it turns out, will judge sweeter tastes as tasting better than something slightly more bitter. Yet, the slightly bitter taste of Coke ends up being quite enjoyable when drinking a whole can. Here a snap judgment–the Pepsi taste test–was accurate in one sense, but not relevant.

Gladwell’s book has been criticized, and perhaps rightly so, for “not going anywhere.” I’ll admit Gladwell’s vignettes are at times more thought-provoking than they are useful. (It should be noted that his books are found in the marketing or self-help sections, not the science section.) What he does succeed in doing is making the reader aware of the power of split-second decisions. Because our rapid cognitions can be very right or very wrong, we need to find ways to improve the quality of these types of decisions and to better understand how to control them.

This book, despite its limitations, is responsible for my renewed interest in the state of psychology today…more on that subject later.

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