Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success

The first time I became aware of the word "outlier" was on the website fivethirtyeight.com. This was during the height of the US Presidential elections. The Merriam-Webster dictionary defines an "outlier" as "a statistical observation that is markedly different in value from the others in the sample." Now, I studied statistics as part of my graduate program in public policy and public administration and I can't recall hearing the term. Okay then, that's to my discredit.

Now Malcolm Gladwell, author of "Blink" and "The Tipping Point" and a regular contributor to The New Yorker has just released "Outliers: The Story of Success." What, Gladwell asks, makes high-achievers different? He suggests that luminaries such as Mozart, Microsoft founder Bill Gates, Apple Inc CEO Steve Jobs and the Beatles owe their successes to their culture, family and their generation. Gladwell also discusses why Asians are good at math.

Gladwell posited the theory of the ten-year rule: that the people who have succeeded have spent a minimum of ten years learning/practicing their metier. It could explain performances of Michael Johnson and Usain Bolt. His explanation about the Asians' superiority in math made sense. It is a cultural phenomenon, he suggested. He related this to the long hours spent by many Asians in rice fields: the patience and industry carried over to the training of the young. This is not such a novel idea since Asian schools offering extra lessons in math can be easily found in any major North American city. On the flip-side, there is a paucity of such schools in black communities, for example. Another idea is that 1955 was a good year to be born: Gates, Jobs and others were born that year. Gladwell was on Charlie Rose last week and spent time expounding on these ideas.

As a Jamaican, I became smitten by Gladwell after it turned out his mother is Jamaican and that he is a cousin of former US Secretary of State Colin Powell, whose parents were also Jamaicans.

In a happy coincidence - well, perhaps not - in the second part of the hour-long show, Rose's second guest was Geoff Colvin, Senior Editor at Large at Fortune magazine and author of "Talent is Overrated: What Separates World-Class Performers From Everybody Else". In this new book, Colvin expands on an article he wrote for Fortune, "What it Takes to be Great." Using Tiger Woods, Warren Buffett, Winston Churchill and Jack Welsh as examples, Colvin suggests that greatness does not come from DNA but from practice and perseverance sharpened over decades.

Both the Gladwell and Colvin books make perfect bookends.

Self Publishing on a Shoestring! (June 27, 2008)

One of the perils of self-publishing is that not only do you have to wear many hats but you have to cover all the costs as well. So far I have shelled out a bundle on cover design and twice had to make payouts on editing (one editor didn’t know what she was doing the other scammed me). I will have to pay the graphic designer soon for layout then hire a proofreader. All this before I shell out another three hundred dollars on the actual printing by Booksurge, Amazon’s self-publishing arm. Not to mention the dozens of review copies that will have to be paid for out of pocket. The Audacity of Hope this isn’t, although I am audaciously hoping. When the book is finally published I will have to sell the books out of the boot of my car. What do I get in return for all this? Thirty-five percent on every book purchased on Amazon, Abebbooks, BookSurge or Ex-Libris. And talking about money: I will have to find another three hundred to get my laptop out of the pawnshop. But hell, that’s life…I am not going to let it get me down!

An Outsider's View: Barack and Oprah (June 29, 2008)

I have long been an admirer of both Oprah Winfrey and Barack Obama. I have bought and read her O magazines and I have his The Audacity of Hope. But I primarily admire their personal narratives. I am also a fan of the Clintons, Hillary and Bill, and she was my preferred candidate for the Democratic Presidential nomination. Those declarations out of the way then, let me get to the point: Ms Winfrey, a long time close friend of Mr. Obama's, screwed up big time when she publicly endorsed Mr Obama on CNN's Larry King Live. The name Oprah is a brand in the same way Apple, Sony, Coca Cola and BMW are brands. You wouldn't see the CEOs of any of those brands coming out in support of any political candidate and it is surprising that none of Ms Winfrey's advisers cautioned her about the public Obama endorsement.

When Mr. King asked why she was doing it now, she replied:
“Because I know him personally,” Ms. Winfrey said. “I think that what he stands for, what he has proven that he can stand for, what he has shown was worth me going out on a limb for – and I haven’t done it in the past because I haven’t felt that anybody, I didn’t know anybody well enough to be able to say, I believe in this person.”

Of course Ms. Winfrey could have found other ways to show her support: financial contributions, using surrogates like Gayle KIng, or invitations to Obama supporters to be on her show, using interview questions to help flesh out his campaign ideas. The point is there is a blurring of distinction between the personal (Oprah Winfrey) and the brand (Oprah). Then throw in race (both Ms. Winfrey and Mr. Obama being black); and gender: by endorsing Mr. Obama Ms. Winfrey was in a sense rejecting the historical candidacy of a woman. True, by winning his party's nomination, Mr. Obama was making his own history by becoming the first black nominee for President. But 75 per cent of Ms. Winfrey's viewers are women and 60 percent of American women who voted in the Democratic primaries, ended up supporting Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

It was not surprising then, that there has been a decline in her audience. As reported in the May 26, 2008 New York Times, Neilsen Media Research said the average audience for "The Oprah Winfrey Show" had fallen nearly 7 per cent in 2008, the third year in a row of decline. It is likely that following the presidential tussle between Mr. Obama and Ms. Clinton, that this will end up being a tumultuous year for "The Oprah Winfrey Show" and Ms. Winfrey. It may turn out that her endorsement was the turning point in Mr. Obama's successful campaign but it may mark the moment her show "jumped the shark". In this context her recent deal with Discovery Communications to launch OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network with a 50-50 cable and web business was brilliant. Did she see the writing on the wall?

Remembrance of Things Past: Europe 2007 (June 29, 2008)

Just watched Spain beat Germany in the Euro 2008 soccer on TV. The match was played in Vienna, Austria. I had tentatively planned to be there in the audience. Normally, I am in Britain when major soccer tournaments are taking place: I was in Britain in 1998, 2002 and 2006 when the World Cup was being played (not in Britain mind you). But Vienna was one of my favorite cities during my eleven country European tour in summer 2007. In addition to the United Kingdom and Austria, I visited the Netherlands, France, Belgium, Germany, Switzerland, Slovenia, Poland, Hungary and Denmark. Sometimes it takes a trip like that to clear your mind and re-orient yourself, to figure out whether you want to continue living –and why- and perhaps how to plot your path forward.

I discovered my second wind in visits to the Tate of London where I saw Jackson Pollack’s work for the first time; I developed a new thirst for knowledge on my visits to Musée d'Orsay in Paris where I saw the works of the Impressionists. That visit fitted in well with the Teaching Company course I had completed: From Monet to Van Gogh: A History of Impressionism. I completed the circle by visiting The Vincent Van Gogh Museum in Amsterdam.

I also liked Budapest: it was among the cheapest of all the European cities and it was beautiful at nights. But it was hot: close to 40 degrees Celsius.

Jay-Z at Glastonbury June 30, 2008

The Jiggerman slew, or killed (is this still in vogue) at Glastonbury where he headlined over the weekend against a background of criticism he was 'wrong' (according to Oasis' Noel Gallager) for the music fest. But it was all good. Jay-Z's band opened in good fun with the opening strains of 'Wonderwall'. Take that Noel! Guardian blogger Paul MacInnes rated the Jay-Z set 9 out of 10 "because nothing is perfect." The Guardian said he was overdressed with three-quarter length coat and checked scarf. Yeah, but he looked good. (A personal note to self: get one of them checked scarves and the shades looked cool too!)...Amy Winehouse wasn't so cool, jabbing one fan who she thought had thrown a hat at her beehive...the fan isn't pressing charges, saying he enjoyed her act. I worry about Amy...she's sounding a little ragged...a far cry from the voice I feel is the closest to a young Aretha Franklin...but her personal narrative is beginning to rival another of my faves, Billie Holiday. Leonard Cohen was a big hit and the Guardian said many in the audience were crying when he sang Hallelujah..."Love is not a victory march - it's a lonely and broken hallelujah." That song sang so brilliantly by Jeff Buckley on "Grace" and Famous Blue Raincoat, a song about infidelity ("...And you treated my woman to a flake of your life, and when she came back she was nobody's wife..") are my favorites in the Leonard Cohen canon. I am planning to see him this year. His concerts have been getting superlative reviews from Rolling Stone magazine, The Toronto Star and The Guardian among others.

The Road Not Taken: An Update. (June 30, 2008)

I am coming to the end of the first phase of my publishing project: the graphic artist is making the changes, just before the text goes to the proofreader. But I am still doing some work on the Afterword. The problem is a small passage that invokes Malcolm Gladwell's The Tipping Point where I posit that 1980 provided the tipping point in violence in Jamaica. I wanted the whole text to be rock-solid and to be fluid. Didn't want anyone to say "I get the sense of what you are saying." I wanted it to be crystal clear. To this end I made the mistake of contacting someone on Craigslist who assured me she was a high school teacher and ended up scamming me out of one hundred dollars. Another lesson learned! Steer clear of an outfit called writeitup.com. I have been fussing over the text. I had to delete some of my favored quotes because of copyright issues. I actually attempted to call a copyright outfit in California over a quote ("The blues is a lowdown achin' heart disease like consumption killing me by degrees...") by blues singer Robert Johnson, who died in 1938 for God sake! Normally the lyrics of someone who dies goes into the public domain after 50 years, but the laws were apparently changed. I am getting an education. I had to delete T.S. Eliot's "The Hollow Men," which I stole from a Hunter S. Thompson book, probably Fear and Loathing: On the Campaign Trail '72, quotes from lyrics by Sting, Leonard Cohen and Toots Hibbert (Pressure Drop). I want the book to be much better than the first edition. But I am going to let it go: it is what it is!

Self Publishing June 31, 2008

In addition to paying for editing, page layout and proofreading, I will have to shell out another $800 for the book's website. I own the domain memoirsofareluctantguerrilla.com and I am considering this designer who appears to be an expert in modern web designs. I am also contemplating taking advantage of BookSurge's Buy X, Get Y (BXGY) advertising package. If I buy two months advertising for $2000, then I get a third month free. The BXGY would provide three months of promotion to a targeted clientele on Amazon.com which has 55 million active customers. For the uninitiated, BookSurge is the self publishing arm of Amazon.com. If I subscribe to this deal, then it would most likely cover the months August, September and October.

Terror Suspect in Ottawa Court June 30, 2008

I am following the trial in Ottawa, Canada, of terrorist suspect Momin Khawaja. Mr. Khawaja has pleaded not guilty to seven terrorism connected charges related to an alleged plot to bomb sites in England. Court heard from prosecution witness Mohammed Babar who testified to sharing email messages with the accused about the latter's training. The witness said accused returned from a terrorist training camp in Pakistan excited at his experience firing Ak-47 assault rifles, machine guns and RPGs. "He said he had a chance to fire the RPG, the AK-47 and the light machine gun. He was excited and enjoyed it," Babar told court. Potential targets apparently included British pubs, nightclubs and train stations, Babar said.

Babar's testimony transported me back to my own training in Cuba in 1980: AK-47s, RPG grenade launchers, light and heavy machine guns. Except that I didn't enjoy my experience and hadn't planned on the training in the first place. Didn't like guns and violence then, don't like them now!

Google And Me: The Start of a Beautiful Friendship? July 02, 2008

When you Google ‘The Reluctant Guerrilla’ or ‘The Road Not Taken: Memoirs of a Reluctant Guerrilla’ now, my blog comes up with this entry from my first blog: “A used copy of my book… was being offered on Amazon.com…” Cool. There are also other references to my book on Google, most notably in Mitchell’s West Indian Bibliography, Bibliography of the Grenada Revolution, some academic text in German and a listing of my name and book title and what appears to be an ISBN in an entry from the Trinidad and Tobago Education ministry:

www.books.ai/9th/Del-Deq.htm
www.thegrenadarevolutiononline.com/page15.html
www.nalis.gov.tt/Education/351resources.html

I am trying to enjoy the whole writing and publishing experience. When the first edition was launched in Jamaica in 1985, I was in Montreal, where I wrote the book. At one point the publishers asked me “When are you coming to claim authorship?” This time I will be taking a kind of “damn the torpedoes” approach....In TRNT I said David Schwartz’s The Magic of Thinking Big was most influential in those last desperate days in Jamaica. It was my bible for positive thinking. I am now reading the author’s follow-up The Magic of Getting What You Want, published in 1983. I am also reading and re-reading Carolyn See’s Making A Literary Life: Advice for Writers and Other Dreamers. The book is a pep talk and is chock filled with useful suggestions for would-be writers. “Anything that you can do to pretend to be a writer - do it,” See says. Personal assistant? An entourage? Bodyguards? “Do you want lovers?” Aha, that’s a riot. Making A Literary Life is my new bible.

The Walk of Life! July 05, 2008

While I struggle to self-publish I have to pursue what the Dire Straits refer to as the Walk of Life. This week I was a team leader at the Education Quality and Accountability Office (EQAO) scoring exercise. Today, Saturday, I was painting scaffolds all day. These scaffolds will feature somewhere in some band’s concert soon. Meanwhile I just received a missive from Five Seventeen, my page layout genius about the Timeline in TRNT. Five doubles as editor and brings to my attention any problem he sees. Sometimes his email shakes me out of my doldrums….Caught Amy Winehouse in concert on TV: it was an impressive concert. She not a bad skanker: she looked and sounded good on Toots & the Maytals' “Monkey Man.” I was thinking about some of my favorite groups and artists and I figure I could categorize their oeuvre as ‘music for depressives.’ Leonard Cohen, Blood & Wine (‘Please Don’t Waste Me in The Ground’), Pink Floyd, The Cure and Coldplay to mention just the obvious and there is no blues on the list. I am not making a big deal about it.

The State of My Nation... July 14, 2008

Things seem to be looking up...
First I lucked into meeting another journalist who volunteered to edit the second edition of TRNT. Then, how about this for great luck? Two months ago I went on the web looking for someone or an outfit to lay out my book and happened on an entity called Five Seventeen. Five has been brilliant - not just laying out stuff, but doubling as researcher and editor. (Perhaps that's tripling). Of course as a graphic artist you expect them to know the difference between en and em dashes, but Five has provided top notch advice on use of quotes and arcane issues about copyrights.

Then, just yesterday, I received an email from a documentary producer interested in working on a doc based on TRNT. We have arranged a weekend meeting before the idea is pitched to a cinematographer who has worked with The Harder They Come. Which is cool because back in 1999 the writer/director of THTC, Perry Henzell was my guest at Concordia University. (I was the prez of the Graduate Students Association). We screened THTC and Henzell answered questions from the audience and I presented him with a GSA shirt. The high point: Lunch with Perry at McKibbins Irish Pub on Bishop Street in Montreal. I had also set a book signing for his book "Sweet Stuff," for him at Chapters. I have an autographed copy stashed.

I have long been a skeptic of horoscope, but what should I make of a prolonged spell of good, seemingly, on-the-mark ones recently? This one for example in today's Globe and Mail:

Aquarius....The sun energises your ruler Uranus today, making it easy for you to turn ideas into realities. It does not matter in the slightest what others say can and cannot be done -if you believe in what you are doing it will be a resounding success. You cannot lose.

The State of the (Music) Nation: A Lament

Quick, name the last great R&B album? It would have to be Stevie Wonder's 1976 Songs in the Key of Life. Before that I would suggest two albums that came out in 1971: Sly & the Family Stone's There's a Riot Going On and Marvin Gaye's What's Going On. Some may say: what about Prince's Purple Rain or Sign O' The Times or Al Green Let's Stay Together or I'm Still in Love With You. Okay it's subjective, but I begin by defining great R&B as the marriage between great music and great lyrics which is why I would rank Riot, What's Going On and Songs in the Key of Life as the last great R&B albums. Perhaps Bob Marley & the Wailers Exodus belongs in this elite group. Time rated it the best album of the 20th century.

Sly's fusion of R&B, soul, rock, funk and psychedelia with social and political commentary was ground-breaking and influenced a slew of artists and groups: Prince, Earth, Wind & Fire and Ohio Players. This was urban blues at its best.

What's Going On was a visionary and conceptual masterpiece with its broad lens focused on the environment ("...where did all the blue skies go?"), poverty, discrimination, corruption and drug abuse in songs such as Mercy Mercy Me and What's Going On.

One could argue that 1973's Innervisions was more socially conscious, but for my money Songs in the Key of Life was the more complete and greater album.

These three great albums were made more than thirty years ago and it has been uphill ever since. We have a lot of very good music: the stuff out of Philadelphia International, Luther Vandross, Anita Baker, Toni Braxton and Prince. But, now there is a dearth of good soul or R&B music. Destiny's Child? Ugh! Ironically, it was Philadelphia International which ushered in disco and was partially responsible for R&B's decline. Yep, disco killed the R&B star.

Where have you gone Smokey Robinson? A nation turns its bored and lonely eyes to you. Check out the lyrics to the next R&B hit, and don't even mention the music. I think it has to do with education or the lack of it: the drop-out rate in high schools in black communities everywhere - Britain, Canada, US or Caribbean is close to 40 per cent and lyrically black music has suffered because there isn't the competition - when Smokey was unable to produce hits for the Temptations, Motown turned to Norman Whitfield - among peers. There are no Smokey Robinsons, no Marvin Gayes or Stevie Wonders anymore. The well that produced those great artists and influenced other genres and artists like the Beatles and the Rolling Stones has gone dry.

The good thing is that all of that good music have been filed on my iPod and I can listen to Barbara Lewis' Hello Stranger and Baby I'm Yours or reminisce on Sly's If You Want Me to Stay.

A Loan Forgiveness Program to Fight Terrorism

Before the collapse of the world banking system I had this theory on one way the United States and others could counter terrorism. In some ways this theory seems simplistic but let me give it a go: member governments of the G-8 plus China could get together and offer to erase the debts of developing countries in return for peace, order and good government (POG).

The donors would define what they meant by POG. Recipient governments would be given a tick-box of progressive actions they could pursue: they would be allowed to improve health systems, develop employment and welfare programs and repair infrastructure. They couldn't create "make-work" projects, especially those politically-oriented ones. Fulfillment of the criteria would be adjudged over an extended period and loan forgiveness occurring progressively over a fixed period, say twenty years.

There are excellent reasons for such a program: poverty in developing countries poses the greatest terrorist threat. There are other benefits to loan forgiveness as well: the more stable these countries are you can bet the less illegal immigration - I was once an illegal immigrant myself - there would be, therefore relieving pressure on limited resources.

It would still be feasible but when the citizens in the developed countries are facing record unemployment themselves, it would not be politically palatable to be bailing out poorer countries. Another thing: since capitalism has been seen to fail, developing countries may want to consider reckless socialist alternatives. And why shouldn't they? The Americans, British, Irish, French and other governments are falling over themselves socializing their banking systems. Poor Milton Friedman must be turning over in his grave. And let's not forget that these poorer countries are feeling the impact of a crisis not of their making. What I fear will happen is this: developed countries will prefer the optics of cutting foreign aid and developing countries will be further squeezed. But a structured loan forgiveness program is the way to go.

Just a thought.

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