Gladwell: Adversity breeds success

In a preview of his forthcoming book, “Outliers,” keynote speaker Malcolm Gladwell explored what lies behind success.

As a nation, we've forgotten the lessons of 19th century rags-to-riches storyteller Horatio Alger, bestselling author Malcolm Gladwell said in his keynote speech Thursday at APA's Annual Convention. Gladwell urged the psychological community not to be too quick to discard the notion that adversity breeds success.

"Our contemporary rags-to-riches interpretation is an economic one," he said. We try to erase disadvantage from our society to provide everyone the same opportunities. By contrast, "the 19th century interpretation was a psychological interpretation," he said.

In that version, disadvantage was thought to endow positive attitudes, motivations and work ethic.

"If our kid got into both Kansas State and Harvard, we would say go to Harvard, right? And not for a moment would we consider that there might be some compensatory advantage to going to a place that was not so high status," Gladwell said..

"If someone said to you, “Would you like your child to be born with dyslexia?,” we would instantly and automatically say no. Even though, there are some percentage of people who are born with that disability who compensate for it so brilliantly and well that they end up far ahead in the world than they would have been otherwise. Right?"

Gladwell told the story of Sidney Weinberg, who rose from a humble beginning as an assistant janitor at investment firm Goldman-Sachs to lead the company to unparalleled success. Gladwell argued that Weinberg's disadvantaged beginnings paved the way for his achievements. When Weinberg offered his opinions, people listened because others thought, "if you can make it to the highest levels of Wall Street having come from such humble beginnings, you must be good."

"If we could choose to raise our kids on the wrong side of the tracks," Gladwell said, "we never would, even though there absolutely are cases where being born on the wrong side of the tracks has an enormous advantage. It causes people to make inferences about you that are enormously helpful in the world.

"And school districts around the country spend enormous sums of money attempting to reduce class size without even pausing to consider whether their might be some compensatory benefits to raising kids in an imperfect educational environment."

Instead of going out of our way to equalize every advantage, "why don't we set up structured disadvantages?" Gladwell asked, tongue somewhat in cheek. The danger, he said, lies in not even entertaining the question.

"This is a really, really critical issue, because as a society, we’re becoming really rich. Compared to where we were a hundred years ago, we had unimaginable resources. But it strikes me that we have done a very poor job of understanding which kinds of the benefits that we buy with our wealth are positive, and what kinds of obstacles and disadvantages we are better off hanging onto."