The secrets of Malcolm Gladwell
blogs.ft.com
blogs.ft.com
That's like asking someone who looks physically fit what their secret is, and they tell you, "Diet and exercise."
Everyone knows this, but no one wants to put in the work.
If you are a professional speaker on a tour, someone with a lot of drama experience, or a salesperson with the same pitch every time, then it might make sense to do Gladwell's approach. For the rest of us, practice extensively but don't memorize start-to-finish.
It depends. There are some advantages to winging it: true spontaneity, an ability to have a more interactive presentation that is tuned to the rhythm and responses to the audience.
The oft-materialised risk is that it turns into a rambling incoherent mess.
In front of an unknown audience, the risk is too large, because if they don't feed you the right response, you are dead in the water. At least with a prepared talk you have something to fall back to.
If you know your audience, or if you are determined to engage it whatever it takes (school talks come into this category), a certain amount of off-the-cuffness works well, provided you are confident you know what you are talking about.
Sprezzatura would be more like "oh, was the speech that good? I hadn't noticed myself. Well, now that you mention it, I guess it just comes naturally to me...".
He was unbelievable. I could listen to him for hours. He's as engaging in person as he is on paper--clear, not overly verbose, and unfailingly entertaining.
When I do power point presentations, this is easy to accomplish - the points (1 to 2 at most, usually) are on the slide, and I simply expand on them in my talk. I may rehearse the slide/talk 10 times, and each time it will come out slightly different, and that is generally good. I want to make sure that I know what I am going to talk about, but I trust myself to be able to discuss the topic with some insight on the spot.
Granted, this only works for topics you are familiar with, but no amount of prep in the world will make you comfortable leading a 75 minute discussion on a topic that is not close to your heart and mind.
I always lol when I hear the Bill Gates example. The guy is a freaking genius. He had to go through Math 50 at Harvard to figure out there were people smarter than he was. Somebody else sneaking into the computer lab to learn programming (I'm sure there were many) wouldn't have been as good.
Actually, I thought he told people something they really don't want to hear: your superb talents don't mean a thing unless you straighten up and put in your 10k hours. It's a matter of perspective ;)
People on both sides of the talent vs hard-work debate are posting here using his books and lectures as support.
Personally, I'm in the "work matters more than talent" camp. so of course, that's what I remember from his work :-)
[edit: clarification]
It kind of makes sense if you think about it, since achievement typically has a log-normal distribution with a long right-hand tail, which implies that it's based on multiple normally distributed underlying factors.
Take away any one of the factors, and you rapidly approach more "normal" levels of achievement.
Indeed, Gadwell has a talent for writing and speaking. While tastes for what he offers differ, he's taken that talent and worked hard to develop it.
We all might not have the brain of Bill Gates, but I've seen many go surprisingly far on hard work with moderate talent. I've also sadly seen some very bright people just drag along through life from lack of effort. It's really sad to witness.
Gladwell's point -- and the OP author's -- is that you should taboo the word "talent." Talent is the idea you wind up with when you commit the Fundamental Attribution Error while observing success or skill:
In social psychology, the fundamental attribution error ... describes the tendency to over-value dispositional or personality-based explanations ["he is very talented at X"] for the observed behaviors [extreme skill at X] of others while under-valuing situational explanations for those behaviors. ["he spent his entire childhood practicing X"]
The rest of your comment, whatever. I don't care about his books. Neither does the author of this article, if you care to read it.
The fact remains, Gladwell's most recent book, Outliers, argues that there is no such thing as talent.
If you call someone talented, you're implicitly conceding they were somehow predisposed to have the skill they've got. Gladwell says there are no such predispositions, only histories, habits, and hard work.
UPDATE: the definition of TALENT I'm using is here: http://www.thefreedictionary.com/talent
tal·ent (tlnt) n. 1. A marked innate ability, as for artistic accomplishment. See Synonyms at ability.
Did you read Outliers? Because it doesn't actually say that. Let's see what it really says:
"Yes, the hockey players who make it to the professional level are more talented than you or me. But they also got a big head start..." (p 30)
"Joy and Gates and the Beatles are all undeniably talented. Lennon and McCartney had a musical gift of the sort that comes along once in a generation, and Bill Joy, let us not forget, had a mind so quick that he was able to make up a complicated algorithm on the fly that left his professors in awe. That much is obvious. But what truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities..." (p 55)
Gladwell argues against what his book calls "the primacy of talent." He says talent is one ingredient in success - even a necessary one - but not the most distinguishing one. He describes all the successful people he profiles as very talented, but adds that many equally talented people are unsuccessful because of different historical, cultural, and personal backgrounds.
* Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.
That's not what I read in it. If you look up the passage about the conservatory students, you'll find that he says that you need a sufficient amount of talent to get into it, and beyond that level, effort expended is a more important factor.