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RD: Is it ever too late to become a success?
Gladwell: Hitchcock began making his best movies in his late 50s. Cézanne had his first one-man show at 56. Robert Frost, Wallace Stevens, and many others did their best work very late in life. Sometimes success isn't recognized until late in life. That's not uncommon. Success is not an automatic function of individual talent. It's bound up in so many other broader circumstantial, environmental, historical, and cultural factors.
RD: What about your own life story?
Gladwell: Success is the steady accumulation of advantages. In my case, you can't understand me without understanding my family, which means going back to 18th-century Jamaica.
I am the descendant of an African slave and a white plantation owner. Unlike in the American South, the offspring of such relationships were allowed to be free. So [while] my great-great-great-grandmother was a slave, her son was a preacher. That gave our family an extraordinary advantage, which persisted for generations and put my grandmother in a position to achieve great personal and professional success, which in turn helped my mother. I am the inheritor of that legacy. This was a revelation: I hadn't known my true story until I started researching this book. It was profoundly humbling.
RD: Is there such a thing as an overnight success?
Gladwell: No. And that's my concern with a show like American Idol. It encourages the false belief that there's a kind of magic, that you can be "discovered." That may be the way television works, but it's not the way the world works. Rising to the top of any field requires an enormous amount of dedication, focus, drive, talent, and 99 factors that they don't show on television. It's not simply about being picked. Which, by the way, is why very few of the anointed winners on American Idol have gone on to true success. Most have flamed out and gone away. That should tell us something.
Gladwell's Five Steps to Success
1. Find meaning and inspiration in your work.
2. Work hard.
3. Discover the relationship between effort and reward.
4. Seek out complex work to avoid boredom and repetition.
5. Be autonomous and control your own destiny as much as possible.
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