Twenty Something Sense

The “American Dream” gained formal notoriety less than 80 years ago when James Truslow Adams wrote, on the American Dream, in his 1931 book Epic of America

It is not a dream of motor cars and high wages merely, but a dream of social order in which each man and each woman shall be able to attain to the fullest stature of which they are innately capable, and be recognized by others for what they are, regardless of the fortuitous circumstances of birth or position.

There is a prevailing philosophical idea at the core of what we understand by the “American” experience. This idea is personified by the self-made man pulling himself up by his own bootstraps and extends to the notion that hard work and perseverance are all a person needs to be anything one can imagine. As engrained in the American consciousness as this dream is and though tales chronicling the country’s founding and early development have been written through its lens, this idea fails to explain or even acknowledge the boundaries that prevent its promise from being realized in our lives, chief among them – opportunity.

The problem with this dream is that its lack of recognition for the roadblocks of reality make it sound more like a fantasy. I’m reading the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell in which he discusses, among other things, the “Accumulative Advantage” theory or The Matthew Effect. This is the idea that success and the benefits of that success compound to create opportunities for even greater success with even greater benefits. This theory has been explored and borne out by laboratory scientists and social anthropologists alike. The book outlines case-studies in success from Bill Gates to the Beatles explaining that their success and greatness isn’t solely the product of their hard work and determination, it is also owing to, among other things, the opportunities that were available to them and their respective community cultures that prepared them to take advantage of those opportunities.

Perhaps most interestingly though, Gladwell details several societal structures this theory engenders and ventures into the realm of social policy by proposing structural remedies. The most direct example he explains is Canadian youth hockey leagues where January 1st is used as a cut-off date from class-to-class. This leads to kids with early-year birthdays playing with kids with end-year birthdays in spite of the difference in physical maturity (a big deal when you’re 9). When scouts survey the youth teams for talent at such an early age they are in fact only selecting the most physically mature players. The slight maturity advantage however quickly compounds into an actual skill advantage as these players have been singled out for special coaching, longer and more challenging training, etc…. Here, Gladwell suggests a more egalitarian approach might be to institute parallel leagues for the January-June and July-December birthdays. With this modification, youth players could be judged more accurately by skill in their peer groups, advanced training could be provided to the truly talented until the slight differences in aged-based maturity normalize. He also posits that this theory may hold with regard to early childhood education and “gifted” programs in general academia as well and notes a Denmark model in which resources are equally invested in childhood education and “gifted” programs do not begin until after the normalization in aged-based maturity.

I’ve seen the book reviewed by some critics who have labeled it cynical because so much of what the author says runs contrary to the American notion of rugged individualism, e.g., much of who we become is predictably predetermined by factors beyond our control including where and when we were born and who we were born to – but would Bill Gates have been able to be Bill Gates were he born 5 or 10 years earlier? Of course not. It’s helpful to see these titans of industry and celebrity deconstructed into their component parts of self-admitted chance encounters and lucky breaks. The book, in my opinion, translates well into engineering for success, but on a macro scale because its lessons speak to the structure of a more socially democratic system that may very well dust off the American Dream. I should reiterate though that none of this detracts from the value of hard work, indeed Gladwell notes with his 10,000 hour rule that “Practice isn’t the thing you do when you’re good. Practice is the thing you do that makes you good.”