at Denny's and a mild disagreement with one's publisher are the pursuits of someone from another planet.
Such is the gap between the advantaged and the disadvantaged outsider – such is the edge some have and others lack. Not that you'd know it from reading Malcolm Gladwell. In his book – David and Goliath: Underdogs, Misfits and the Art of Battling Giants (2013) – that modern-day sage explores the art of success for those without the advantages of the insider. And as the book's title suggests, Gladwell uses that famous biblical battle as his exemplar.
History perceives the underdog to be the shepherd-boy misfit David. Yet, according to Gladwell, David possessed hidden advantages over the warrior-giant Goliath due to his ability to generate new solutions by breaking the rules. Goliath prepared for a straight fight based on his traditional assumptions and military knowledge, and expected to win based on his size. Meanwhile, the outsider David – by refusing armour – ignored convention: instead employing his shepherd's slingshot to fell the colossus.
Life's full of such examples, opines Gladwell – proving that the disadvantaged or excluded can break convention simply by turning it on its head. Dyslexics succeed due to their highly-developed listening skills, he says, while those educated in larger class sizes – something most educationalists think detrimental – benefit from shared learning and collaboration. From the American Revolution to Vietnam, from the Civil Rights movement to Northern Ireland, Gladwell finds history littered with underdogs that were expected to lose due to their disadvantages, yet who overcame obstacles through guile, guts and creativity. Most often – like David and his agile slingshooting – they won because their perceived disadvantages were in fact advantages, giving them an edge over their rivals.
Great news. If only it were true.
Unfortunately, it's a myth: the outsider myth – a modern day fallacy that says, to succeed, you have to go against the tide. Be different. In reality, however, it's an option open only to a well-educated elite pursuing their expensively-acquired advantages over the rest of us. Of course, underdogs can succeed, just as outsiders can change the world. Yet any ‘misfit’ thinking success is assured simply because they're ‘not like other people’ is likely to find themselves on the wrong side of history. From 5,000 years of records, Gladwell picks the winners while ignoring the countless occasions outsiders were crushed and forgotten by those utilizing their inherent advantages – their edge – over the rest of us.
For Gladwell, disadvantages – such as low educational attainment and social exclusion – are not disadvantages at all. They encourage cooperation, flair and imagination. Yet I think this a cruel trick to play on the millions of people feeling alienated from conventional pursuits while lacking the gilded opportunities of an Orwell or Hemingway, or even a Caulfield. Society's changed since Salinger wrote of Caulfield's bleary-eyed New York wanderings, and even since I kicked around the East End. But it hasn't changed enough to accommodate all those encouraged to think their outsider angst and misfit rage a sure sign their ‘gift’ is bankable.
Not so, shout the optimists. The world's full of disadvantaged outsiders that made it due to their unique outlook. Take rock ‘n’ roll. Isn't that the soundtrack to working class rebellion going right back to white kids playing black rhythms to shock their parents in 1950s America? On this side of the pond, pop-music (at least until the 1990s) was virtually defined by alienation: not least in the spawning of multiple musical tribes such as punks, mods, casuals, rude boys or new romantics. Surely, each of these cultural insurgencies contained significant elements of working class rebellion, didn't they? And their revolutionary leaders – whether Ozzy Osbourne, Paul Weller, Johnny Rotten, Terry Hall or Steve Strange – were all authentic working class heroes, weren't they?
Indeed they were. Yet look closely and those preaching anarchy were just as often recoiling from middle-class expectations – from ‘making plans for Nigel’ – than the limits of working-class aspiration. Sure, the odd back-street band won a deal from the moneymen – producing dancehall fodder for the masses. But nearly all those 1970s superbands – the likes of Genesis, Pink Floyd, Queen, Fleetwood Mac, and even The Clash – can trace their heritage back to Britain's fee-paying ‘public’ schools, again proving that rebellion is facilitated by, not despite, the advantages of privilege.
A peculiarly-British twist? Not at all. While researching this book news came of Lou Reed's death. A sad loss, not least because, along with his band (The Velvet Underground), he was emblematic of the rebellion pop-music engendered for so many. Reed was billed as an outsider – a label confirmed by his obituaries: The New York Times even running the headline ‘Outsider Whose Dark Lyrical Vision Helped Shape Rock ‘n' Roll'.
Yet Lou Reed's rejection of society owes more to his advantages than any sense of working class rebellion. The son of an accountant, Reed – as the child of successful New York Jewry – led a rather similar, well-educated, adolescence to Salinger. In other words, he was an idiosyncratic member of an elitist club. And this made Reed's rebellion towards the drug-addled dens of New York's underworld a choice, although his sense of rejection was compounded by his parent's ham-fisted efforts to ‘cure' his bisexual ‘urges'.
In fact, just about everywhere you look for rebellion you find highly-educated people with expensively-honed talents pursuing ‘exclusion' as a means of self-expression – something true of music, the arts and literature. And it's even true in business. After all, revolutionary techies Bill Gates (of Microsoft) and Mark Zuckerberg (of Facebook) had wealthy parents and a good college education – seemingly necessary requisites for breaking the mould via entrepreneurial success. Even Richard Branson, the UK's best-known entrepreneurial rebel – and one of the moneymen supporting British pop – is the privately-educated son of a barrister.
Stop me if I'm ranting, because the message here isn't one of class envy or ‘chippiness'. At least not deliberately. My concern is for the outsider and the fact there's a gulf – despite appearances – between the tools available, and therefore the outcomes, for advantaged against disadvantaged outsiders: for those with or without the edge of privilege.
Yet the central premise of this book is not the bemoaning of this reality. It's to establish how disadvantaged outsiders can develop that edge. While disagreeing with Gladwell's claim that our disadvantages and/or alienation can work in our favour, my aim here is to help make that very prospect a reality: to give genuine outsiders (not just eccentric elitists) the edge required to help them succeed.
Indeed, for every Salinger there's a D.H. Lawrence or Alan Sillitoe: both born to semi-literate Nottinghamshire fathers – one a miner, the other a bicycle factory worker. Yet both became era-defining writers. In fact, Sillitoe's The Loneliness of the Long Distance Runner (1959) stands alongside The Catcher in the Rye as a treatise to, this time working class, alienation and rebellion.
For every Lou Reed there's a David Bowie (the Brixton-born son of a waitress and charity worker); or Andy Warhol (Reed's mentor and patron, and the son of an immigrant Pennsylvanian miner); or Tracey Emin (a teenage rape victim from the wrong part of Kent with cross-Romany/Turk-Cypriot parentage).
And for every Richard Branson there's Apple's Steve Jobs (the adopted son of a garage mechanic); or omni-inventor Thomas Edison (the near-deaf youngest child of a political refugee); or Starbucks' Howard Schultz (the son of a Brooklyn truck driver).
Yet don't be fooled. The Edisons and the Emins – as well as the Bowies and Warhols – are far from the norm. Insiders are the norm. It's their world, with advantaged outsiders no more than insiders with an attitude – though still utilizing the edge gained from their inherent advantages in pursuit of their (usually creative) self-expression. Disadvantaged outsiders have to make it despite their sometimes highly-disabling attributes, not because of them. Gladwell's wrong on this one, though that's where
