Malcolm Gladwell: On the loveliness of mediocrity

Sometimes I feel like my experience at Astate has been sub-par because there isn't highly ambitious people around every corner, unlike some Ivy League schools and such. However, this is an optimistic message arguing the opposite. Malcolm believes a mediocre college is great for young people because it allows them to explore.

On the loveliness of mediocrity

See the original: The Conversations With Tyler podcast with guest Malcolm Gladwell

COWEN: Let’s say you’re giving advice to the parents and grandparents in the room. You can’t reshape the system, you can’t even control Harvard, but you can tell them what to do for their children. What’s your advice, given all of what you just said?

GLADWELL: Well, you should delay specialization as long as possible because prediction is poor, and burnout is as big an issue as poor prediction, early prediction. And I would avoid, I think . . .

The other parallel problem, which I get at in David and Goliath­, is that overly competitive environments at too early an age are really, deeply problematic. I thought about this the other day. I live most of the time upstate in New York, very close to Bard [College]. And I go work out at the Bard gym and I was watching . . . Bard has got, I don’t know, how many students? Is it 2,000? I don’t even know. Some tiny number. And I was watching the Bard lacrosse team work out. And I don’t want to offend anyone who went to Bard.

COWEN: They’re not allowed to say, by the way, if they did.

[laughter]

GLADWELL: OK. That’s right, they can’t say. They can’t say.

They’re terrible!

[laughter]

GLADWELL: I was eyeballing their lacrosse team, and I was like, “Good Lord!” I felt that I could go down there at 52 and make this team. That was my first thought, and my second thought was, “That is so fantastic.” Because what it means is, you can be an ordinary Joe at Bard and play lacrosse.

Now think about that in every different thing. In a school that small, with the exception of the things at which they are . . . there’s probably two or three things at Bard at which they genuinely do excel. I’m sure the drama program or the music program is formidable. But let’s accept, though, any nonspecialty item at Bard is going to be wide open. It’s totally accessible. You want to be in the physics club at Bard, you’re going to be in the physics club at Bard. And that is a massively underrated thing.

In other words, there’s a continuum here, and exclusivity is at one end and opportunity is at the other end. And people constantly are confusing these two things and thinking that in exclusivity and in elite status is opportunity. False. Eventually, that’s where the opportunities lie. They don’t lie there when you’re 16 or 17 when what is required of you is experimentation. If you want your 17-year-old to explore the world, send your 17-year-old to a place where the world can be explored. The world cannot be explored at a super-elite university. It’s impossible.

I talk about in David and Goliath, the phenomenon of very, very, very, very good science and math students going to elite colleges and dropping out at enormously high rates because they’re in the 99th percentile and they’re in a class full of people in the in 99.9th percentile. And when you are in the 99th percentile and you’re up against someone in the 99.99th percentile, you feel stupid. Even though you will never again in your life — unless you want to be an academic at MIT in physics — be surrounded by people that smart. It’s over after that. Then you go back to the real world, and you’re smart again. So why would you artificially put yourself in a situation where you feel so dumb that you stop doing the very thing that you went to school to do? That is bananas. And why this isn’t a fact that people . . .

When I was in college, I went out for the University of Toronto newspaper and they wouldn’t give me a job. It was too hard to get in. They were brilliant people. So what did I do? I wrote for my pathetic joke of a . . . we had a residential college. We put out this joke thing every couple weeks, and it was insanely fun. I could do whatever I wanted, nobody cared. We made up all kinds of crazy . . .

In the end, I had a way better experience than I would have had if I was at the highly competitive newspaper. I’ve never forgotten that. By virtue of being this lame, forgotten thing, I got to do more fun stuff and have a much better time than I would have at the proper newspaper. This drives me . . . well, clearly it drives me crazy. I don’t need to say it drives me crazy.

[laughter]