As Sachin Tendulkar, Rahul Dravid and Virendra Sehwag set scoreboards ablaze, a good way to understand what makes them the way they are is to read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers. Readers will recall Gladwell as the engaging author of The Tipping Point and Blink. The first title has gone into everyday usage, and needs no explanation, while Blink argues persuasively that first impressions are often more important than second impressions. Outliers, published last year, tells us what makes geniuses (sportsmen, musicians, Steve Jobs) different from ordinary people.
The answer is that geniuses are made, not born. Whichever category of genius one is looking at, the difference between being good and being great, or an “outlier” (like someone who can score 30,000 runs in international cricket), Gladwell argues, is hard work and endless practice. Apply the argument to Tendulkar, and it sounds plausible. To be sure, the man whom people have called “the god of cricket” (notice the Indian penchant for under-statement!) had cricketing talent, but he devoted his life to cricket before he had entered his teens, even changing schools to be able to play yet more cricket. Still, he wasn’t a genius when he began playing Test cricket at 16; it took him quite a while to score his first 1,000 runs, and his batting average in the initial years was only a workmanlike 37. As the single-minded focus on the game continued, however, that number rose in a subsequent phase to 65. Tendulkar was not born a batting genius; intense practice, endless hard work and good coaching made him one.
Ditto with Gautam Gambhir; his batting average since his recall to the national team 18 months ago, after a two-year interregnum, is in the stratospheric 80s. Once again, Gambhir wasn’t born an “outlier”, he became one with endless practice, and attention to why he was being given out leg before wicket so often. Dispelling the myth-making about boy geniuses, Gladwell goes into the history of Mozart, who was writing music at the age of six, to point out that his really good work wasn’t done till he was in his 20s. Gladwell develops the 10,000-hour thesis — the faster a sportsman or musician gets in 10,000 hours of practice, the better he or she will be, as a study of pianists showed. This seems to have been true also of the Beatles, and of Tendulkar. It works in chess too (Vishwanathan Anand began playing endless chess at home when still a young boy in Manila), and in technology. Gladwell tells the story of Bill Joy (the “Edison of the Internet” who co-founded Sun Microsystems and rewrote the Java language). Joy had ability, but what made him a genius was the fact that at 16 he enrolled at the University of Michigan, which in the early 1970s had one of the most advanced computer science programmes, and a massive mainframe computer centre (this is before the age of PCs) where Joy got endless computer time without having to pay for it. How does one link this thesis to the fact that, over the past 20 years, India has steadily improved its performance in cricket, till it now has a very positive win-loss ratio? One answer is that the Indian team now has four batsmen with Test averages above 50 (only Gavaskar had this till now). But the underlying explanation could be the important one: more youngsters with talent focus on getting their 10,000 hours of practice simply because cricket has become better paying — like a Zaheer Khan deciding to give up medical school in order to focus on cricket.
