Based on that description it doesn't sound like he's looking carefully at people who weren't successful:
"There is a silly book called A Millionaire Next Door, and one of the authors wrote an even sillier book called The Millionaire's Mind. They interviewed a bunch of millionaires to figure out how these people got rich. Visibly they came up with bunch of traits. You need a little bit of intelligence, a lot of hard work, and a lot of risk-taking. And they derived that, hey, taking risk is good for you if you want to become a millionaire. What these people forgot to do is to go take a look at the less visible cemetery — in other words, bankrupt people, failures, people who went out of business — and look at their traits. They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck." - Nassim Taleb
That success can't be predicted with simple traits like IQ, hard work, and risk-taking is no surprise to me. Plenty of smart people are no good with money or business, just like many risk-takers can't tell the difference between a smart risk and a dumb risk (the vast gap between the two makes me wonder whether it's even wise to describe both kinds of risks with the same word).
But I think it's lazy to then give up and attribute it all to "luck".
It's rare to find a person who combines intelligence and risk-taking into a personality and mindset that thrives, financially, in our environment. But when it happens, I think those people's particular, qualitative traits contribute significantly to their success.
(I'm not saying that luck isn't also a significant factor. But it's overstated in that paragraph.)
"They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck."
The conclusion doesn't follow. Sharing some isn't the same as sharing all. And, even if they did share all of the measured traits, that doesn't tell us that there weren't unmeasured traits that distinguished the two groups. (Of course, if the difference is in the unmeasured traits, copying only the measured traits may not help.)
Taleb's statement about risk could be made succinct. Risk-taking appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for financial success. That's hardly a damning criticism of either book despite being disguised as such.
Phil Mickelson is a prominent example of the unbalanced view that the general public has of risk-taking and its relationship to success. Before he won a major, he was roundly criticized for taking too many chances. After winning, he was renowned for his creativity. Little thought has been given to the idea that his willingness to embrace risk and to accept the possibility of failure might be critical to his success.
Taleb's statement is a much stronger claim than your summary that "Risk-taking appears to be a necessary but not sufficient condition for financial success"
Your summary allows for the possibility that there are other factors besides risk-taking that can help ensure success, and in particular your statement leaves open the possibility that these factors could include working harder, being smarter, etc. etc. Taleb's statement explicitly rejects that possibility, arguing that the factors which distinguish the successful and the non-successful are ones you don't even have control over.
Saying that some smart, hard-working risk-takers failed is not a counterexample, and that's all Taleb was doing, at least in the quoted passage. It's roughly the same as saying that starting cards in Texas holdem don't influence the outcome of the hand because AA sometimes loses. It suggests that he doesn't understand the definition of risk.
You need to know only the basics of Bayesian inference to conclude deduce that if hard work, intelligence, and willingness to accept risk are overrepresented among successful people versus the general population, those traits are probably influential to success.
Maybe being smart and working hard doesn't make you a lock or even likely to succeed. But you'd be naive to think that your chances wouldn't be better than a competitor who was dumb and lazy.
You would also be naive to buy a book from a guy who gives you an explanation for something and conveniently neglects to mention, or perhaps doesn't even realize, that his explanation only accounts for 5% of the variance. A guy who tells you that hard work and risk taking will improve your chances from 1% to 5% in a one field but will improve them from 1% to 50% with less risk in another is giving you information that is actually worth something.
Would dropping out of Harvard and founding Microsoft land someone in the cemetery?
I think one of the biggest differences between risk takers and the cautious is simply that risk takers care less about what they risk. They know they can get by without it. By contrast, even many of those within startups, it seems, would start their own, because of the hit that they're need to take to their way of living.
Finally, luck favors the prepared mind. One of the things that Billg was great at was that, whenever he happened upon an opportunity, he pounced on it. Once the Altair came out (with no programming language), he and Paul Allen tried the audacious feat of programming one without one. He dropped out of college, moved to New Mexico, and started selling what he could. When he heard the IBM/DR-DOS deal, he scrambled to put together an operating system for them, and so how valuable retaining the rights would be.
Others just let these things drift by. But he went hunting for them, and had such a sense of a long term version that he could figure out what would fit, and what wouldn't.
I would refine your statement, by observing that Bill Gates was the only son of one of the wealthiest and most influential families in the country. He simply never had that much to lose in the first place.
Wealth can and (usually) goes the other way - since they have inherited enough of a rich-kid pension that they don't need to work, progeny of rich kids can choose to not work (or maybe be an average writer). I can't think of many examples of rich kids starting successful companies.
> ... They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck.
Ah sure. Does this mean hard work and taking risks is useless? Nope, because without hard work and risk taking you wouldn't ever get the chance to get lucky.
Gladwell is a good storyteller. He weaves disparate things together in a way that seems convincing and brilliant at first but dissolves on inspection. When challenged, his answer is, Oh of course I never said that anything was true.
I have mixed feelings about this. On the one hand, entertainment is fine, Gladwell is an intellectual entertainer, nothing wrong with that. On the other hand, his narratives do depend on an implicit claim to being true discoveries about how the world works; they're not nearly as valuable and interesting if they're not.
If you look up the definition of "charlatan", Gladwell is perilously close to it.
While trying to pin down what exactly Gladwell is concluding is generally difficult, you're certainly right, his gift is definitely in the story telling.
And honestly, that's good enough for me. While I believe that I am up to date on the latest in Computer Science I am not well read on the any of the recent or popular studies going on in social psychology. And Gladwell brings that research to the forefront.
Gladwell was the first to expose me to Paul Eckman's work; a man that has dedicated his life to recording and interpreting the micro-expressions that individual faces take on as different emotions escape us.
This led me to think "Oh, this would be greatly if I could interpret these expressions and use them in my weekly poker game." And sure enough Mr. Eckman offers a training CD.
http://www.paulekman.com/cds.html
Gladwell is dusting off the basement academic journals, painting them with great story telling, and shining a spotlight on the research. And that has merit.
too little attention to where they are from: that is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing.
Those things, of course, are all that pop pyschologists ever look at.
"There is a silly book called A Millionaire Next Door, and one of the authors wrote an even sillier book called The Millionaire's Mind. They interviewed a bunch of millionaires to figure out how these people got rich. Visibly they came up with bunch of traits. You need a little bit of intelligence, a lot of hard work, and a lot of risk-taking. And they derived that, hey, taking risk is good for you if you want to become a millionaire. What these people forgot to do is to go take a look at the less visible cemetery — in other words, bankrupt people, failures, people who went out of business — and look at their traits. They would have discovered that some of the same traits are shared by these people, like hard work and risk taking. This tells me that the unique trait that the millionaires had in common was mostly luck." - Nassim Taleb
Gladwell's previous work on genius isn't that promising either: http://infoproc.blogspot.com/2007/05/gladwell-and-genius.htm...
Finally, I doubt that the book will be better than this: http://www.scribd.com/doc/2926754/The-Mundanity-of-Excellenc...