Could do (much) better

First of all, let me wish you a happy, healthy and successful New Year in this first blog posting of 2009.

I say that sincerely, though you might ask what exactly I mean by "happy, healthy and successful".

Experts disagree on whether happiness can be measured and whether governements should aim to increase happiness. Willem Buiter clearly doesn't think so.

Good health is something we'd all like, but doctors can't always be certain whether we are healthy and, if not, agree on what should be done. And then there's success, which could mean being happy, healthy, wealthy or reaching whatever other goals you have.

Two books I got for Christmas look at people who most of us would regard as being successful. The first was Parky, the autobiography of Michael Parkinson, Britain's most famous talk-show host.

Parky's most remarkable interviews were those with former heavyweight boxing world champion Muhammad Ali. These included an extroardinary outburst by Ali in 1974 over whether he had white friends and whether his religion saw white Americans as the devil. Watch here.

The second book was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. An outlier is something or someone who is "markedly different" from everything or everyone else. For example, people who are incredibly successful, like Bill Gates or The Beatles.

Gladwell's book is more stimulating than Parkinson's, but its conclusion is trite: phenomenal success, says Gladwell, is the result of a number of factors: inherent ability; hard work; family, social and cultural background (which can be positive or negative); and good luck, including being in the right place at the right time.

Few readers will be surprised by this conclusion, although Gladwell keeps telling us that we think pure genius is the only relevant factor. (Message to Malcolm: most of us don't think this, that's a straw man.) Furthermore, Gladwell fails to look at the relative importance of the success factors.

In fact, the most interesting part of Gladwell's book for me was not about successful individuals at all but about how cultural factors can influence airline safety (another form of success).

Outliers will no doubt be a commercial success, like Gladwell's last two books, The Tipping Point and Blink. And I recommend it to you. But it is not a great book. Successful people like Gladwell can surely do much better.