来源:http://www.nytimes.com/2008/11/30/books/review/Leonhardt-t.html
[1] In 1984, a young man named Malcolm graduated from the University of Toronto and moved to the United States to try his hand at journalism. Thanks to his uncommonly clear writing style and keen eye for a story, he quickly landed a job at The Washington Post. After less than a decade at The Post, he moved up to the pinnacle of literary journalism, The New Yorker. There, he wrote articles full of big ideas about the hidden patterns of ordinary life, which then became grist for two No. 1 best-selling books. In the vast world of nonfiction writing, he is as close to a singular talent as exists today.
[1] 1984年，一位名叫马尔科姆的年轻人毕业于多伦多大学，并移居美国，尝试新闻工作。 由于他非常清晰的写作风格和对故事的敏锐洞察力，他很快就在华盛顿邮报找到了一份工作。 在“邮报”工作不到十年之后，他又走上了文学新闻“纽约客”的巅峰。 在那里，他写了很多关于普通生活隐藏模式的重要创意文章，然后成为两本畅销书籍的主要内容。 在广阔的非小说写作世界中，他与现在存在的独特才能非常接近。
[2] Or at least that’s one version of the story of Malcolm Gladwell. Here is another:
[3] In 1984, a young man named Malcolm graduated from the University of Toronto and moved to the United States to try his hand at journalism. No one could know it then, but he arrived with nearly the perfect background for his time. His mother was a psychotherapist and his father a mathematician. Their professions pointed young Malcolm toward the behavioral sciences, whose popularity would explode in the 1990s. His mother also just happened to be a writer on the side. So unlike most children of mathematicians and therapists, he came to learn, as he would later recall, “that there is beauty in saying something clearly and simply.” As a journalist, he plumbed the behavioral research for optimistic lessons about the human condition, and he found an eager audience during the heady, proudly geeky ’90s. His first book, “The Tipping Point,” was published in March 2000, just days before the Nasdaq peaked.
[2]或者至少那是Malcolm Gladwell故事的一个版本。这是另一个：
[3] 1984年，一位名叫马尔科姆的年轻人毕业于多伦多大学，并移居美国，尝试新闻工作。当时没有人能够知道，但他的时间差不多完美。他的母亲是心理治疗师，父亲是数学家。他们的职业指向年轻的马尔科姆走向行为科学，他们的受欢迎程度将在20世纪90年代爆发。他的母亲也碰巧是旁边的作家。因此，与数学家和治疗师的大多数孩子不同，他后来回忆起，他开始学习“在说清楚和简单的事情上有美感。”作为一名记者，他探讨了行为研究，以获得关于人类状况的乐观教训， 90年代，他在令人兴奋的，自豪的令人讨厌的时候找到了热切的观众。他的第一本书“引爆点”于2000年3月出版，就在纳斯达克峰值前几天发布。
[4] These two stories about Gladwell are both true, and yet they are also very different. The first personalizes his success. It is the classically American version of his career, in that it gives individual characteristics — talent, hard work, Horatio Alger-like pluck — the starring role. The second version doesn’t necessarily deny these characteristics, but it does sublimate them. The protagonist is not a singularly talented person who took advantage of opportunities. He is instead a talented person who took advantage of singular opportunities.
[4]关于格拉德威尔的这两个故事都是真实的，但它们也是非常不同的。 第一个个性化他的成功。 这是他职业生涯中经典的美国版本，因为它赋予了个人特征 - 才华，勤奋，Horatio Alger般的勇敢 - 主演角色。 第二个版本不一定否认这些特征，但它确实升华了它们。 主角不是一个利用机会的独特人才。 相反，他是一个利用奇异机会的人才。
[5] Gladwell’s latest book, “Outliers,” is a passionate argument for taking the second version of the story more seriously than we now do. “It is not the brightest who succeed,” Gladwell writes. “Nor is success simply the sum of the decisions and efforts we make on our own behalf. It is, rather, a gift. Outliers are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”
[5]格拉德威尔的最新着作“异常值”是一个充满激情的论据，因为我们比现在更认真地对待第二版故事。 “这不是最聪明的人，”格拉德威尔写道。 “成功也不仅仅是我们为自己做出的决定和努力的总和。 相反，它是一种礼物。 异常值是那些获得机会的人 - 他们有足够的力量和存在来抓住他们。“
[6] He doesn’t actually tell his own life story in the book. (But he lurks offstage, since he does describe the arc of his mother’s Jamaican family.) Instead, he tells other success stories, often using the device of back-to-back narratives. He starts with a tale of individual greatness, about the Beatles or the titans of Silicon Valley or the enormously successful generation of New York Jews born in the early 20th century. Then he adds details that undercut that tale.
[6]他实际上并没有在书中讲述自己的人生故事。 （但他潜伏在舞台上，因为他确实描述了他母亲的牙买加家庭的弧线。）相反，他讲述了其他成功故事，经常使用背靠背叙事的设备。 他首先讲述了个人伟大的故事，关于披头士乐队或硅谷的巨头，或者是20世纪初出生的极为成功的纽约犹太人。 然后他添加了削弱这个故事的细节。
[7] So Bill Gates is introduced as a young computer programmer from Seattle whose brilliance and ambition outshine the brilliance and ambition of the thousands of other young programmers. But then Gladwell takes us back to Seattle, and we discover that Gates’s high school happened to have a computer club when almost no other high schools did. He then lucked into the opportunity to use the computers at the University of Washington, for hours on end. By the time he turned 20, he had spent well more than 10,000 hours as a programmer.
[7]因此，比尔盖茨作为一名来自西雅图的年轻计算机程序员被介绍，他的才华和野心超越了成千上万其他年轻程序员的才华和雄心。 但随后格拉德威尔带我们回西雅图，我们发现盖茨的高中碰巧有一个电脑俱乐部，几乎没有其他高中。 然后，他很幸运地有机会在华盛顿大学使用计算机数小时。 当他20岁时，他作为一名程序员花了超过10,000小时。
[8] At the end of this revisionist tale, Gladwell asks Gates himself how many other teenagers in the world had as much experience as he had by the early 1970s. “If there were 50 in the world, I’d be stunned,” Gates says. “I had a better exposure to software development at a young age than I think anyone did in that period of time, and all because of an incredibly lucky series of events.” Gates’s talent and drive were surely unusual. But Gladwell suggests that his opportunities may have been even more so.
[9] Many people, I think, have an instinctual understanding of this idea (even if Gladwell, in the interest of setting his thesis against conventional wisdom, doesn’t say so). That’s why parents spend so much time worrying about what school their child attends. They don’t really believe the child is so infused with greatness that he or she can overcome a bad school, or even an average one. And yet when they look back years later on their child’s success — or their own — they tend toward explanations that focus on the individual. Devastatingly, if cheerfully, Gladwell exposes the flaws in these success stories we tell ourselves.
[9]我认为，许多人对这一想法有一种本能的理解（即使格拉德威尔为了反对传统智慧而提出他的论点，也不这么说）。 这就是为什么父母花太多时间担心他们的孩子上学的原因。 他们并不真的相信这个孩子如此精力充沛，以至于他或她可以克服一个糟糕的学校，甚至是一个普通的学校。 然而，当他们多年后回顾他们孩子的成功 - 或他们自己的 - 他们倾向于关注个人的解释。 令人沮丧的是，如果高兴，格拉德威尔揭露了我们告诉自己的这些成功故事中的缺陷。
[10] The book’s first chapter explores the anomaly of hockey players’ birthdays. In many of the best leagues in the world, amateur or professional, roughly 40 percent of the players were born in January, February or March, while only 10 percent were born in October, November or December. It’s a profoundly strange pattern, with a simple explanation. The cutoff birth date for many youth hockey leagues is Jan. 1. So the children born in the first three months of the year are just a little older, bigger and stronger than their peers. These older children are then funneled into all-star teams that offer the best, most intense training. By the time they become teenagers, their random initial advantage has turned into a real one.
[10]这本书的第一章探讨了曲棍球运动员生日的异常现象。 在世界上许多最好的联赛中，无论是业余联赛还是职业联赛，大约40％的球员出生在1月，2月或3月，而只有10％出生在10月，11月或12月。 这是一个非常奇怪的模式，有一个简单的解释。 许多青少年曲棍球联赛的截止日期是1月1日。因此，今年头三个月出生的孩子比同龄人更大，更强壮。 然后，这些年龄较大的孩子将进入全明星队伍，提供最好，最激烈的训练。 当他们成为青少年时，他们随机的初始优势变成了真正的优势。
[11] At the championship game of the top Canadian junior league, Gladwell interviews the father of one player born on Jan. 4. More than half of the players on his team — the Medicine Hat Tigers — were born in January, February or March. But when Gladwell asks the father to explain his son’s success, the calendar has nothing to do with it. He instead mentions passion, talent and hard work — before adding, as an aside, that the boy was always big for his age. Just imagine, Gladwell writes, if Canada created another youth hockey league for children born in the second half of the year. It would one day find itself with twice as many great hockey players.
[11]在加拿大顶级联赛的冠军赛中，格拉德威尔采访了1月4日出生的一名球员的父亲。他的球队中超过一半的球员 - 梅迪辛哈特老虎队 - 出生于1月，2月或3月。 但是当格拉德威尔要求父亲解释他儿子的成功时，日历与它无关。 相反，他提到了激情，才华和努力工作 - 在此之前，他补充说这个男孩对他这个年龄的人来说总是很大。 想象一下，格拉德威尔写道，如果加拿大为下半年出生的孩子创造了另一个青年曲棍球联盟。 有一天它会发现自己拥有两倍的伟大曲棍球运动员。
[12] “Outliers” has much in common with Gladwell’s earlier work. It is a pleasure to read and leaves you mulling over its inventive theories for days afterward. It also, unfortunately, avoids grappling in a few instances with research that casts doubt on those theories. (Gladwell argues that relatively older children excel not only at hockey but also in the classroom. The research on this issue, however, is decidedly mixed.) This is a particular shame, because it would be a delight to watch someone of his intellect and clarity make sense of seemingly conflicting claims.
[12]“异常值”与格拉德威尔早期的作品有很多共同之处。 很高兴阅读并让你在几天之后考虑其创造性理论。 不幸的是，它还避免了在一些情况下进行研究，这些研究对这些理论产生了怀疑。 （格拉德威尔认为，相对年龄较大的孩子不仅在曲棍球上而且在课堂上都表现出色。然而，关于这个问题的研究显然是混合的。）这是一个特别的耻辱，因为看到他的智力和 清晰度可以理解看似相互矛盾的说法。
[13] For all these similarities, though, “Outliers” represents a new kind of book for Gladwell. “The Tipping Point” and “Blink,” his second book, were a mixture of social psychology, marketing and even a bit of self-help. “Outliers” is far more political. It is almost a manifesto. “We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that 13-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur,” he writes at the end. “But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one 13-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?”
[13]然而，对于所有这些相似之处，“异常值”代表了格拉德威尔的一种新书。 他的第二本书“引爆点”和“眨眼”是社会心理学，市场营销甚至一些自助的混合体。 “异常值”更具政治色彩。 这几乎是一个宣言。 “我们看着年轻的比尔盖茨，并惊叹于我们的世界让这个13岁的孩子成为一个非常成功的企业家，”他最后写道。 “但这是错误的教训。 我们的世界只允许一个13岁的人在1968年无限制地访问分时终端。如果有一百万青少年获得同样的机会，我们今天会有多少微软？
[14] After a decade — and, really, a generation — in which this country has done fairly little to build up the institutions that can foster success, Gladwell is urging us to rethink. Once again, his timing may prove to be pretty good
[14]经过十年 - 而且，实际上是一代人 - 这个国家在建立能够促进成功的机构方面做得相当少，Gladwell敦促我们重新思考。 再一次，他的时机可能会很好