Mar
19th
Sat
19th
Malcolm Gladwell on success
“The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-yar-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? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success - the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history - with a society that provides opportunites for all. (…)
I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. (…) It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t. (…)
Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all. (…)
Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. (…)
In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
See also:
☞ Jonah Lehrer on which traits predict success (the importance of grit)
☞ Bill Gates responds to Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill, FORA.tv, June 2, 2010.
“The lesson here is very simple. But it is striking how often it is overlooked. We are so caught in the myths of the best and the brightest and the self-made that we think outliers spring naturally from the earth. We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-yar-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? To build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success - the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history - with a society that provides opportunites for all. (…)
I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing. (…) It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t. (…)
Superstar lawyers and math whizzes and software entrepreneurs appear at first blush to lie outside ordinary experience. But they don’t. They are products of history and community, of opportunity and legacy. Their success is not exceptional or mysterious. It is grounded in a web of advantages and inheritances, some deserved, some not, some earned, some just plain lucky - but all critical to making them who they are. The outlier, in the end, is not an outlier at all. (…)
Once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder. (…)
In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”
See also:
☞ Jonah Lehrer on which traits predict success (the importance of grit)
☞ Bill Gates responds to Malcolm Gladwell’s theory that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill, FORA.tv, June 2, 2010.
— Malcolm Gladwell, Canadian journalist, bestselling author, and speaker, Outliers, Little, Brown and Company, 2008.
