Slashdot Mirror
Success Not Just a Matter of Talent
NinjaCoder writes "The Guardian has an interesting article based on a new book (Outliers: The Story Of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell) which examines some persons of interest to computer technology (Bill Joy, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs, amongst others). It examines reasons for their successes and strongly suggests a link between practice (10,000 hours by age 20 being the magic milestone) and luck. This maybe an obvious truism, but the article does give interesting anecdotes on how their personal circumstances led to today's technological landscape. It points out that many of the luminaries of the current tech industry were born around 1955, and thus able to take advantage of the emerging technologies.
I heard his next book is going to be an analysis of the power of hand-washing to prevent disease!
Success is being in the right place at the right time. That's 50% of it. The remaining 50% are 30% hard work and 20% talent. The point being, unless you're in the right place at the right time and you see the opportunity, your hard work and talent are unlikely to pay off.
Is that success is often not merely talent and hard work, but having talent and being in the right place at the right time.
How many /.ers could have been Bill Gates?
Yet, only Bill Gates had both the contacts at IBM and the luck that IBM didn't can the PC project.
Also, what the laissez-faire business proponents often fail to realize is that the markets are often structured in such a way as to preclude everyone with the talent from actually competing. Consider the network effect on operating systems, for example. Even though you and I could write our own operating systems, the fact is that once one is written, it can be distributed and sold for a nominal cost; Microsoft has already amortized a large part of the cost of the Windows operating system, meaning that they can sell it for far less than it would cost me to write my own. In other words, in spite of the amount of talent out there, there's only room for one Bill Gates. And the laissez-faire economists often miss this point.
The consequence, of course, is that while many people could have made as much money as the star players in the technology game, the market will tolerate only a few super-millionaires. The rest of us - despite our talent - either never had the opportunity, or chose to forego it for other, more important reasons (such as spending time raising a family). This notion that anyone can become rich in the tech sector is not entirely false; provided that you understand that not everyone can become rich. The rest of us with the talent of Steve Jobs or Bill Gates will have to sign our inventions over to our employers and settle for a middle class lifestyle.
The society for a thought-free internet welcomes you.
Too bad there isn't any market demand for guys who masturbate :-(
Apparently there is - just look at Gladwell!
Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities. - Voltaire
"Success is being in the right place at the right time. That's 50% of it. The remaining 50% are 30% hard work and 20% talent. The point being, unless you're in the right place at the right time and you see the opportunity, your hard work and talent are unlikely to pay off."
This is the excuse I have heard from un-successful people that don't want to put the time and effort that it takes to actually be successful.
We have potential opportunities that pass by us every day. Without the proper knowledge or experience, these opportunities will just continue to pass by.
I would say it's more along the lines of 10% finding the opportunity (right place, right time) and 90% knowing what do do when you get it (talent and experience)
It doesn't hurt to have very well-to-do parents.
Bull. It's more like 10%, with the rest being split between skill/intelligence and perseverance/hard work--with that split, I think, varying somewhat with the type of opportunity. Life is full of opportunities, and many people just don't take advantage of them.
So you think that success of Bill Gates is attributable to skill, not to the fact that he was in the right place at the right time to trick IBM into distributing the operating system he was in the right place and at the right time to buy for $50K?
This is the excuse I heard from unsuccessful people who think they can be successful just by putting in the time and effort.
Truth is, if you're doing something on your own, being timing is crucial. eBay was in the right place at the right time. They weren't particularly talented and now you can't do another eBay. Same with PayPal. Same with Google. Same with Yahoo. Same with just about any truly successful company out there. Perhaps the most vivid example of this is early Microsoft. Their success was built on the software they didn't even write.
No matter how much time and effort you put in today, you will not replicate the success of those companies in their respective niches. Solely because you're not in the right place at the right time.
No, not everybody can be a success. If everybody put in 10,000 hours training as children, there would just be a whole lot more people competing for that one top spot, but still only one top spot.
better != majority
better != cheaper
better != non-proprietary
It's better because it just fucking works. No auto-running viruses/trojans problems, no fucking around with libraries and dependencies.
So blacks, women, and people under the age of 40 just aren't working hard enough? Because those are the people that are most likely to be making less than average wages, more likely to be working without benefits, etc. You call it an excuse, but for people who have poured their heart and soul into their work year after year and realized nothing from it, they call it prejudice. And it's just self-serving crap for you to say that "proper knowledge or experience" is the only pathway to opportunity when every day on the news we read about Haliburton and kickbacks, slush funds, and back room deals.
Intelligence is a bell curve, but almost 80% of the wealth in this country is concentrated amongst 5% of the population; And most of that held by white men who are over the age of 50. I don't suppose you're willing to say that this is because that's the only group that works hard.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple. -Barry Switzer
"Bull. It's more like 10%, with the rest being split between skill/intelligence and perseverance/hard work..."
Depends upon definition of success. If success is defined as being lower middle class or better, yes you may be right. If success means being Bill Gates, then you are incorrect.
People greatly overestimate their input in success and greatly underestimate chance. Laborers work harder than CEO's but get paid much less. You rarely get to be a CEO based on talent alone.
And we all know that the guys who make multi-million dollar bonuses on Wall Street earn every cent of that money by working far harder then the rest of us. They work much longer hours than those lazy people on the poverty line with two or three jobs. And its very responsible work. And they're very responsible people. And you have to pay a premium for that responsibility. otherwise, I dunno, you might end up with a bunch of hacks crashing the market. Which would never, ever happen with our guys.
Eric Baird
You realize, of course, that you all you've done is express snark without addressing what you quoted.
What you probably don't realize is that the propensity to work hard and the ability to make good decisions also pretty much come down to luck. So what? Some people are winners. Getting pissy about that fact just makes you bitter.
I'm fine with it. Chaos rules much of our lives. Some people make out better than others due to factors out of their control, such as personality, good looks, natural talent, and the advantages or at least lack of disadvantages they start out with.
Not saying that talent, will, and work don't play a part, just that they don't necessarily play nearly as big a part as many would have us believe. Just as you question my intent in pointing that out, I have to question theirs when they continually push hard work, sacrifice, etc as the major factors.
It's not enough to bash in heads, you've got to bash in minds. - Captain Hammer
you didn't RTFA did y... oh what am i saying? of course you didn't.
the article isn't saying that success is purely arbitrary. it is arguing that what we commonly perceive as inborn talent is actually a convergence of luck, expedient circumstances, and good ol' elbow grease.
the author makes the distinction early on between traditional meritocracies like sports/IT versus the world of business/politics, which the author describes as "old-boy networks." pop music would be more akin to the world of business & politics since actual personal ability plays very little role in an industry of pretentious superficiality.
the true grit of the article really is just revisiting the nature vs. nurture debate and summarizing the recent findings of developmental psychologists and other intelligence researchers. the first educational experiment to provide strong evidence that genius could be cultivated was conducted by Laszlo Polgar, a Hungarian schoolteacher and father of the world-renowned "Polgar Sisters" who are amongst the top-ranking chess players in world.
while Laszlo Polgar was an avid chess player, he never rose beyond the level of an amateur, and when he first began his experiment with his eldest daughter, Susan, female chess players were pretty much unheard of and the world of competitive chess was strictly dominated by males. but through diligent mentoring and a rigorous regimen of practice and study, Laszlo proved his theory that genius could be deliberately cultivated, shattering the precept that talent/genius were genetic or inborn traits.
the correlation between professional level athletes and birth dates was also established long ago (and was even published in a New Scientist article submitted to /., i believe). all of this helps to demonstrate that genetics are only significant to the extent that they might determine what interests & activities we are predisposed towards, which affect what skills we practice and cultivate in our childhood.
You won't want to hear this but is, statistically, women make less it is indeed because, statistically, they tend to work less. It is more likely that a woman will be the one in a two parent family to: Take time off to care for a sick child, take time off to give birth/have a safe pregnency, take years out of a career to become a housewife, or to stop working after they marry. When you factor in all that time off, career-hour for career-hour, women do as well as men. I haven't studied the black people and old people thing.
If video games influenced behavior the Pac Man generation would be eating pills and running away from their problems.