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.

Comments

Another Gladwell masterpiece!

[stinkbomb]

This Gladwell character has quite the literary scam going:

1. Take an obvious and ancient truism.
2. Write 200-300 pages of anecdotes related to it.
3. Profit!

I heard his next book is going to be an analysis of the power of hand-washing to prevent disease!

Re:Another Gladwell masterpiece!

[ushering05401]

Before someone mods you troll I would like to point out that this is exactly the stimulus that 'people of faith' the world over seek every time they enter a place of worship.

Gladwell is utilizing a proven tool (rehashing the familiar) to get people thinking...

Re:Another Gladwell masterpiece!

[TubeSteak]

Gladwell is utilizing a proven tool (rehashing the familiar) to get people thinking...

It only gets people thinking, in the sense that they are thinking along the lines you have outlined.

And anyone who knows about debate will tell you that framing a discussion in your terms is a great way to neutralize anyone's ability to respond. "Have you stopped beating your wife yet?" is the simplest form of that type of debate-fu.

Fostering independent thought and inquisitive minds is not something that is done through rehashing the familiar or repetition.

Re:Another Gladwell masterpiece!

[ushering05401]

OK, so the criticism of Gladwell then boils down to something like this:

A guy who claims to know something about ideas has chosen the most enduring and successful method for propogating ideas known to man.

I don't want to come off as brutish, but some branches of my family have been ensnared in occasionally unhealthy religious practices that made no rational sense, so I have thought about mind control in depth. Gladwell is using an extremely well documented aspect of human nature to spread his ideas. The documentation of the technique he is using is called History - AKA a chronicle of ideas that caught fire long enough or brightly enough to be remembered - something this dude claims to know something about.

Humans like to be spoken to in the manner that Gladwell is speaking and he will continue to be massively popular until a fresher face comes along and does the exact same thing in a slightly different manner. The parent to my original reply should be +5 Insightful in my opinion, even though I think more nuance was required in the original post.

insightful revelation

[spune]

Who would have guessed that individual circumstances play an important role in success? It certainly had never occurred to me that who you know matters more than what you know.

Success is being in the right place at the right t

[melted]

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.

Success is a choice

[tsa]

Success is a choice. Everybody knows that.

Re:Success is a choice

[Burnhard]

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.

Re:10,000 hours by the age of 20?

[AliasMarlowe]

Too bad there isn't any market demand for guys who masturbate :-(

Apparently there is - just look at Gladwell!

Re:And the Winning Talent is.......

[V!NCENT]

There was much more than marketing involved in the success that Microsoft had until this day.

It involved lies, false promises (yellow road to Cairo), lobbying for antisocial laws (DMCA), lock-in practices(WMV, MS Office files), FUD(agreement with Novell about patents), embrace, extend and extinguish and bying into the stock of competitors.

Apples success so far came from delivering a better product...

Re:Success is being in the right place at the righ

[kz45]

"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)

Rich Parents

[ISoldat53]

It doesn't hurt to have very well-to-do parents.

Re:Rich Parents

[Animats]

It doesn't hurt to have very well-to-do parents.

It does help. It knocks years off the time it takes to get to the point that you have enough assets to do something.

In the US, having rich parents gives more of an edge than it did fifty years ago. Few kids used to attend private schools, and if they did, they were probably Catholic. Now, there's a whole system of high-end schools and activities for rich kids. There's heavy institutional support for getting into the right college. Fifty years ago, there were SATs, but nobody took special SAT preparation courses. This is reflected in the rising correlation between the parents income and the child's income.

Re:Rich Parents

[mattwarden]

> Few kids used to attend private schools, and if they did, they were probably
> Catholic. Now, there's a whole system of high-end schools and activities for
> rich kids.

That has a ton more to do with the federal government's failure of the public education system than it does rich parents. In fact, the household income threshold where people below that threshold would attend public schools is moving further further toward the lower-middle class. That suggests a strong shift in household spending priorities, which is partially due to education competition but even moreso due to the failure of the public school system. Many many families are paying double for education (taxation to fund public schools, tuition to pay the school they actually utilize and benefit from).

> There's heavy institutional support for getting into the right college. Fifty
> years ago, there were SATs, but nobody took special SAT preparation courses.
> This is reflected in the rising correlation between the parents income and
> the child's income.

I think you are right, partially. But, again, I think you are missing the fact that current education does not properly prepare students for college, and therefore does not adequately prepare them for the SATs and ACTs. Both my sister and I did not bother with those courses, but we were fortunate enough to have a single parent raising two children who worked very, very hard to send us to schools that would actually prepare us for professional success.

I will say, though, that I must be lacking in the math department, because I have never been able to figure out how she was able to afford the private school tuition (although, I do know that our high school had funds available to subsidize the tuition of those with less income, and we did receive some of that subsidy -- further evidence that private schooling could actually work).

Re:Success is being in the right place at the righ

[sribe]

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

[melted]

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?

Re:So you think that success of Bill Gates

[sribe]

No, Bill Gates is an aberration both in terms of the sheer luck, and his ruthless exploitation of it. When you talk about the most successful few individuals in the world, you talk about people who encountered (and engaged) the best opportunities in the world. But when you talk about success in a slightly less rarified sense, those opportunities are all over the place, and hard work is a MUCH more significant differentiator.

Re:So you think that success of Bill Gates

[lattyware]

Whatever you think about Bill Gates or M$ as a software provider, you have to respect the man as a businessman.

Re:So you think that success of Bill Gates

[ErkDemon]

BG was unusual in that, unlike many "hippy" programmers at the time, he came from a "banking and law" family background. He's William Henry Gates the Third, family nickname, "Trey" for three. How many of us have family nicknames in Latin? :)

So unlike most of the other people writing code at the time, BG understood Big Business. Monopoly power. Cross-market leverage. Inertial market share. And after IBM stupidly gave Bill a profitable toehold in their loss-making PC business, BG successfully leveraged his company to the top, using every textbook business trick going (many of them borrowed from IBM).

One of BG's smartest moves was to stay the hell out of computer manufacturing, and to instead focus on making sure that all the myriad PC manufacturers, who were desperately cutting each others' throats on price, were paying to pre-install his software on their machines. Apple were control freaks and hated the idea of anyone else making money out of their product, Bill recognised that partitioning the market into hardware and software meant that he could take an absurd margin on the software and leave some other mug to worry about actually building, stocking, warehousing and sell the hardware.

Microsoft have done a few good things, but Bill's aim was always for MS to become the new IBM, a company powerful enough to make its success self-perpetuating through sheer market presence.

The tragedy is that he succeeded. Microsoft are now roughly where IBM were in the early eighties, a company with lacklustre products that runs on business inertia, with no real idea of what they ought to be doing next. They hire a lot of talent, but it's not obvious what they do with it all.

Re:So you think that success of Bill Gates

[Paul Fernhout]

Almost all these replies citing luck, talent, and hard work, and knowledge (all true), leave out a key aspect -- the way you can get or buy all these (or by having free *time* and access to *tools* can develop them), and that thing is access to capital (dollar-denominated ration units in our society). Bill Gates had a lot of ration units (capital) to give him free time and access to tools and learning because his family was wealthy and he was born with a big trust fund. See:
    "How to be as Rich As Bill Gates"
    http://philip.greenspun.com/bg/
"William Henry Gates III made his best decision on October 28, 1955, the night he was born. He chose J.W. Maxwell as his great-grandfather. Maxwell founded Seattle's National City Bank in 1906. His son, James Willard Maxwell was also a banker and established a million-dollar trust fund for William (Bill) Henry Gates III. In some of the later lessons, you will be encouraged to take entrepreneurial risks. You may find it comforting to remember that at any time you can fall back on a trust fund worth many millions of 1998 dollars."

Oh, and Bill Gates dumpster dived at a computer center in his formative years as well:
    http://danbricklin.com/log/2004_03_11.htm#paw
"Interviewer: Is studying computer science the best way to prepare to be a programmer?
Gates: No, the best way to prepare is to write programs, and to study great programs that other people have written. In my case, I went to the garbage cans at the Computer Science Center and I fished out listings of their operating systems. You've got to be willing to read other people's code, and then write your own, then have other people review your code. You've got to want to be in this incredible feedback loop where you get the world-class people to tell you what you're doing wrong..."

What he describes here sounds a lot like what the free and open source community of programmers does. :-) Not what Microsoft does. He had the guts to drop out of college (Harvard), true, but he also had the safety net of personal wealth already. Starting with wealth and others' information are key aspects of the Bil Gates story (and understanding our society), and it is unfortunate this is all not better known. It puts his early letter to hobbyists in a new perspective, where an already rich guy (from inheritance) claimed poorer hobbyists sharing knowledge and content were hurting this guy economically who already was very wealthy and had gotten a lot of what he knew from reading through others' discarded printouts. (That sharing was before copyright infringement was a felony, by the way, as the laws have been made stricter since to further protect people like Bill Gates.)

I don't know which is worse:
* the ethical hyprocrisy of Gates' letter:
    http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Open_Letter_to_Hobbyists
* the defense of Gates and the US economic system by "Millionaire Wannabees" who do not know of this history.
    "The Wrath of the Millionaire Wannabe's"
    http://www.conceptualguerilla.com/?q=node/47
"But here's something I'll bet the dittoheads haven't thought of. Maybe they're the chumps. Maybe they've been sold a bogus "American dream" that never existed. Maybe "the rules" they play by were written by the people who have "made it" - not by the people who haven't. And maybe - just maybe - the people who have "made it" wrote those rules to keep the wannabes chasing a dream that's a mirage."

This is the excuse I heard

[melted]

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.

Re:This is the excuse I heard

[Kirkoff]

I'm not sure that Google is a great example of good timing. There were already several players in the search engine space when they started. They just did it better. That's intelligence and the hard work to release it (even if it was a PhD project).

 

Re:This is the excuse I heard

[Tablizer]

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.

It should be pointed out that being "successful" and being a billionaire are two different things. Even if you were not at the "magic moment", there's still ways to become well-to-do.

For example, the next fledging microcomputer-like or internet-like opportunity might be right under our nose (say, solar cells). If you merely invest in the right players, you could still get quite wealthy.
   

Getting in on the ground floor

[Animats]

It does help to be in the right place at the right time. But you get to pick where you are. Moving from New York to Silicon Valley in 1974 worked out very well for me.

Twentysomethings who went to San Francisco in 1998 for the dot-com boom did OK, although not for long. Between 2000 and 2005, the number of twentysomethings in SF dropped 40% when the dot-com boom collapsed.

You can work hard and still guess wrong, though. If you thought that fusion power was going to be big, and spent the necessary years to get a doctorate in nuclear physics, you're probably not working in that field now.

There's nothing right now that looks as promising as the great booms of the past - railroads, automobiles, electricity, radio, aviation, plastics, computing, the Internet. The smart young people I know seem to be going into either biotech or law, but neither field is really booming. I have hopes for robotics, but it's not having a boom yet.

Port 23?

[IceCreamGuy]

At first glance I read "Success Not Just a Matter of Telnet..."

Re:And the Winning Talent is.......

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

What would Machiavelli do?

[Spy der Mann]

The other day I looked at a book entitled "What would Machiavelli do?". In the back it said something about people not achieving success despites their talent. The book then asked a question: Why is it that some people who are not as talented, obtain success? Are they smarter? Stronger? No. They're simply more evil.

I'm sure Bill Gates read that book and applied it accordingly, screwing the lives of everyone just for his personal gain.

Re:Success is being in the right place at the righ

[girlintraining]

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.

Born Lucky

[Doc Ruby]

Bill Gates is William Henry Gates IV. His father, Bill Sr (born "III") was one of America's top corporate lawyers, as was his mother. That's why Microsoft was able to outmaneuver IBM on a one-way exclusive contract for PC DOS, and later even weasel out of the "landmark" US monopoly judgement (the senior Gates' lobbying lawfirm Preston Gates & Ellis was where Republican uberlobbyist Jack Abramoff got his start until Bush's "Justice" Department took over the "penalty" phase).

I'd rather be lucky than good any day. For Bill Gates, that's his birthright.

Re:Born Lucky

[ChromeAeonium]

Some people are born on third base and go through life thinking they hit a triple. -Barry Switzer

Re:10,000 hours by the age of 20?

[jonaskoelker]

Larry> Too bad there isn't any market demand for guys who masturbate :-(

lol ;)

Also, wrong. There's sperm banks.

Unfortunately they only accept a limited number of wads per donor. Why unfortunately? Imagine meeting a friend's friend at a party:

Larry> Hi, I'm Larry.
Jonas> 'Jonas.
Larry> So, what do you do for a living?
Jonas> I'm a programmer; how about yourself?
Larry> I'm a wanker.

I wonder what will happen

[JamesP]

once I get my 10k hours of slashdot...

right place right time

[opencity]

Wasn't it Feynman who said something along the lines of "You only discover America once"?

To me there's always a new wave to surf. I had a friend waxing bitter in about 1996 about how he'd missed the golden age of garage innovation. That there was never going to be another Apple. There hasn't been, but there was a Google.

The 10,000 hours number seems weird ... I tell beginner musicians that there is a certain amount of pain and boredom before it starts to get fun. I usually randomly pull a number between 10 and 25 hrs out of the air.

So 4 hours a day on the piano is 2,500 days. Round up to 7 years. Sounds about right.

Re:Success is being in the right place at the righ

[ErkDemon]

Come now ... you aren't seriously suggesting that George W. Bush's ability to become CEO of the USA was due in any significant way to his family's political connections rather than on a combination of obvious talent, natural aptitude, intelligence, and sheer hard work? His dad being a former president and his brother being governor of Florida had nothing to do with it!

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.

Re:Bull x 3

[Danse]

Complete crap.

If you put in the hard work, you'll know where the right place and time is. It's 90%+ hard work, good decisions, and having someone to bankroll you in the early stages. It's less than 10% luck.

Sure. Bill Gates would have turned out the exact same way if his parents weren't rich, very business-minded, gotten access to personal computers very early and had connections at IBM. Right.

No it doesn't, the Forbes 400 richest shows this

[br00tus]

A look at the Forbes 400 richest shows this to be the case. While ordinarily, looking at individuals is not helpful, concentration of capital is so skewed that in this case it is. Because Forbes 400 richest Americans collectively have more wealth than the world's poorest 2.5 billion people. So let's take a look.

Bill Gates III. The III should give it away. His father was a millionaire, one of Seattle's most prominent lawyer's and was instrumental in Microsoft's early success. Gates's mother was on charity boards with bigshots from IBM, which also helped Gates out. Forbes marks Gates as "self-made", in terms of its rankings, the half of their list who did not inherit hundreds of millions is self-made, the half that inherited hundreds of millions to billions is not self-made.

Warren Buffett - also marked as self made. His father was a Congressman and his family owned a number of stores in Omaha. He was born into Omaha's elite - of course, being part of Omaha's elite is not like being part of New York City's elite, but still.

Larry Ellison - from what I know, he is the first truly self-made person on the list. Like many on the list, he got rich by out-maneuvering IBM. He read a paper by an IBM scientists about how IBM was going to be making relational databases, and he quickly put Oracle together, beating out IBM's long drawn out development process. He also out-maneuvered competitors like Informix and Sybase.

The next four people on the list - Waltons - inherited all of their money.

One illusion of the list I think is usually self-made individuals are at the top. The four Waltons together are far richer than Bill Gates. David Rockefeller Senior, at the age of 93, is 144th on the list, but who has more influence, Rockefeller and the Rockefellers, or Gates? From listening to Gates's interviews recently, he almost sounds like he has no control over things like Microsoft's development of Vista any more, so if he can't even control that, what does he control?

Re:Bull x 3

[Danse]

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.

Digital Research etc (Re:Luck favors the prepared)

[ErkDemon]

The story that I read was that the IBM guys were due to visit DR to get an operating system (CPM), and were then due to drop in on Gates to talk about getting a version of BASIC. When they visit Digital Research for their pre-arranged meeting, they find that the boss is out of the office, flying his plane, and can't be reached.

So they leave, a little disgruntled, and make the next stop on their itinerary, Our Bill. They discuss a deal for Bill to supply a version of BASIC. This will let them tick the second item on their shopping list. Then, just before they leave they ask, "By the way, do you happen to know anyone other than DR that can do operating systems?"

Bill sees a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity. As it happens, Bill does know someone that already has an OS that could be ported, and who could do the port. IBM probably ought to be talking to that guy. Bill probably ought to give them the guy's name. The guy will probably be very pleased with Bill for pointing IBM his way. But Bill realises that for these few precious minutes, he's the only person on the planet who knows that these two parties ought to be talking. As long as he can keep them away from each other, he can make a lot of money by doing deals with each of them individually, and making sure that neither of them is aware of what he's really doing.

The first stage in getting this scam to work is to ensure that the IBM guys don't ask anyone else about operating systems, and don't go back to DR. Bill has to get them to agree that he'll be supplying the OS, right now, without admitting that he doesn't actually have an OS to supply. But they've come here to make a deal about BASIC, so they "have their pens out". They've been told that Bill is the "go-to" guy for BASIC, so he has their confidence. They're asking him for suggestions. He has one.

"No Problem! We can do that for you too!".

The IBM guys had hoped to be making a deal on the PC OS, they're planning to make a deal with Bill on that day anyway, they have no reason to believe that Bill is bullshitting them, and so it's an easy sell.

Having got the deal, and stopped IBM from asking anyone else about OSes, Bill now has to put the second stage of the plan into operation. He has to go to "OS Guy" and nonchalantly enquire as to whether OS guy might want a bit of work, to port his uninteresting OS to another platform, and give Bill the rights to it on that new platform. Bill is careful not to let "OS Guy" realise that thus is a potentially huge contract, that IBM are involved, that Bill has naughtily already made a contract that depends on OSG's cooperation, or that that Bill stands a chance of getting filthy rich from the rights to his (OS Guy's) OS. If OSG knew any of these things, he could walk away, or ask for a lot more money, or decide to make his own separate deal with IBM. He'd have Bill over a barrel, because if OSG didn't agree, Bill would have no obvious way to fulfill his deal with IBM.

So the success of Bill's plan depends on a certain lack of openness: He has to bluff IBM, or he doesn't get the contract, and he has to be less than honest with the guy whose OS it is, or else he might not be able to fulfil the contract. Bill's only hold over OS guy is that he's not telling OS guy what's really going on, or why he wants the OS. OS Guy doesn't demand a huge amount of money, because he doesn't know that Bill has IBM for a client, or that Bill's effectively presold something that OSG owns.

OS Guy doesn't demand partnership in the IBM deal, because it's kept secret that there is an IBM deal. Bill later justifies the deception by pointing out that he was legally prevented from telling OSG what he was doing by IBM's standard "non-disclosure" clause. From Bill's POV, he's successfully delivered an OS to IBM as promised, so he hasn't conned IBM, and while it's possible that IBM might have gone to OSG directly and made HIM filthy rich instead of Bill, it's also possible that if Bill hadn't made such a determined play for the con

Re:Success is being in the right place at the righ

[Iamthecheese]

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.

Re:One other factor...

[kanweg]

Sorry you had to re-read it so many times. (I"m not a native speaker).

There is probably no need to correct your perception of lawyers, I think. I can say that because most patent agents I know are people with a technical background, although there are countries where it is lawyers who deal with patent applications. That is terrible, because for the patent process, you're dealing with technical stuff, not legal stuff.

Patent law is a deal between society and the inventor, and on the whole it is fairly well balanced (in contrast to copyright law which is skewed tremendously towards the copyright holder). Don't get me started on patents on software, though. Society gets zilch in return for it.

Bert

Re:Success is being in the right place at the righ

[ultranova]

That depends on how you define success...

If you feel the need to argue about the definition of success, the chances are that you don't have it ;).