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!

[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.

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: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).

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: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.

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:Born Lucky

[ChromeAeonium]

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

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: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.

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