Success Not Just a Matter of Talent 247
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.
Another Gladwell masterpiece! (Score:5, Insightful)
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 t (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
I think what people miss the most (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:10,000 hours by the age of 20? (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
"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 (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Another Gladwell masterpiece! (Score:3, Insightful)
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:Success is being in the right place at the righ (Score:4, Insightful)
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 (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Rich Parents (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
This is the excuse I heard (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Rich Parents (Score:5, Insightful)
> 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 a choice (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:And the Winning Talent is....... (Score:2, Insightful)
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.
Re:Success is being in the right place at the righ (Score:4, Insightful)
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.
Re:So you think that success of Bill Gates (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:This is the excuse I heard (Score:4, Insightful)
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:Born Lucky (Score:5, Insightful)
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 (Score:2, Insightful)
"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.
Re:Another Gladwell masterpiece! (Score:5, Insightful)
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:This is the excuse I heard (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Success is being in the right place at the righ (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Another Gladwell masterpiece! (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:So you think that success of Bill Gates (Score:5, Insightful)
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:Bull x 3 (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:Duh! (Score:2, Insightful)
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 [wikipedia.org], 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.
Re:Success is being in the right place at the righ (Score:4, Insightful)