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.
I'm writing my own book (Score:1, Interesting)
And most of my profiles are on people born around 1980, able to take advantage of the emerging internet technology.
10,000 hours by the age of 20? (Score:1, Interesting)
Too bad there isn't any market demand for guys who masturbate :-(
Getting in on the ground floor (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
Re:So you think that success of Bill Gates (Score:5, Interesting)
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? (Score:5, Interesting)
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.
right place right time (Score:4, Interesting)
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.
No it doesn't, the Forbes 400 richest shows this (Score:3, Interesting)
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?
Digital Research etc (Re:Luck favors the prepared) (Score:5, Interesting)
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:So you think that success of Bill Gates (Score:3, Interesting)
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/ [greenspun.com]
"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 [danbricklin.com]
"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 [wikipedia.org]
* 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 [conceptualguerilla.com]
"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."