Does the year you're born make any difference in your success?It's a question that will come up for anyone reading Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers.
Even though there's something about
Gladwell's books that make me feel like I'm supposed to read them in an airport, I
was able to fight that feeling long enough to get through it this past Thanksgiving weekend. The book - which is about the true story of success - is every bit as interesting and entertaining as Tipping Point and
Blink, and is just as easy of a read.
A few random
thoughts on the book and what it says about the requirements for success:
It requires about 10,000 of practice to be good at pretty much anything.
Many, many aspects of life depend on external forces and timing.
Along the same
lines, it'd be interesting to find the outliers' outlier, the ones who've
been successful outside of some massive environmental
updraft.
The book reminded me
of one of my long held philosophies of life, one which crystallized when I read
Sun Tzu's Art of War. Sun Tzu writes about how to use the terrain to your
advantage and how you should arrive early to the battlefield (you can read the full text by following the links this
sentence).
I've always mushed those together into the philosophy that you should, as much as possible, position yourself in contexts where the environment is working for you. If you're prepared and operating from the right platform(s) then you're basically swimming with the current.
I guess this is a more tactical application of the same basic thinking as Gladwell's Outlier philosophy, but in my case, I can (to some degree) control the environment into which I place myself, whereas in many of the Outlier examples many of the critical variables are decided for me (like the year I'm born).
So, whereas I
think Gladwell makes some wonderful points, there's a sense in the book that
much of success is decided for you. I prefer to believe there's a lot more
under my control, if I'm just creative about how I approach the problem and do
what I can to have the terrain fight for me.
But I'm probably just delusional.
Gladwell, is 1971 a good vintage for a digital media investment banker guy?
Could it be that Talent (the T-word) and the willingness to put in 10,000 hours are directly related? Does the ability to remain dedicated to something count as talent? Does talent mean that one should be able to succeed effortlessly? And how about one more: does having the financial luxury of 10,000 hours to do any one thing require a certain socio-economic head start?
My answers, in order, are Yes, Yes, No, Yes. And in the case of the last point, when and where you are born certainly matters!