For the past three decades, leading business gurus on the order of Tom Peters have declared that the most essential ingredient required for success in a particular field was to have a massive level of talent, as it was talent that truly made the world go around.
But that was then, and this is now. Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell in his new book “Outliers: The Story of Success” (Little, Brown 2008) and Fortune magazine’s Geoff Colvin in his new book “Talent is Overrated” (Portfolio/Penguin 2008) have both turned conventional wisdom upside down on what it is that actually causes monster levels of success and concluded that possessing talent is nice, but has no real correlation to high-level achievement.
If not talent, then what made the Beatles, Chinese math whizzes, the top Canadian teenaged hockey players and Bill Gates get to the top of the mountain in their respective fields? Gladwell says digging deeper into history’s greatest success stories reveals that they are all about people being engaged in an activity when a unique opportunity involving that activity arises, and then having the tenacity to seize it and milk it for all it’s worth.
After performing together in England for three years, the Beatles found themselves in 1960 booked into clubs that required them to play eight-hour gigs night after night in Hamburg, Germany. To create a daily repertoire for such an extended period of time necessitated their putting all their cumulative talents into the highest gear just to endure each night, experimenting with and blending together every imaginable musical thought that popped into their heads. By the time they concluded “the Hamburg crucible,” the Fab Four had separated themselves from all other rock and rollers of their era.
As a child, Bill Gates had the good fortune to have affluent parents who sent him to the top private school in Seattle. In the late ’60s, that school became the first to have its own “computer club.” Then a club member’s parent provided for the technology-oriented teenagers with virtually unlimited access to a computer at the University of Washington, allowing young Bill to start doing real-time programming while only an eighth- grader. He took off from there.
The tenacious succeed
It’s one thing to be presented with a life-changing opportunity, but quite another to have the wherewithal and tenacity to seize it. So what exactly is entailed in the circumstance of seizing such an opportunity? Both Gladwell and Colvin cite a study involving violinists over the course of a decade. Those who became the most accomplished were not those who distinguished themselves with their talent from a young age. No. The most acclaimed performers were those who practiced more than the rest of the pack — for essentially 10,000 hours — which Gladwell decides is the litmus test for ultimate performance excellence. The Beatles, before coming to America, and Bill Gates during adolescence devoted themselves to about 10,000 hours at their respective crafts before hitting the big-time.
Geoff Colvin points out it’s not just routine, repetitive practice that produces the world-class performer. It is “deliberate practice” fueled by total commitment requiring “furious hard work” driven by a “rage to master” that involves pushing oneself beyond what a person can currently do, and aimed at improving the various specific needs required to take the performer to an elite level.
This fury, this rage, this all-consuming commitment ultimately sustains itself, according to Colvin, by a passion fed by recognition, and by a “multiplier effect” that causes what was once a small advantage (the Beatles in the endless Hamburg gigs and Bill Gates on the computer as a teenager) to spark a series of events that produce far larger advantages such as their sustained commercial success.
To play off the titles of Gladwell’s prior books, having little to do with mere “talent,” the daily eight-hour performances in Hamburg for the Beatles and the unlimited access to the University of Washington’s computers for Bill Gates became their careers’ “tipping points,” and in a “blink” they knew they had found their lives’ callings.
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