A couple of weeks ago, I posted on Geoff Colvin's new book, "Talent is Overrated", in which he points to recent research that indicates that stars are usually not born, but developed through a process called "deliberate practice". Check that post out if you haven't already; the concept is pretty compelling.
Colvin's a name that most of you probably won't recognize unless you are hard core readers of Fortune magazine, where he has a column called "Value Driven" - also a good read. With that in mind, maybe you'll read Colvin's thoughts on deliberate practice being the key to success, maybe you won't.
What if I told you that Malcolm Gladwell (books including Blink, Tipping Point) has a similar book scheduled to come out called "Outliers"? Would you be interested in that? I thought so. In Outliers, Gladwell explores the concept of people who are outliers - men and women who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished and so extraordinary and so outside of ordinary experience that they are puzzling to the rest of us from a performance perspective.
Gladwell points to a few things as being key - the 10,000 hour rule, cultural differences, and opportunities others don't have based on the environment you grew up or matriculated in.
More on the concept of Outliers from a Fortune Interview with Gladwell:
"F: How did you become interested in this topic?
G: I was interested in writing about success. I just became convinced that our explanations [of what drives it] were lacking. We have the kind of self-made-man myth, which says that super-successful people did it themselves. And we have a series of other beliefs that say that our personality, our intelligence, all of our innate characteristics are the primary driving force. It's that cluster of things that I don't agree with.
The premise of this book is that you can learn a lot more about success by looking around at the successful person, at what culture they belong to, what their parents did for a living. Successful people are people who have made the most of a series of gifts that have been given to them by their culture or their history, by their generation.
F: Talk about Bill Gates. The mythology is that he was spontaneously drawn to computers. But you say that's not the case.
G: Bill Gates has this utterly extraordinary series of opportunities. When he's 13, it's 1969. He shows up at his private school in Seattle, and they have a computer room with a teletype machine that is hooked up to a mainframe downtown. Anyone who was playing on the teletype machine could do real-time programming. Ninety-nine percent of the universities in America in 1969 did not have that.
Then, when he was 15 or so, classmate Paul Allen learned that there was a mainframe at the University of Washington that was not being used between two and six every morning. So they would get up at 1:30 in the morning, walk a mile, and program for four hours. When Gates is 20, he has as much experience as people who have spent their entire lives being programmers. He has this incredible headstart.
F: What link does practice have to success?
G: The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day.
F: You also talk a lot about culture. How does it affect math skills, for example?
G: We give kids from around the world the same set of math tests, and every time we get the same results: America is just below average, and then at the very, very top are Singapore, Hong Kong, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. It occurs again and again.
There's an ultimately unconvincing argument that this has to do with IQ. I think what it has to do with is culture. Asian culture has a profoundly different relationship to work. It rewards people who are persistent.
Take a random group of 8-year-old American and Japanese kids, give them all a really, really hard math problem, and start a stopwatch. The American kids will give up after 30, 40 seconds. If you let the test run for 15 minutes, the Japanese kids will not have given up. You have to take it away.
I argue that this has to do with the kind of agriculture pursued in the West and the East going back thousands of years. I have ancestors who were peasant farmers in Western Europe in the Middle Ages. They probably worked 1,000 hours a year, if that. In the winter, they slept. They drank a lot of beer.
These Asian cultures are all wet-rice agricultural economies. Growing rice is this extraordinarily complex, labor-intensive activity that requires not just physical engagement but mental engagement. So a farmer in 14th-century Japan or 14th-century China was working 3,000 hours a year - three times longer. I know it sounds hard to believe, but habits laid down by our ancestors persist even after the conditions that created those habits have gone away.
Fascinating stuff. Most of you probably won't be compelled to Colvin's book, but many of you will buy Malcolm's. Enjoy it.
