What do Bill Gates, The Beatles and Canadian ice hockey stars have in common? Clue: the answer isn’t just that they are phenomenally successful…
We’re often told that success comes down to talent and effort – the most able and hardest working are the ones who achieve wealth, fame and power.
But what if there’s another secret ingredient that we’re missing? In the latest iluli video, we explored the critical role of luck in helping those who rise to the top. It’s a theme running through Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success.
Gates, the Fab Four and Canadian hockey stars are incredibly talented and hardworking. But their success stories also owe a significant debt to factors beyond their control, like timing and opportunity. In other words – luck.
As Gladwell puts it: “Personal explanations of success don’t work. People don’t rise from nothing.”
He adds:
The people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves. But in fact, they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the work in ways others cannot. It makes a difference where and when we grew up.
Timing is everything
Some people oppose the idea that luck plays a significant role in success. Surely, they argue, pinning success on chance underplays the importance of hard work, “grit” and determination. In a world where success comes down to random luck, we’d also be saying that no one ever earns or deserves it. And that would be grossly unfair.
But maybe there’s another way of looking at this.
In Outliers, Gladwell shares an intriguing fact about elite Canadian hockey players: a disproportionate number of them have birthdays between January and March.
Dig a little bit deeper and it becomes clear that this is more than just a random quirk. The Canadian youth leagues use a January 1st cutoff date. This means that players born in the earlier months of the calendar year are likely to be the biggest, strongest and most mature in their year group. These early advantages snowball – players who had the head start receive better coaching, more playing time and greater opportunities to progress. It’s little wonder they’re the most likely to go professional.
In almost every competitive field – business, technology, politics, entertainment – people who receive an early lucky break are likely to keep accumulating them, while those without fall further behind. The more competitive an industry, the more these compounding advantages determine who reaches the top.
Consider these household-name tech billionaires:
Steve Jobs - co-founder of Apple (born 24th February 1955)
Eric Schmidt - former CEO of Google (born 27th April 1955)
Bill Gates - co-founder of Microsoft (born 28th October 28 1955)
Three of the leading figures in computing were born in the U.S. within eight months of each other! Coincidence? Or not. For all their hard work and brilliance, Gladwell argues that the time and places of their birth were integral to their success. It was the good luck of Jobs, Schmidt and Gates to come of age just as the biggest technological revolution of the century was starting.
10,000 hours
You’ve probably already heard of Gladwell’s 10,000-hour rule. The most enduring insight from Outliers takes the idea of “practice makes perfect” to the next level. The argument goes that to reach “expert” level mastery of a particular skill, you need to spend a huge amount of time practising it. Citing Swedish psychologist Anders Ericcson’s study of violinists, Gladwell concludes that the time required to master a skill is 10,000 hours.
So far, so meritocratic, you might be thinking. But might luck have an important role to play here too?
Bill Gates is often held up as the ultimate self-made entrepreneur – a college dropout who built a software empire from a garage and became the world’s richest man. However, as Gates himself acknowledges, he had several lucky breaks on the way. He was born to parents who were determined for him to be successful. He grew up in a wealthy Seattle neighbourhood and attended a private school with its own computer terminal – a real rarity in the 1960s. Gates seized this opportunity to the point of obsession. He hogged the machine and racked up thousands of hours of programming experience. All this before many of his generation even knew what a computer was.
Gladwell writes:
We look at the young Bill Gates and marvel that our world allowed that thirteen-year-old to become a fabulously successful entrepreneur. But that’s the wrong lesson. Our world only allowed one thirteen-year-old unlimited access to a time-sharing terminal in 1968. If a million teenagers had been given the same opportunity, how many more Microsofts would we have today?
The backstory to The Beatles’s big break is surprisingly similar. They didn’t become the biggest band in the world through talent alone. Before their meteoric rise, they honed their craft in Hamburg, playing eight-hour sets night after (hard day’s) night in the city’s clubs. Gladwell estimates that, by the time they signed to a record label, The Beatles had already performed live 1,200 times.
How did they get this crucial head start? Pure chance. A Hamburg nightclub owner visited London in the early 1960s looking for bands and he happened to bump into someone from Liverpool who recommended them. That’s it. Like Bill Gates and his computer terminal, the Fab Four benefited from a one-in-a-million stroke of good fortune and seized it for all it was worth.
Making our own luck
Outliers urges us to zoom out beyond the myth of the self-made genius to recognise the hidden factors that often underpin success.
Gladwell writes:
Biologists often talk about the 'ecology' of an organism: the tallest oak in the forest is the tallest not just because it grew from the hardiest acorn; it is the tallest also because no other trees blocked its sunlight, the soil around it was deep and rich, no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling, and no lumberjack cut it down before it matured. We all know that successful people come from hardy seeds. But do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them, the soil in which they put down the roots, and the rabbits and lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid?
As much as we love stories of self-made millionaires, world-changing geniuses and overnight sensations, we limit our ability to foster success if we ignore the critical role of luck. Talent and hard work matter. But so does the right timing, environment and circumstances.
After all, we can’t change when we are born or manufacture chance encounters that might lead to the next Beatlemania. But we can help shape the systems that create opportunities – like ensuring young people’s access to sport isn’t determined by their birth month, and working towards all children having access to the latest technologies at school.
Ultimately, the uplifting moral of Outliers is that we can make ourselves lucky – as long as we focus on the forest, not just the trees.
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