Right Place Right Time

We all have this stereotype of people who achieved extreme greatness or acquired extreme wealth through their sheer perseverance, genius, talent and determination. However, the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell strips down this stereotype and attributes success to external circumstances as much as personal effort. Your birth date, birthplace, your race and your local environment provides as much impact to your success as how much effort you put in to your career or work.

The book gives several examples to illustrate these. Canadian league hockey players, and Bill Gates among others were given as examples to illustrate how being born in a certain month or year determines one's success.

Canadian league hockey players for instance are mostly born on Jan to March. This is because given a certain age requirement to play; those born earlier in the year have several months’ edge over others who were born later in the same year.

Look at these birthdates of people who built the foundations of the information age as we now know it: Bill Gates – 1o/28/1955, Paul Allen – 1/21/1953, Steve Ballmer – 3/24/1956, Steve Jobs – 2/24/1955, Eric Schmidt – 4/27/1955.

For a young would-be lawyer, being born in the early 1930s was a magic time, just as being born in 1955 was for a software programmer, or being born in 1835 was for an entrepreneur.

As a side note, interestingly, Gladwell doesn't put much credit to genius though you do need to be intelligent enough to be successful. He compares IQ to having a certain height to play professional basketball. Once you are over a height threshold: 6’1”-6’3”, you have a good chance of being able to play professional basketball, but your edge in height over other pro players will only give you little marginal success. So in the real world, once you have a certain IQ: >100, you are assured that you have a good chance of being successful in your chosen field, but any further increase in IQ will not give you much of an edge over others.

The flipside to all of this is that given that one is at the right time and at the right place, (though he wouldn’t know it yet until later), one has to have put in thousands of hours in a certain skill or craft to become extremely successful: 10,000 hours to be more specific according to Gladwell.

More important than how the number 10,000 came up, is that people who logged these long hours on a certain skill or task before they became famous or rich didn’t know what lay ahead of them. I’m sure Bill Gates didn’t know he was going to be the richest man in the world when he was still writing code in high school.

Bill Gates, before he dropped out of Harvard and later found Microsoft, already had access to computers when he was still a teenager –which was very uncommon during his time. With this rare access, he then logged thousands of hours programming and writing code.

These long hours were logged out of one's own interest, and encouragement from others. These people then just happen to be at the right time and place when opportunity came.

“It’s not that those guys were smarter… than anyone else. It’s that they had a skill they had been working on for years that was suddenly very valuable.”

However random and fickle fortune may now seem to be, the takeaway here is not just to sit and wait but to heavily invest one's time in something that interests him and constantly seek opportunities in the ever-changing environment where one can apply and leverage that skill.