Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell
The world is full of stories of lone geniuses and self-made successes. However, such stories are usually over-simplified and paint a misleading picture of how success is actually attained in practice.
Being talented does not guarantee success all by itself. All talents need nurturing and all skills need training. Among the highest performers in nearly any field, there is a very strong correlation between their skill level and the hours they have put into their craft. There are very few actual cases of prodigies who succeeded with little effort or ultra-gritty people who work hard without accomplishing anything. The rough baseline for attaining proficiency in a complex skill is approximately 10,000 hours.
Putting in 10,000 hours into any skill requires a strong work ethic. However, if work is meaningful or is made to feel meaningful, then a good work ethic tends to arise naturally in a budding high-performer without having to be forced. The key ingredients for meaningful work are a high level of autonomy, a high level of complexity, and a good correlation between effort and reward.
If success requires both time and a good work ethic, then having a constructive upbringing is critical. Wealthy parents actively cultivate and nurture their children, leaving them ready to take on the world and become wealthy themselves. On the flip side, less wealthy parents often adopt a less-active style of parenting, leading to missed personal growth and eventually to missed opportunities.
In a virtuous cycle, successes lead to more opportunities which lead to more learning which lead to more successes. It is critical to start the virtuous cycle early and to continue feeding it. For example, elite athletes have birth dates overwhelmingly concentrated in the early months of the year. This isn’t because month-size age gaps are meaningful among adults, but rather because older children are perceived as more talented than their peers during childhood, setting off a virtuous cycle of more practice and more nurturing.
The nature of people’s upbringing is heavily shaped by their culture and what values the culture emphasizes. Cultures leave legacies that survive well beyond the circumstances that caused the cultures to come into being in the first place. For example, East Asia’s historically dominant lifestyle was rice farming in family-based units; rice farming is extremely time-consuming, very technical, and requires lots of wisdom and expertise in order to succeed. Many generations later, East Asians today remain well known for their work ethic, their collectivist cultural bent, and deference to authority and expertise; these cultural traits help them make up a disproportionate share of the world’s top academic achievers. In another example, European Jews have historically been excluded from traditional land ownership and employment due to racist laws; they survived by heading to cities and becoming self-employed merchants and businessmen. Today, Jews make up a disproportionate share of the world’s great entrepreneurs and lawyers, largely thanks to cultural legacies of grit and opportunism.
Lastly, it is important to be at the right place at the right time, ready to seize once-in-a-lifetime opportunities as they arise. The great 19th Century American industrialists were overwhelmingly born in the 1830s, hitting their prime working years just as Reconstruction created a boom in economic demand. The great pioneers of the personal computing revolution were overwhelmingly born into geeky families in the mid 1950s, coming of age just as the era of giant mainframe computers was coming to an end. The great American lawyers of the 20th Century were overwhelmingly born into entrepreneurial Jewish families in the 1930s, coming of age just as the era of Big Law was beginning. In each case, these outliers had already accumulated the necessary 10,000 hours of expertise thanks to their constructive upbringings. When the opportunities finally arose, they were ready to seize them.
Success requires lots of time, lots of nurturing, a culture that emphasizes hard work, access to opportunity, and a substantial amount of dumb luck. The people who have all of these conditions are well-positioned for spectacular successes in life.