What Luck, IQ and Practice Have to Do With Success
A personal opinion and summary on Outliers: The Story of Success
The meaning of success varies according to each person’s beliefs. Neither money, nor other material or in-material things can fully determine whether someone is successful. I would even say that YOU are the only person who can consider yourself successful. Please take that into account even after reading this article, which I sincerely hope you enjoy ;)
The great advantage
In any elite group of hockey, almost half of the players will have been born between January and March, only 10% between October and December and the rest will have been born throughout the rest of the year. In other words, the majority of the best hockey players (in Canada) were born earlier in the year. What does this tell us about success?
According to Malcolm, this has nothing to do with astrology or magic. It’s simple logic. In Canada, the cutoff for age-class hockey is on January. Therefore, a boy who turns 10 in the early days of the year, could have a significant advantage over his peers who could several months younger.
The reason why this factor especially matters in sports like hockey is because of the physical development that a boy could have even only with just a few months of advantage. If you think about teenagers, being some months older than others could mean being some centimeters taller and also having extra strength.
On the other hand, we all know that being strong or tall doesn’t only depend on our birthdate. Other factors like genetics, diet and exercise definitely play an important role. And being a great sports player doesn’t entirely depend on your birthdate. So, even though the data is real, being born in January 1st won’t necessarily make you the best hockey player in the world.
But wait. What about special opportunities? Those “train tickets” that can take you to “Successland”, that are quickly sold out and are only available during a short period.
Well, I won’t say much about this except that they probably do exist. Other than that, I’ll let the data speak for itself:
Is it possible that these people were born in the perfect moment in the perfect place? I’m probably not the best person to explain this, so I’ll let you follow your curiosity and find that out in the book if you wish.
Become an expert in anything
Despite the interesting facts mentioned above, there’s clearly another part of the story left to tell, and I’m sure you already knew this. It would be completely unfair and false to say that success is only a matter of birthdates. It’s most likely that many times in your life you’ve heard something that relates more to:
“Achievement is talent plus preparation”
Simple, but true. Continuing with the hockey example, it’s worth mentioning that being selected as one of the best players in January allowed kids to become even better. How?
The selected group has the opportunity to be constantly practicing. More hours than the kids who weren’t selected. Besides, they were in a more competitive environment, having the chance to compete with other best players.
On another example, Michael Howe explains that the Mozart’s early works aren’t outstanding. Sounds like a challenge? Well, music critic Harold Schonberg goes even further by saying that Mozart actually “developed late”, since he didn’t produce his greatest work until he had been composing for more than 20 years. Innate talent and practice made him an outlier.
In fact, neurologist Daniel Levitin suggests that 10 thousand hours of practice are what anyone needs to become a world-class expert in anything.
Now let’s look at another case of success: The Beatles. They were invited to play in Hamburg because of a club owner called Bruno went to London to look for bands and he happened to meet an entrepreneur from Liverpool in Soho who was down in London by pure chance! The connection was established and the Beatles gained the opportunity not only to play at Bruno’s club but many others, in a modality called nonstop striptease. Meaning that they would play hour after hour to catch the passing traffic. The Beatles ended up traveling 5 times between 1960 and 1962 and by 1964 the had already performed 1200 times!
What about Bill Gates? One of the richest men in the world. As a child, his parents took him out of public school (because he was easily bored) and sent him to Lakeside, which was an elite private school. Through Gate’s second year at Lakeside, the school started a computer club (which wasn’t very common in 1968), nor was it common to learn programming by what was called an ASR-33 Teletype. This was basically a way more advanced system compared to the computer-card-system, which gave Bill Gates the opportunity to do real-programming as an eighth-grader! After some more amazing chances, Bill and his friends ended up spending 1,575 hours of computer time in seven months. It was his obsession, so by the time he dropped out of Harvard, he had already been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years, which was way past 10,000 hours.
IQ isn’t everything
What a reliving title, isn’t it? Summarizing Malcolm Gladwell’s ideas, there are two main problems with geniuses (if we relate them with success). One is that IQ does matter, but up to some point. If you have about 120 points of IQ, 10, 20 or more points won’t really make that big of a difference.
Of course, you would be smarter and do better at IQ tests, but if we’re talking about real-world success, there are other abilities that you may want to acquire before you commit yourself to getting a higher IQ score. Skills such as communication, creativity, collaboration and critical thinking will sometimes do more.
Think about it this way: imagine you have 140 points of IQ (you’re above average). But that doesn’t mean there are probably a thousand more people with that same ability. The point here is: what makes you different from other smart people? This is the point where I would personally encourage you to be you. Be as unique as possible! For thousands of people can have the same potential and maybe even the same opportunities, sometimes only a few are willing to do their best to achieve their highest and craziest dreams!
Takeaways
- Success depends on many different factors
- Opportunities sometimes appear because of luck, or coincidence
- It’s up to each person to take advantage of the opportunities given to them
- Practice makes master
- IQ won’t matter a lot if you don’t develop other skills
Outliers: The Story of Success
Malcolm Gladwell has written five New York Times bestsellers and has been included in the TIME 100 Most Influential People list.
This text only contains some of the points that I considered most mind-blowing or important to know about the story of success. If you would like to know more about the trouble with geniuses, the importance of hard work, why Asian students do well on math contests and much more, I highly recommend that you get the book.
Hey! I’m Sofi, a 16-year-old girl who’s extremely passionate about biotech, human longevity, and innovation itself 🦄. I’m learning a lot about exponential technologies to start a company that impacts the world positively 🚀. I love writing articles about scientific innovations to show you the amazing future that awaits us!
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