Malcolm Gladwell: What Makes You Successfull?

Gladwell recently wrote a book called Outliers and gave this speech to the London Business Forum right before the release...

He doesnt talk about the specific content of the book, so as not to repeat himself, but stayed within the theme of success and how people achieve it. Gladwell looks at a number of cases including the beatles, bill gates, himself, etc...and according to him, what at first glance looks like raw genius, is actually the result of factors that can be identified and, in theory, emulated.

And while some of his learning seem pretty obvious, he really brings it home with his uncanny ability to speak and write. Gladwell revealed that the amount of time required to become great at anything is the same in most industries. “It seems to be impossible to achieve any kind of true expertise unless you have practiced for 10,000hours.”

The “10,000 hours rule” is true of chess grandmasters, classical musicians and doctors. “It is almost impossible to find an exception,” Gladwell said. Even the Beatles, he points out did not burst onto the scene fully formed in 1964, as people assume. Beginning the story with their famous US tour “leaves out such an extraordinary amount of history. In fact, it leaves out the critical period of development of the Beatles, which was when they want to Hamburg.”

Lennon and McCartney were only teenagers when they got the Beatles a regular gig as the house band for a strip club in Hamburg. They played together for eight hours a day, seven days a week, for months at a time. In such circumstances, Gladwell said, “you are forced to improvise, you are forced to write your own music, you are forced to master a staggering array of styles, and forms, and conventions, and genres. You are forced to learn how to play as a band.”

“Hamburg was the making of the Beatles, said biographer Philip Norman. But what he actually meant was that it gave them a chance get in their 10,000 hours of practice before their peers. By 1964, they’d played together around 1,200 times – more often than most of today’s bands would stick together during their whole careers".

“When we think about the Beatles, we almost never get past this naive notion that the band’s success was all about the extraordinary once-in a lifetime talent of Lennon and McCartney,” Gladwell pointed out. “Wrong. It is about people with extraordinary talent who happened to be in a situation that allowed them to put in an extraordinary amount of training and effort.”

So, the number-one lesson provided by these examples is that exceptional performance is within reach of most people, provided they’re willing to put in enough – typically 10,000 hours – of effort. The second lesson, Gladwell continued, is that success tends to follow serious difficulty. Most people try to follow a “capitalisation strategy,” in their careers, he said, where success builds on success. So, for example, “from Eton to Oxford, and from Oxford to a job in the City with Goldman Sachs”. But actually there is evidence to suggest that exceptional performers more often follow a “compensation strategy”, where success builds on failure.

“The correlation between disabilities and entrepreneurship,” Gladwell pointed out, is remarkable. “Julie Logan at the London Business School [recently] did a survey of American Entrepreneurs and found that a third of them, at some point in their life, had been diagnosed with a serious learning disability.” Admittedly, he added, many children respond to learning difficulties by turning to crime. However, those who stay straight, typically manage to develop compensatory skills. “You become a great talker, you become a great problem-solver, you build a network,” Gladwell suggested. “Eighty per cent of dyslexic entrepreneurs were sports captains at school.” And non-academic skills such as leadership can obviously become very useful later on, in the business world.

Success also requires failure, gladwell continued. As psychologist David Galenson points out, creatives fall into two main camps: “conceptual innovators”, such as Picasso, who execute bold, revolutionary ideas; and “experimental innovators”, like Cezanne, who work more slowly, by trial and error. The former is much rarer, and Gladwell argued that the latter is now the prevalent style of innovation, especially in organisations. “Modern problems are so complex that they demand, I think, a much more cautious style,” he said, “a style that involves a great deal of trial and error and experimentation.”

He closes by hammering home the lessons about how important it is to have real training and practice, by calling out the financial industry. “This is a really critical notion that I feel has been lost, not just in the music industry but in many industries.” he said. After all, he pointed out, if inexperienced traders had been given greater supervision by certain investment banks and had trained longer than a few years, before being allowed to play with other people’s money, we may not have experienced the biggest credit crunch in history.