What is Success?

​I had the opportunity to see Malcolm Gladwell speak at the 2009 ISTE conference in Washington D.C.  I enjoyed his keynote and bought his book Outliers while at the conference, but it ended up on a bookshelf and life happened.  I finally got to reading it this summer and thought it was an insightful well-written book.  Gladwell takes a look at everything from successful hockey players, the Beatles and Bill Gates to rice growers in China and airline pilots in Korea to provide evidence for his understanding of what it takes to be successful.  Although he doesn’t deny that things like hard work and genius in a field are important, he explains that even more important are when and where you are born, the family you are born into and opportunities that get presented to you.  The stories of success in this book are wonderfully crafted and keep you engaged as you see the small differences that made one person successful and another not so much.  One important concept that gets pulled from this book is the idea of needing to spend 10,000 hours doing something to be a master at it.  Just carving out that amount of time in one’s life is tricky, so having a supportive parent and the means to hone a craft is critical.  The opportunities that one is presented come often from being at the right place at the right time.  For instance, Bill Gates went to one of the few high schools that had a main frame computer at the time, so he could spend hours experimenting with it.  Before the Beatles got big, they had a long-time gig in Hamburg that was 6 hours a night, 7 days a week where they were required to play a wide range of musical styles and through this became master musicians as well as developed their own unique sound from the many they learned to play.  Boxing is a perfect example of Gladwell’s theories.  You can have all the talent in the world, but if you don’t have the right promoter, you can forget about being successful in the sport.  My biggest take away from this book is that the best way to help people be successful is to expand their opportunities to find what they are passionate about and carve out the time and opportunities for people to develop a wide range of skills that will allow them to master their passions.

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