Malcolm Gladwell - Why 98% Aren't Successful

[Music] there is something profoundly wrong with the way we make sense of success what is the question we always ask about successful we want to know what they're like what kind of personalities they have or how intelligent they are or what kind of lifestyles they have or what special talents they might have been born with and we assume that it is those personal qualities that explain how an individual reaches the top in the autobiographies published every year by the billionaire entrepreneur rock star celebrity the storyline is always the same our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to greatness I want to convince you that these kinds of personal explanations of success don't work people don't rise from nothing we do owe something to parentage and patronage the people who stand before kings may look like they did it all by themselves but in fact they are invariably the beneficiaries of hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard and make sense of the world in a way others cannot it makes a difference where and when we grew up the culture we belong to and the legacies passed down by our forebears shape the patterns of our achievement in ways we cannot begin to imagine it's not enough to ask what successful people are like in other words it is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn't the tallest oak in the forest is not just the tallest because it grew from the hardiest acorn it is also the tallest because no other tree's blocked its sunlight because the soil around it was deep and rich because no rabbit chewed through its bark as a sapling and because no lumberjack cut it down before it matured we all know that successful people come from Hardy seeds but do we know enough about the sunlight that warmed them the soil in which they put down their roots and their rabbits and Lumberjacks they were lucky enough to avoid anytime you look at an elite group of hockey players the very best of the best you can reliably assume that 40% of the players will be born between January March 30% between April and June 20% between July and September and 10% between October and December 17 out of the 25 players on the team were born in January February March or April the explanation for this is quite simple it has nothing to do with astrology or anything magical about the first three months of the year it's simply that in Canada the eligibility cutoff for age class hockey is January 1st a boy who turns 10 on January 2nd then could be playing alongside someone who doesn't turn 10 until the end of the year and at that age in pre-adolescence a 12 month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity what happens when a player gets chosen for a rep squad he gets better coaching his teammates are better and he plays 50 or 75 games a season instead of 20 games a season like those left behind in a house league and he practices twice or even three times more than they would have otherwise in the beginning his advantage wasn't so much that he was inherently better but only that he was a little older but by the age of 13 or 14 with the benefit of better coaching and all that extra practice under his belt he really is better so he's the one more likely to make it to Major Junior a and from there under the big leagues the small initial advantage that the child born in the early part of the year has over the child born at the end of the year persists it locks children into patterns of achievement and under achievement encouragement and discouragement that stretch on for years and years do you see the consequences of the way we have chosen to think about success we overlook just how large a role we all play and by we I mean society in determining who makes it and who doesn't we could easily take control of the machinery of achievement in other words and not just in sports but as we will see in other more consequential areas as well but we don't and why because we cling to the idea that success is a simple function of individual merit and that the world in which we all grow up and the rules we choose to write as a society don't matter at all the question is this is there such a thing as innate talent the obvious answer is yes not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level only some do the innately talented ones achievement is talent plus preparation the problem with this view though is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play the emerging picture from such studies is that 10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert in anything in study after study of composers basketball players fiction writers ice skaters concert pianists chess players master criminals on what-have-you this number comes up again and again 10,000 hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day or 20 hours a week of practice over ten years no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time it seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastering 10,000 hours is the magic number of greatness the other interesting thing about that 10,000 hours number of course is that 10,000 hours is an enormous amount of time it's all but impossible to reach that number by the time your young adult all by yourself you have to have parents who encourage and support you you can't be poor because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet there won't be enough time left over in the day to practice in fact most people can only really reach that number if they get into some kind of special program or they get some kind of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in those hours is the 10,000 hour rule a general rule of success let's test the idea with two examples and for the sake of simplicity let's make them as familiar as possible The Beatles one of the most famous rock bands ever and Bill Gates one of the world's richest men in 1960 while they were still a struggling high school rock band The Beatles were invited to play in Hamburg Germany it was a huge non-stop show hour after hour here is John Lennon in an interview after the Beatles disbanded talking about the band's performances at a Hamburg strip club called the Indra we got better and got more confidence we couldn't help it with all the experience playing all night long it was handy than being foreign we did try even harder put our heart and soul into it to get ourselves over in Liverpool we'd only ever done one-hour sessions we just used to do our best numbers the same ones that everyone in Hamburg we'd to play for eight hours so we really had to find a new way of playing by the time they had their first burst of success in 1964 in fact they had performed live an estimated 1200 times do you know how extraordinary that is most bands today don't perform 1200 times in their entire careers the Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set beetles apart let's now turn to the history of Bill Gates brilliant young math whiz discovers computer programming drops out of Harvard starts a little computer company with his friends called Microsoft now let's dig a little bit deeper gates his father was a wealthy lawyer in Seattle and his mother was the daughter of a well-to-do banker so his parents took him out of public school at the beginning of seventh grade sent him to lakeside a private school that catered to Seattle's elite families midway through gates his second year at Lakeside the school started a computer Club he was kind of an amazing thing it was an amazing thing of course because this was 1968 most colleges didn't have computer clubs in the 1960s Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968 from that moment forward Gates lived in the computer room he and a number of others began to teach themselves how to use this strange new device in one 7 month period in 1971 Gates and his cohorts ran up 15 hundred and 75 hours of computer time on the ISI mainframe which averages out to eight hours a day seven days a week it was my obsession Gates says of his early high school years there are very clearly patterns here and what's striking is how little we seem to want to acknowledge them we pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit but there's nothing in any of the histories you've looked at so far to suggest things are that simple these are stories instead about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it their success was not just of their own making it was a product of the world in which they grew up [Music]

Channel: Maximum Success

Views: 83,861

Rating: 4.7383461 out of 5

Keywords: Malcolm Gladwell, truth about success, sad truth about success, why 98% aren't successful, Malcolm Gladwell - Why 98% Aren't Successful, Aren't Successful

Id: ozBAe60bJDY

Length: 10min 31sec (631 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 16 2019