Dissecting Success
Ask any 10 people to define what it means to be “successful” and you will have 10 different answers. Success is a truly subjective experience and accomplishment, but one thing is definite: it is those who are extremely hard-working are the ones that rise to the top. But, what if told you that ‘hard work’ only makes up for less than 60% of someone’s success? Our notion that it is the best and the brightest who effortlessly rise to the top is much too simplistic, and oftentimes wrong.
I was first introduced to the idea that success is an amalgamation of controllable and uncontrollable factors in Malcolm Gladwell’s ‘Outliers.’ Author of ‘The Tipping Point’ and ‘Blink,’ he puts into perspective the reasons some people are exceptionally successful in their fields. Furthermore, he also explores the reason behind failure and the possible lessons gained from them. In this article, I will dissect success and tell you the reasons why successful people become successful.
Exceptionally Successful People Don’t Rise from Nothing and Success is Not Always Based on Individual Merit.
People become successful based on a set of circumstances that happened to be in their favor, at the right time. It may be ‘hidden advantages and extraordinary opportunities and cultural legacies that allow them to learn and work hard to make sense of the world in ways others cannot.’ Gladwell used age as an example, with empirical evidence, that physical maturity has an enormous difference on the ability of two individuals, ceteris paribus. Being born at the end of the year may actually affect your performance in sports (as he argues in his book), as compared to your January-born counterpart.
Success is a Result of Cumulative Advantage.
Circumstantial differences play a huge role in your success determination. The sociologist Robert Merton famously called this phenomenon the “Matthew Effect.” It is those who are successful, in other words, who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. It’s the rich who get the biggest tax breaks. It’s the best students who get the best teaching and most attention. And it’s the biggest nine- and ten-year-olds who get the most coaching and practice. Success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage.” The professional hockey player starts out a little bit better than his counterparts; that little difference leads to an opportunity that makes that difference a bit bigger, and that edge, in turn, leads to another opportunity, which makes the initially small difference bigger still — and on and on until the hockey player is a genuine outlier. But he didn’t start out an outlier. He started out just a little bit better.
The System of Talent Identification is Flawed
In most modern societies, early-education gifted programs aim to sieve out the brighter ones from a young age, thinking that this is the best way of ensuring no talent slips through the cracks. However, from Lesson 1, students born later in the year might not stand a chance when put in the same class as those born in the same year, but earlier. Canadians who play hockey well are usually born in the months of January to March, as empirically shown in his book. The explanation, from Gladwell, is that in Canada, the cut-off for enrollment into age-class hockey is January 1. In preadolescence, month gaps in age present a great difference in physical maturity. Back to the point, with the current system in place, those who possess innate talent, but are born at the end of the year may not stand out in the talent identification process because of the lack of development opportunities their ‘older’ peers have during those gap months. Because of the way we perceive success, which is so individualized, we ‘miss opportunities to lift others onto the top rung’.
Chinese Children Test Better in Math Because of Their Language Structure and Rice-Agriculture Past
Chinese numbers are all single syllabic and logically constructed. As a result, Chinese-speaking toddlers can easily count to 100 while English-speaking toddlers can only count to the twenties. Math is also a subject that requires persistence, and persistence is a highly-valued Chinese trait, taught by Confucianism as evidenced by folklore and poems throughout its long and illustrious history. Gladwell postures that the importance of persistence was a construct of rice-agriculture, which requires heavy management and rewards the harder-working farmer. These two features of Chinese culture, emphasis on persistence and a simple and logical language for numbers, give Chinese children a distinct advantage when it comes to mathematics.
There Is an Intelligence Threshold, and A Magic Number.
You don’t need to be the smartest, you just need to practice for 10,000 hours. Those who succeed are all smart enough, but not necessarily geniuses. At some IQ mark, increased genius has a diminishing return. Rather, the saying of ‘practice for 10,000 hours’ has a real impact, and is what differentiates the winners. This is true in musical “geniuses,” computer “geniuses” or even science “geniuses.” 10,000 hours is an enormous amount of time, and it is simply not possible to do it all by yourself. These people are fortunate enough to be in a set of circumstances which allow them to do what they do best. Often, they are also enrolled into some sort of program that provides them with the kind of training they require.
In summation, our time and place of birth; cultures in which we live in; the amount of time spent working, all affect the final outcome. It is all but a set of circumstances that we happen to exist in, that will greatly impact our chance to succeed — to be an outlier.
