Outliers

 

An outlier is an outstanding person. He does not belong to the herd because of certain qualitative characteristics like exceptional intellect or skill in a particular domain. Albert Einstein was an outlier, for example. Leonardo da Vinci, another example. Carl Sagan, yet another.

Outliers stand out of the herd like a tall oak in a forest. Is it some genetic factor that shapes the outlier? Is his exceptional quality inborn? Well, not entirely. The tallest oak has its origin in a quality acorn, no doubt. But there are many other factors that contributed towards its healthy growth like availability of sunlight (no other trees blocked it), deep and rich soil, and not being espied by a lumberjack.

Bill Gates wouldn’t have reached where he did unless his parents provided the conducive environment for his growth and development. When they realised that young Bill was getting bored of his school, they took him out and sent him to Lakeside, a private school that catered to the elite families of the place. A year after Bill joined it, the school started a computer club. It was the year 1968. Most colleges, let alone schools, didn’t have computer clubs in those days. Bill Gates was fortunate. He got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968.

Managing a computer club was a tremendous economic challenge in those days. Bill’s school succumbed before the challenge in spite of the efforts by the rich parents to sustain the computer club. Bill was lucky to have a friend in his elite school whose father was one of the founders of Computer Center Corporation (C-Cubed) at the University of Washington. After the school, Bill attended C-Cubed and spent his evenings with computers.

C-Cubed went bankrupt eventually. Bill and his friends succeeded soon enough to latch themselves onto an outfit called ISI (Information Sciences Inc.) which agreed to let them have free computer time in exchange for working on a piece of software that could be used to automate company payrolls. Bill and his friends spent 1575 hours on the ISI mainframe in seven months’ time. The computer became Bill’s passion and the sure steppingstone to his success.

But was it just luck that led Bill Gates to his success? He was lucky to be born in a wealthy family that could afford him an elite school. He was lucky to get a friend whose father was a founder of C-Cubed. He was lucky to be taken on by ISI.

It wasn’t all luck, however. The boy worked for whatever he got. He went out of the normal ways to get his opportunities. 1575 hours in seven months translates into 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. He did that much work apart from his regular schoolwork.

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the celebrated book titled Outliers, propounds what he calls ‘the 10,000-hour rule”. If you want to be a maestro in any field, you need to put in about 10,000 hours of hard work before you emerge a winner. Bill Gates did that. The Beatles did that. Every successful person or endeavour put in about 10,000 hours of preparatory labour before they became the stars in their respective domains.

Success requires both: the environment and your hard work. Hard work is your choice. Your environment is a gift, your luck. As Thomas Gray sang long ago, a lot of flowers are born in the desert where their beauty and fragrance are lost to the desolate air. That is their fate.

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