Outliers and the 10,000 Hours

I have not blogged about “Inside Steve’s Brain” book since I finished reading it last year. “Flip” was next in line but I skipped for a while after watching Good Morning America promoting Malcom Gladwell’s book “Outliers”. I must admit that I didn’t continue reading his other book “Tipping Point” not because it didn’t interest me but I just couldn’t really squeeze my time to continue reading it the year it was handed to me. I finished reading the book “Outliers” last month. Most of the time I would read it when I could hardly sleep.

The book explains why some people succeed far more than others. Some countries are used to illustrate some situational opportunities. Yes, Philippines is also mentioned in the “The Ethnic Theory of Plane Crashes”. Some may find the basis unfair. For someone like me who would like to hear more about how a person or a group started and succeeded, you will really want to even draw a timeline, to share, and of course, to blog about it.

Don’t get me wrong but upon reading “Outliers”, you might want to blame your parents, your neighbors, your teachers, the government, or where you live in. You might want to recall as to when was the last time you talked to a numerologist. While reading the first chapters, I remembered this guy (a Filipino scientologist like Tom Cruise, Madonna and John Travolta) I met and have worked with in Los Angeles, California 8 years ago. He asked my and my brothers’ birthdates and dropped some startling comments. He said that after me, the next who will economically succeed is my youngest brother Jay-ar. Eight years ago, Jay was a graduating student in college. Today, he’s making well in his promising business. I am also glad he’s the one who bought my 2nd Intel-powered MacBook Pro. I also have a brother who is a pastor in VCF Alabang and another brother who takes up his nth course in college…now closely racing to finish Nursing somewhere in Northern Philippines.

In 1992, a friend I haven’t seen for a long time, Don Marasigan (younger brother of Raimund Marasigan) played and would let me hear a pre-recorded material of Eraserheads that was rejected by the station after 99.5RT because they sounded crap. On March 7, 2009, Eraserheads made another history by performing live before 100,000 people. The audience didn’t care how they tuned. Filipinos love their music. Many bands look up to them.

The author uses numbers as a reference of opportunity period. In fact, in the early chapters of the book he presented the birthdates of those who got more opportunities…those who were busy 10,000 hours in their lives.

In the book I learned that it is not about being smart or talented to succeed. It is about the opportunities. I don’t personally believe in “suwerte” or luck. I never say good luck to my business partners and co-workers whenever they go for a project or account pitch. But it seems to me that being an outlier is a fusion of 10,000 hours and luck, I mean opportunities.

Do you think there would be Microsoft if Bill Gates lived in Manila? Will you agree that the young and arrogant Steve Jobs would not survive in the Philippine corporate culture with his style of terminating his employees who couldn’t answer his questions while meeting him in the hallway or elevator?

An outlier is someone who has been given opportunities and has the strength and presence of mind to grab them.

To those who are interested, I just want to share some of the points I highlighted that enthralled me and gave me a reason why I must shoot the paperplane in the blogosphere about this best selling book.

1. In Canada, as the most hockey-crazed country on earth, if you were born in the first quarter of the year, you are most likely to be selected for the traveling “rep” squad – the all-star hockey teams.

2. In Czech Republic soccer team, those born in the last half of the year have all been discouraged. In Czech junior hockey team, half of the team was born in the first quarter of the year they were born. In grade and high schools, those born from January to April are put in one class.

3. 10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything. 10,000 hours does not only include the enormous amount of time to practice. If you’re already an adult, it is impossible to reach this number. But other factors like having parents who encourage and support you will add to that rule. You can’t be poor. You can’t meet both ends of working to help or support others while you practice as there will be no enough time left in a day.

4. The Beatles, when they were still a struggling high school rock band in Liverpool, was given a break when they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany where rock and roll music had no place, the audiences were unappreciative, the clubs were no good acoustics, and got paid not well. They played 172 hours on stage from their three trips that eventually made them very good and sounded like no other.

5. Bill Gates happened to have well-off parents who lived in Lakeside, Washington wherein 1968 had an access to time-sharing terminal funded by the parents. He was given an opportunity to have worked to check the code at C-Cubed and to have worked with the payroll software at ISI on his teen years. In these years, Gates was able to close a project at US$30,000.00. Gates had a friend who discovered that University of Washington would let them steal so much of computer time. His friend Paul Allen is also a co-founder of Microsoft.

6. Steve Jobs at young age lived in the epicenter of Silicon Valley with neighbors filled with engineers from Hewlett-Packard. He had been given opportunities from having been involved in the assembly line to build computers to designing his own.

7. What the hockey players, Bill Joy (co-founder of Sun Microsystems), the Beatles, and Bill Gates truly distinguished them is not their extraordinary talent but their extraordinary opportunities.

8. All the outliers mentioned above were beneficiaries of unusual opportunity.

9. The greatest transformation in the American economy happened in 1860s and 1870. It was shaped by those visionaries who were born in the 1830s – John Rockefeller, Andrew Carnegie, J. P. Morgan, etc.

10. The most important date in the history of the PC revolution was January 1975. Twenty years ago Microsoft’s Bill Gates (1955), Paul Allen (1953), and Steve Ballmer (1956) were born. It was also in 1955 that Apple co-founder and CEO Steve Jobs and Google CEO Eric Schmidt were born. Not discounting Bill Joy (1954) who founded Sun Microsystem.

11. People who have higher IQs don’t mean they will all more likely to succeed.

12. The wealthier children that have parents would intensively play sports with their children during free time and summer. The thing that is almost entirely absent from the lives of the poor children. The middle-class parents talk things through with their children, reasoning with them. They expect their children to talk back and respectfully question them.

13. Poorer children behave and more creative in making use of their own time. While middle-class children are more exposed to set of experiences and are cultivated by interacting comfortably with adults – they learn a sense of “entitlement”.

14. The book also tells about why Asians are better in Math.

Now I can answer friend who once asked why a creative and very hardworking person like him still falls short of another friend who is easy going and yet gets much prosperous. ☺