• by Dave Morgan , Featured Contributor, January 15, 2009

Like many of you, I took some time over the holidays to read a book or two while unwinding and enjoying my leisure. For me, one of those books was Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers." I am a big fan of Gladwell's, having read and liked his two earlier books and having met him a couple of times on the conference circuit. I think that he is an extraordinary storyteller and has a unique ability to systematically explain complex concepts in plain language.

Since I had already had several friends tell me about the book, I generally knew its basic premise before reading it: research demonstrates that many successful people owe their unique success more to being in the right place at the right time than to their talent.

Thus, I started reading the book, expecting to learn that being lucky was more important to success than being talented or smart or ambitious or hard-working. Happily, once I'd read the book, I realized that I was wrong.

Yes. It is true that the core thrust of the book is that in a number of fields, from hockey to computer science to law, being born at the right time to the right parents in the right neighborhoods was almost a "requirement" to ultimate success in the field.

For example, professional hockey players in Canada are predominantly born in the first few months of the year, almost never in the last few months. Why? Because the youth leagues use strict calendar year-based age grouping and when the boys are young, a few months' difference can make an enormous difference in physical maturity. Thus, eight year-olds born in January are able to outskate (and outfight, I suspect) those born in October. It then follows that they have more success while young, get more coaching attention, play on the "select" teams that get to travel and play better teams and, most importantly according to Gladwell, also get much more practice time.

It turns out it's the practice time that really makes the difference. Gladwell argues that virtually every endeavor, from practicing law to computer programming to playing hockey, requires the same amount of dedicated and focused practice time to perfect one's skills -- 10,000 hours. Yes, it appears that one cannot be successful without 10,000 hours of dedicated practice to a particular craft, and those that ultimately were the most successful in the areas that he studied -- from Bill Gates and Bill Joy to Joseph Flom to the great industrialists of the 1800's -- were in the right place at the right time not just to be successful, but to get significantly more quality practice time at their endeavor before others. Thus, luck gave them a chance to put in the hard work to be successful; it didn't replace it. It didn't give them any shortcuts around it.

I highly recommend "Outliers" to all of you. It is an easy and fast read and, no matter what field you work in, it will make you think very differently about success.