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A gift or hard graft?
We look at outrageously talented and successful
people - the Beatles, Mozart, Rockefeller, Bill Gates - and assume
there is such a thing as pure genius. Not necessarily, argues
Malcolm Gladwell...
Malcolm Gladwell
Saturday November 15 2008
The Guardian
The University of Michigan opened its new computer centre in 1971,
in a low-slung building on Beal Avenue in Ann Arbor. The
university's enormous mainframe computers stood in the middle of a
vast, white-tiled room, looking, as one faculty member remembers,
"like one of the last scenes in 2001: A Space Odyssey". Off to the
side were dozens of key-punch machines - what passed in those days
for computer terminals. Over the years, thousands of students would
pass through that white-tiled room - the most famous of whom was a
gawky teenager named Bill Joy.
Joy came to the University of Michigan the year the computer centre
opened, at the age of 16. He had been voted "most studious student"
by his graduating class at North Framingham high school, outside
Detroit, which, as he puts it, meant he was a "no-date nerd". He had
thought he might end up as a biologist or a mathematician, but late
in his freshman year he stumbled across the computing centre - and
he was hooked.
From then on, the computer centre was his life. He programmed
whenever he could. He got a job with a computer science professor,
so he could program over the summer. In 1975, Joy enrolled in
graduate school at the University of California, Berkeley. There, he
buried himself even deeper in the world of computer software. During
the oral exams for his PhD, he made up a particularly complicated
algorithm on the fly that - as one of his many admirers has written
- "so stunned his examiners [that] one of them later compared the
experience to 'Jesus confounding his elders' ".
Working in collaboration with a small group of programmers, Joy took
on the task of rewriting Unix, a software system developed by AT&T
for mainframe computers. Joy's version was so good that it became -
and remains - the operating system on which millions of computers
around the world run. "If you put your Mac in that funny mode where
you can see the code," Joy says, "I see things that I remember
typing in 25 years ago." And when you go online, do you know who
wrote the software that allows you to access the internet? Bill Joy.
After Berkeley, Joy co-founded the Silicon Valley firm Sun
Microsystems. There, he rewrote another computer language, Java, and
his legend grew still further. Among Silicon Valley insiders, Joy is
spoken of with as much awe as Bill Gates. He is sometimes called the
Edison of the internet.
The story of Joy's genius has been told many times, and the lesson
is always the same. Here was a world that was the purest of
meritocracies. Computer programming didn't operate as an old-boy
network, where you got ahead because of money or connections. It was
a wide-open field, in which all participants were judged solely by
their talent and accomplishments. It was a world where the best men
won, and Joy was clearly one of those best men.
Sport, too, is supposed to be just such a pure meritocracy. But is
it? Take ice hockey in Canada: look at any team and you will find
that a disproportionate number of players will have been born in the
first three months of the year. This, it turns out, is because the
cut-off date for children eligible for the nine-year-old,
10-year-old, 11-year-old league and so on is January 1. Boys who are
oldest and biggest at the beginning of the hockey season are
inevitably the best. And so they get the most coaching and practice,
and they get chosen for the all-star team, and so their advantage
increases - on into the professional game. A similar pattern applies
to other sports. What we think of as talent is actually a
complicated combination of ability, opportunity and utterly
arbitrary advantage.
Does something similar apply to outliers in other fields, such as
Bill Joy? Do they benefit from special opportunities, and do those
opportunities follow any kind of pattern? The evidence suggests they
do.
In the early 90s, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson and two
colleagues set up shop at Berlin's elite Academy of Music. With the
help of the academy's professors, they divided the school's
violinists into three groups. The first group were the stars, the
students with the potential to become world-class soloists. The
second were those judged to be merely "good". The third were
students who were unlikely ever to play professionally, and intended
to be music teachers in the school system. All the violinists were
then asked the same question. Over the course of your career, ever
since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you
practised?
Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same
time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone
practised roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week.
But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The
students who would end up as the best in their class began to
practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine,
eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the
age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age
of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of
practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students
had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music
teachers just over 4,000 hours.
The curious thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his
colleagues couldn't find any "naturals" - musicians who could float
effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time that
their peers did. Nor could they find "grinds", people who worked
harder than everyone else and yet just didn't have what it takes to
break into the top ranks. Their research suggested that once you
have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that
distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she
works. That's it. What's more, the people at the very top don't just
work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical,
minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of
expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is
a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.
"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction
writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master
criminals," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number
comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to
roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10
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 mastery."
This is true even of people we think of as prodigies. Mozart, for
example, famously started writing music at six. But, the
psychologist Michael Howe writes in his book Genius Explained, by
the standards of mature composers Mozart's early works are not
outstanding. The earliest pieces were all probably written down by
his father, and perhaps improved in the process. Many of Wolfgang's
childhood compositions, such as the first seven of his concertos for
piano and orchestra, are largely arrangements of works by other
composers. Of those concertos that contain only music original to
Mozart, the earliest that is now regarded as a masterwork (No9 K271)
was not composed until he was 21: by that time Mozart had already
been composing concertos for 10 years.
To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about 10 years.
(Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less
than that time: it took him nine years.) And what's 10 years? Well,
it's roughly how long it takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard
practice.
Ten thousand hours is, of course, an enormous amount of time. It's
all but impossible to reach that number, by the time you're a young
adult, all by yourself. You have to have parents who are encouraging
and supportive. 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. In fact, most people can really
only reach that number if they get into some kind of special
programme - like a hockey all-star squad - or get some kind of
extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in that
kind of work.
So, back to Bill Joy. It's 1971 and he's 16. He's the maths wiz, the
kind of student that schools like MIT, Caltech or the University of
Waterloo attract by the hundreds. "When Bill was a little kid, he
wanted to know everything about everything way before he should've
even known he wanted to know," his father William says. "We answered
him when we could. And when we couldn't, we would just give him a
book." When he applied to college, Joy got a perfect score on the
maths portion of the scholastic aptitude test. "It wasn't
particularly hard," he says, matter-of-factly. "There was plenty of
time to check it twice." He could have gone in any number of
directions. He could have done a PhD in biology. He could have gone
to medical school. He could easily have had a "typical" college
career: lots of schoolwork, football games, drunken fraternity
parties, awkward encounters with girls, long discussions with
roommates about the meaning of life. But he didn't, because he
stumbled across that nondescript building on Beal Avenue.
In the 70s, when Joy was learning about programming, computers were
the size of rooms. A single machine - which might have less power
and memory than your microwave - could cost upwards of a million
dollars. Computers were hard to get access to, and renting time on
them cost a fortune. This was the era when computer programs were
created using cardboard "punch" cards. A complex program might
include hundreds, if not thousands, of these cards, in tall stacks.
Since computers could handle only one task at a time, the operator
made an appointment for your program and, depending on how many
other people were ahead of you in line, you might not get your cards
back for several hours. And if you made even a single error in your
program, then you had to take the cards back, track down the error
and begin the whole process again. Under those circumstances, it was
exceedingly difficult for anyone to become a programming expert.
Certainly becoming an expert by your early 20s was all but
impossible. "Programming with cards," one computer scientist from
the era remembers, "did not teach you programming. It taught you
patience and proofreading."
That's where the University of Michigan came in. It was one of the
first universities in the world to abandon computer cards for the
brand-new system called "time-sharing". Computer scientists realised
you could train a computer to handle hundreds of tasks at the same
time. No more punch cards. You could build dozens of terminals, link
them all to the mainframe by a telephone line, and have everyone
programming - online - all at once.
This was the opportunity that greeted Bill Joy when he arrived on
the Ann Arbor campus in the autumn of 1971. "Do you know what the
difference is between the computing cards and time-sharing?" Joy
says. "It's the difference between playing chess by mail and speed
chess." Programming wasn't an exercise in frustration any more. It
was fun.
According to Joy, he spent a phenomenal amount of time at the
computer centre. "It was open 24 hours. I would stay there all
night, and just walk home in the morning. In an average week in
those years I was spending more time in the computer centre than on
my classes. All of us down there had this recurring nightmare of
forgetting to show up for class at all, of not even realising we
were enrolled."
Just look at the stream of opportunities that came Joy's way.
Because he happened to go to a far-sighted school, he was able to
practise on a time-sharing system, instead of punch cards; because
the university was willing to spend the money to keep the computer
centre open 24 hours, he could stay up all night; and because he was
able to put in so many hours, by the time he was presented with the
opportunity to rewrite Unix, he was up to the task. Bill Joy was
brilliant. He wanted to learn - that was a big part of it - but
before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the
opportunity to learn how to be expert.
"At Michigan, I was probably programming eight or 10 hours a day,"
he says. "By the time I was at Berkeley, I was doing it day and
night... " He pauses for a moment, to do the maths in his head
which, for him, doesn't take long. "It's five years," he says,
finally. "So, so, maybe... 10,000 hours? That's about right."
Is this a general rule of success? If you scratch below the surface
of every great achiever, do you always find the equivalent of the
Michigan Computer Centre or the hockey all-star team - some sort of
special opportunity for practice? Let's test the idea with two
examples: the Beatles, one of the most famous rock bands ever, and
Bill Gates, one of the world's richest men.
The Beatles - John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo
Starr - came to the US in February 1964, starting the so-called
"British Invasion" of the American music scene. The interesting
thing is how long they had already been playing together. Lennon and
McCartney began in 1957. (Incidentally, the time that elapsed
between their founding and their greatest artistic achievements -
arguably Sgt Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band and the White Album -
is 10 years.) In 1960, while they were still a struggling school
rock band, they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany.
"Hamburg in those days did not have rock'n'roll music clubs. It had
strip clubs," says Philip Norman, who wrote the Beatles' biography,
Shout! "There was one particular club owner called Bruno, who was
originally a fairground showman. He had the idea of bringing in rock
groups to play in various clubs. They had this formula. It was a
huge nonstop show, hour after hour, with a lot of people lurching in
and the other lot lurching out. And the bands would play all the
time to catch the passing traffic. In an American red-light
district, they would call it nonstop striptease.
"Many of the bands that played in Hamburg were from Liverpool,"
Norman continues. "It was an accident. Bruno went to London to look
for bands. But he happened to meet a Liverpool entrepreneur in Soho,
who was down in London by pure chance. And he arranged to send some
bands over. That's how the connection was established. And
eventually the Beatles made a connection not just with Bruno, but
with other club owners as well. They kept going back, because they
got a lot of alcohol and a lot of sex."
And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn't that it paid well.
(It didn't.) Or that the acoustics were fantastic. (They weren't.)
Or that the audiences were savvy and appreciative. (They were
anything but.) It was the sheer amount of time the band was forced
to play. 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 them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our
heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over. In Liverpool, we'd
only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best
numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg we had to play for
eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing."
The Beatles ended up travelling to Hamburg five times between 1960
and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, of
five or more hours a night. Their second trip they played 92 times.
Their third trip they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on
stage. The last two Hamburg stints, in November and December 1962,
involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed
for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had
their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an
estimated 1,200 times, which is extraordinary. Most bands today
don't perform 1,200 times in their entire careers. The Hamburg
crucible is what set the Beatles apart.
"They were no good on stage when they went there and they were very
good when they came back," Norman says. "They learned not only
stamina, they had to learn an enormous amount of numbers - cover
versions of everything you can think of, not just rock'n'roll, a bit
of jazz, too. They weren't disciplined on stage at all before that.
But when they came back they sounded like no one else. It was the
making of them."
Let's now turn to the history of Bill Gates. His story is almost as
well-known as the Beatles'. Brilliant young maths wiz discovers
computer programming. Drops out of Harvard. Starts a little computer
company called Microsoft with his friends. Through sheer brilliance,
ambition and guts builds it into the giant of the software world.
Now let's dig a bit deeper. Gates' father was a wealthy lawyer in
Seattle, and his mother was the daughter of a well-to-do banker. As
a child Gates was precocious, and easily bored by his studies. So
his parents took him out of public school, and at the beginning of
seventh grade sent him to Lakeside, a private school that catered to
Seattle's elite families. Midway through Gates' second year, the
school started a computer club. "The Mothers' Club at school did a
rummage sale every year, and there was always the question of what
the money would go to," Gates remembers. "That year, they put $3,000
into buying a computer terminal down in this funny little room that
we subsequently took control of. It was kind of an amazing thing."
Even more remarkable was the kind of computer Lakeside bought: it
was an ASR-33 Teletype, a time-sharing terminal with a direct link
to a mainframe computer in downtown Seattle. "The whole idea of
time-sharing only got invented in 1965," Gates says. "Someone was
pretty forward looking."
From that moment on, Gates lived in the computer room. He and a
number of others began to teach themselves how to use this strange
new device. The parents raised more money to buy time on the
mainframe computer. The students spent it. As luck would have it,
Monique Rona, one of the founders of C-Cubed - a company that leased
computer time - had a son at Lakeside, a class ahead of Gates. Would
the Lakeside computer club, Rona wondered, like to test out the
company's software programs on the weekends in exchange for free
programming time? Absolutely!
Before long, Gates and his friends latched on to another outfit
called ISI, 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. In one seven-month period in 1971, Gates
and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of computer time on the ISI
mainframe, which averages out at eight hours a day, seven days a
week.
"It was my obsession," Gates says of his early high school years. "I
skipped athletics. I went up there at night. We were programming on
weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn't get 20 or 30
hours in. There was a period where Paul Allen and I got in trouble
for stealing a bunch of passwords and crashing the system. We got
kicked out. I didn't get to use the computer the whole summer. This
is when I was 15 and 16. Then I found out Paul had found a computer
that was free at the University of Washington. They had these
machines in the medical centre and the physics department. They were
on a 24-hour schedule, but with this big slack period so between
three and six in the morning they never scheduled anything." Gates
laughed. "That's why I'm always so generous to the University of
Washington, because they let me steal so much computer time. I'd
leave at night, after my bedtime. I could walk up to the university
from my house. Or I'd take the bus." Years later, Gates' mother
said, "We always wondered why it was so hard for him to get up in
the morning."
Through one of the founders of ISI, Gates landed a secondment
programming a computer system at the Bonneville Power station in
southern Washington State. There, he spent the spring of his senior
year writing code.
Those five years, from eighth grade to the end of high school, were
Bill Gates' Hamburg, and by any measure he was presented with an
even more extraordinary series of opportunities than Bill Joy. And
virtually every one of those opportunities gave Gates extra time to
practise. By the time he dropped out of Harvard, he'd been
programming nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past
10,000 hours. How many teenagers had the kind of experience Gates
had? "If there were 50 in the world, I'd be stunned," he says.
If you put together the stories of hockey players and the Beatles
and Bill Joy and Bill Gates, I think we get a more complete picture
of the path to success. Joy, Gates and the Beatles are all
undeniably talented. Lennon and McCartney had a musical gift, of the
sort that comes along once in a generation, and Joy, let us not
forget, had a mind so quick that he could make up a complicated
algorithm on the fly that left his professors in awe. A good part of
that "talent", however, was something other than an innate aptitude
for music or maths. It was desire. The Beatles were willing to play
for eight hours straight, seven days a week. Joy was willing to stay
up all night programming. In either case, most of us would have gone
home to bed. In other words, a key part of what it means to be
talented is being able to practise for hours and hours - to the
point where it is really hard to know where "natural ability" stops
and the simple willingness to work hard begins.
What is so striking about these success stories is that the outliers
were the beneficiaries of some kind of unusual opportunity. Lucky
breaks don't seem like the exception with software billionaires,
rock bands and star athletes; they seem like the rule.
Recently Forbes Magazine compiled a list of the 75 richest people in
history. It includes queens and kings and pharaohs from centuries
past, as well as contemporary billionaires such as Warren Buffet and
Carlos Slim. However, an astonishing 14 on the list are Americans
born within nine years of each other in the mid-19th century. In
other words, almost 20% of the names come from a single generation -
born between 1831 and 1840 in a single country. The list includes
industrialists and financiers who are still household names today:
John Rockefeller, born in 1839 (the richest of the lot); Andrew
Carnegie, 1835; Jay Gould, 1836; and JP Morgan, 1837.
What's going on here is obvious, if you think about it. In the 1860s
and 1870s, the American economy went through perhaps the greatest
transformation in its history. This was when the railways were
built, and when Wall Street emerged. It was when industrial
manufacturing started in earnest. It was when all the rules by which
the traditional economy functioned were broken and remade. What that
list says is that it was absolutely critical, if you were going to
take advantage of those opportunities, to be in your 20s when that
transformation was happening.
If you were born in the late 1840s, you missed it - you were too
young to take advantage of that moment. If you were born in the
1820s, you were too old - your mindset was shaped by the old,
pre-civil war ways. But there is a particular, narrow nine-year
window that was just perfect. All of the 14 men and women on that
list had vision and talent. But they also were given an
extraordinary opportunity, in the same way that hockey players born
in January, February and March were given an extraordinary
opportunity.
Let's do the same kind of analysis for software tycoons such as Bill
Joy and Bill Gates.
Veterans of Silicon Valley will tell you that the most important
date in the history of the personal computer revolution was January
1975. That was when the magazine Popular Electronics ran a cover
story on a machine called the Altair 8800. The Altair cost $397. It
was a do-it-yourself contraption that you could assemble at home.
The headline on the story read: Project Breakthrough! World's First
Minicomputer Kit To Rival Commercial Models. To readers of Popular
Electronics, then the bible of the fledgling software and computer
world, that headline was a revelation. Computers up to that point
were the massive, expensive mainframes of the sort sitting in the
white-tiled expanse of the Michigan computing centre. For years,
every hacker and electronics wiz had dreamed of the day when a
computer would come along that was small and inexpensive enough for
an ordinary person to use and own. That day had finally arrived.
If January 1975 was the dawn of the personal computer age, then who
would be in the best position to take advantage of it? If you're a
few years out of college in 1975, and if you have had any experience
with programming at all, you would have already been hired by IBM or
one of the other traditional, old-line computer firms of that era.
You belonged to the old paradigm. You have just bought a house.
You're married. A baby is on the way. You're in no position to give
up a good job and pension for some pie-in-the-sky $397 computer kit.
So let's also rule out all those born before, say, 1952.
At the same time, though, you don't want to be too young. You can't
seize the moment if you're still in high school. So let's also rule
out anyone born after, say, 1958. The perfect age to be in 1975, in
other words, is young enough to see the coming revolution but not so
old as to have missed it. You want to be 20 or 21, born in 1954 or
1955.
Let's start with Gates, the richest and most famous of all Silicon
Valley tycoons. When was he born? Bill Gates: October 28 1955. The
perfect birthdate. Gates is the hockey player born on January 1.
Gates's best friend at Lakeside was Paul Allen. He also hung out in
the computer room with Gates, and shared those long evenings at ISI
and C-Cubed. Allen went on to found Microsoft with Gates. Paul
Allen: January 21 1953.
The third richest man at Microsoft is the one who has been running
the company on a day-to-day basis since 2000 - one of the most
respected executives in the software world, Steve Ballmer. Steve
Ballmer: March 24 1956.
And let's not forget a man every bit as famous as Gates, Steve Jobs,
the co-founder of Apple Computer. He wasn't from a rich family, like
Gates, and he didn't go to Michigan, like Joy. But it doesn't take
much investigation of his upbringing to realise that he had his
Hamburg, too. He grew up in Mountain View California, just south of
San Francisco, which is the absolute epicentre of Silicon Valley.
His neighbourhood was filled with engineers from Hewlett-Packard,
then, as now, one of the most important electronics firms in the
world. As a teenager he prowled the flea markets of Mountain View,
where electronics hobbyists and tinkerers sold spare parts. Jobs
came of age breathing the air of the very business he would later
dominate. He picked the brains of Hewlett-Packard engineers and once
even called Bill Hewlett, one of the company's founders, to request
parts. Jobs not only received the parts he wanted, he managed to
wangle a summer job. He worked on an assembly line to build
computers and was so fascinated that he tried to design his own...
Steve Jobs was born on February 24 1955.
Another of the pioneers of the software revolution was Eric Schmidt.
He ran Novell, one of Silicon Valley's most important software
firms, and in 2001 became the chief executive officer of Google. He
was born on April 27 1955.
I don't mean to suggest, of course, that every software tycoon in
Silicon Valley was born in 1955. But there are very clearly patterns
here, and what's striking is how little we seem to want to talk
about them. We pretend that success is a matter of individual merit.
That is not the whole story. These are stories about people who were
given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and
who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort
was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not of their
own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.
Their success, in other words, wasn't due to some mysterious process
known only to themselves. It had a logic, and if we can understand
that logic, think of all the tantalising possibilities that opens
up.
By the way, let's not forget Bill Joy. Had he been just a little bit
older and had to face the drudgery of programming with computer
cards, he says he would have studied science. Bill Joy the computer
legend would have been Bill Joy the biologist. In fact, he was born
on November 8 1954. And his three fellow founders of Sun
Microsystems - one of the oldest and most important of Silicon
Valley's software companies? Scott McNealy: born November 13 1954.
Vinod Khosla: born January 28 1955. Andy Bechtolsheim: born June
1955. ·
© Malcolm Gladwell 2008.
? This is an edited extract from Outliers: The Story Of Success, by
Malcolm Gladwell, to be published on November 27 by Allen Lane at
£16.99. Malcolm Gladwell: Live In London is on November 24 at 5.45pm
and 8.30pm at the Lyceum Theatre, London. Tickets from £13.50 to
£26.50. To book, call 0844 412 1742 or go to
malcolmgladwell-live.com. There will be an interview with Malcolm
Gladwell in tomorrow's Observer.
Copyright Guardian Newspapers Limited 2008
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