I do respect “genius”, say, Einstein, Bill Gates, and I believe that their great success lie in their talent, their hard-working. In a word, I regard their success as a consequence of their own characteristic.
But, what about the outside environment? Did they rely on something on their way to success? Had things like birthplace, ethnic, family, decade, or even birthdate ever affected them? These are what Malcolm Gladwell focus on in his book Outliers. Subtitled The Story of Success, the author try to show us that such thing can do affect us, say, a lot, on our way to success.
Consider this example, hockey players are nationally respected in Canada. There is an “all-star” team for each age of players. Make a list showing basic information about those players in the “all-star” team, and a strange thing appears(but maybe you don’t notice it), that is most of these players are born in January, February, March. Just coincidence? No! Let’s go over the birthdate of those great players, and players of the “all-star” teams in the history, we will actually find the same thing. Then comes WHY? Why players born in the first three months have such a big advantage over others? That is, believe it or not, because the date that separate two groups of players is January, 1st, so these born-older-players have more time to practice, so they gain more experience, so they can stand out against those same-level players. In conclusion, birthdate is their advantage by birth.
Next, the 10,000-hour rule, which says that if you want to become a world-class expert in any area, you must have been learning, practicing, reading, or teaching for at least 10,000 hours. Mozart didn’t disobey this rule, nor did Bill Gates, nor did the Beatles. But there obviously exist many other people that practiced tens of thousands of hours, but none of them are as successful as Bill Gates or the Beatles. Are their success only the result of their “genius”? No, both of them met a sequence of fortunate opportunities, and they held them all, and they success. For Bill Gates, his family is rich enough, his middle school is good enough to own a time-sharing terminal on which he can practice programming, he was given continuous terminals to practice advanced programming skills, he met essential friends like Paul Allen, he left collage at the right time when PC is stepping into more and more families. And finally, he succeed, greatly. For the Beatles, they were offered a chance to play in Hamburg, Germany, at that time they were not so famous, and they had to play rock and roll eight hours a night, seven days a week, but they didn’t give up. Just like Gladwell wrote:
“They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back,” Norman went on. “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 and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.”
These are only the first two chapters of this outstanding book Outliers and they really refreshed my mind, my belief on why one success.
They success, because of their great luck, they are outliers, but when consider every chance given to them separately, there is nothing special, they do normally, so they are not outliers at all!
Somewhat confused? But what I want to tell you is that Everyone Is A Miracle, we all have this or that opportunities(maybe not all of them lead to success), we are unique because no one would experience exactly the same as us, there’s no way to “chase after” success, but there’re many ways to hold every chance you’re given.
Everyone is a miracle.
Everyone is somewhat, an Outlier.
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