Over Thanksgiving I was given a gift... another book. I love books! I learn so much from reading other people's writing. My gift this year was Malcolm Gladwell's latest book, Outliers. While I do not agree with everything in the book, I do agree with his main premise: success is only achieved through hard work and more hard work.
Gladwell takes apart this notion that a few lucky intelligent people fell into their success. It is not true. He examines some of our western ideas of success, Bill Gates and the Beatles to name two.
What he finds is that these very bright gifted examples are very bright and gifted, but each example also put in lots of practice and hard work before they walked into their success.
There is a chapter titled, 10,000 hours. Gladwell writes that each of these examples of success are gifted and extremely bright, but each example also put in in excess of 10,000 hours of practice before their success. Bill Gates is a great example. When he walked out of Harvard after his sophomore year to start Microsoft he had already programmed in excess of 10,000 hours. He knew as much if not more about programming than most of his peers. Why? Well, Gladwell calls it circumstances... he lived in Seattle and went to a private school that had parents who started a computer club that gave access to a university mainframe computer. Gates happen to be the right person put in the right situation, but he also was bright and driven enough to take advantage of that situation. Of course as a Christian, I know that God had a hand in all of those circumstances as He oversees all.
Gladwell dispels this notion of luck and happenstance. If you read the book you will not be able to get past this idea of hard work and practice. There are many more examples in his book. It was a great read, and one that I highly recommend. Blessings!
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