Just good enough
Posted 29 January 2009 @ 11pm | Tagged thoughts
I recently finished Malcom Gladwell’s Outliers , a really interesting look at some of the most well known success stories including Bill Gates, the Beatles, and Jewish lawyers, among others. The book covers a range of topics but one of the central premises is that what we perceive is talent is more like an affinity to work your ass off and practice, practice, practice.
The book presents lots of interesting evidence for this, and even throws out a number – you need 10,000 hours of practice at something to achieve expert level. Gladwell says getting started young and having access to the environment they needed to spend those ten thousand hours perfecting their art helped Bill Gates, Mozart, and the Beatles to become great.
The other key notion in the book is that you have to be just good enough. For example, to win a Nobel prize, statistically you need an IQ of about 130. But it turns out that having an IQ of 150 or 200 does not increase your chances of getting the Nobel prize. In other words, there is a particular threshold above which you are good enough to get a Nobel prize. The rest is up to how hard you work, the hours you put in to practice and get great at what you do.
Not all of us can be Nobel prize winners, but most of us are probably good enough in our areas of specialty to have a chance at greatness. So the only thing standing in our way is practice. There’s my inspirational thought for the day…time to go practice :-)
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