Dame Luck & The 10,000-hour Road to Success

Considering humanity’s obsession with ‘self-development’/’How to be successful’ books and the yards and yards of shelf space that they occupy on our book stores, any attempt to dissect the clichéd ‘ road to success ’ is definitely worthwhile.

Malcolm Gladwell’s famous 10,000-hour rule has caught the fancy of a lot of people.   The book attempts to question our definition of ‘success’ and to find out a pattern behind ‘outliers’.  Gladwell goes to explain the careers of really successful people – accomplished and extraordinary persons who are outside of ordinary experience.

A recent post by Joe Panettieri from MSPMentor summarizes this book as:

• First, greatness in anything requires talent combined with 10,000 hours of practice.
•  Second, you need a series of lucky or fortunate breaks, often based on your surroundings, to get those 10,000 hours of practice.

The interesting part is where Gladwell attributes the ‘success’ of successful people to factors beyond their control –  like the month of birth of hockey players in their consequent success in that sport.

I think that Gladwell’s theory:

• Gives a raw deal to the role of self-awareness during those 10,000 hours and
• At the same time, it goes too far with ascribing success to ‘things that the individual has nothing to do with’
• Doesn’t highlight the evolution of the individual that it brings on the path to success/wherever it leads (this might be intentional)

Bill Joy may have programmed over 10,000 hours, but the Bill who wrote code in the 100^th/200^th hour would have been a very different person from the one who wrote code the 10,000^th hour.   What is simply written off as ‘practice’ is actually, at closer inspection, a conscious effort that results in the evolution of the ‘practitioner’.

When we look at the case of an MSP starting out her business, Gladwell’s 10000-hour rule holds well – in the sense of time spent in sustained and conscious effort.   Like any other human enterprise, an MSP too requires talent and ‘10,000 hours’ of effort to become successful.  I wouldn’t go as far as including ‘chance’ as one of the determinants of success.  As long as the efforts have been ‘conscious’ and result in constant evolution of the individual, I hold that failure of any sort is impossible.

To see this, simply count the number of businessmen you know who have clocked well over the 10,000 hours of practice in their chosen field of operation and have not yet reached the desired level of ‘success’ in their field.  What could be attributed to a lack of ‘lucky breaks’ can just as easily be described as a lack of awareness when logging in those hours at work.   To be fair, such awareness requires an almost inhuman brutal honesty, of a cold-shower-water-splash-in-the-face kind when it comes to evaluating oneself and one’s efforts.

I believe that when one is equipped with such awareness, the other et ceteras of success will come naturally to the practitioner – even Dame Luck will prefer your company (pun intended)!

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