Genius or Graft

Great article in yesterday's Guardian, an edited extract from Malcolm Gladwell's new book 'The Outliers', that questions the notion that genuis is born and not the result of other factors.

Gladwell suggests that hard graft is vital. That there seems to be a magic number of around 10,000 hours 'practice' to obtain expertise. He quotes Daniel Levitin, a neurologist, who contends that this holds true across sport, music, programming and many other subjects.

He argues that timing is also vital. For example Gladwell demonstrates that the richest Americans ever were all born between 1831 and 1840, just the right time to take advantage of the industrial transformation of America that happened in the 1860s and 1870s. He also suggests the best time to be born to take advantage of the personal computer revolution that started in Jan 1975 with the announcement of the first assemble-it-yourself at home PC, the Altair 8800, was between 1952 and 1958. He shows that a whole raft of computer legends were in fact born in this period.

It is a beguiling argument. But many people were born at the right time, and many of those people worked hard, though not all of them are "geniuses", so I suspect there are still other variables that distinguish the "geniuses" from the rest of us. Nevertheless, the theory gives us hope that we can, with hard graft and good timing, make it big. It is nothing if not democratic.

Extracts from the book are here.

One last thought, the hard graft and timing theory, as a prerequisite for success is not totally new, as here suggests!