Sometimes it takes an (admittedly erroneous) crude approach just to bring what should be an overt point to fruition. While this wasn't one of them, there are certainly times.
And on that point, that's the feeling I get when I read this article. The writer is trying to be direct and ride the fence of "condemnation by realization" but only comes off as wrongly crude. While I haven't read any of Gladwell's book, I've seen him speak and he's got his wits about him regarding these things. Let's put it into perspective: how many of us can effectively lecture on the things he does?
I don't think it's a very good article, but I agree with its premise. Gladwell is not scientifically rigid. His books are interesting and make me think, but I would not take any statistic he gave me as anything other than an interesting fiction. He's too selective about data.
Specifically, you're mainly being downmodded for your last phrase: "you" and the following 4-letter word. If you left that off, you would've gotten a few points down at most. (And I would've up-modded you, as I also dislike spelling mistakes.)
One way that race-based admission is different, especially at state universities, is a specific constitutional prohibition (the fourteenth amendment of the federal Constitution) against state action that doesn't provide equal protection of the laws on the basis of race.
But then most atheists also succumb to comforting lies, and make excuses for death even less defensible than the outright lies of religion. They flinch away, refuse to confront the horror of a hundred and fifty thousand sentient beings annihilated every day.
I would like to think that I, as an atheist, don't have to rationalize the unknown and accept that we just don't have the answers to the "why" of death. I realize he is in pain, but I don't think I'm lying to myself about death just because I don't have some over-arching dogma to believe in.
So IM is better? 3000 messages in my inbox that I can attend to when I'm ready vs. IM - where I'm dealing with everybody simultaneously and live? That's worse than the telephone, IMHO.
Anyway, if you get the same query more than once, it is time to put the answer into a wiki or blog.
I agree. I'm a big fan of asynchronous communication.
I only use IM for work and communicating with my wife during the work day. Fortunately, we use Skype at the office, so I can minimize my exposure to friends. I've discovered that even when I set my status in, say, Google Chat, to "Leave me alone" people still contact me, so I just got in the habit of not signing in.
I also don't have a high volume of email--even with list memberships, I probably don't receive more than 50 emails a day.
I can't stand Card's political views. He hates gays and has expressed violent attitudes toward gays.
Who knows, maybe his writing is a form of repressed homosexual relief for him.
I still enjoyed Ender's Game very much, however. My problem with the review is that it can apply to any fiction that withholds gratification or attempts suspense and has a "super hero" type character. I think of Ender as a kind of super hero, in fact. Just one with geek qualities.
Do we then, call comic books a form of pornography?
I strongly disagree with his opinions, too; I went to see him speak, and it was a great presentation until the end where he somehow spiralled off into a tirade about gay marriage killing society.
But I don't care. He writes (mostly) great books and he'll keep getting my money so long as he keeps it up.
About the faded in time thing, I always felt Ender's Game was surprisingly precise in predicting the rise of online discussion communities, and how their anonymous celebrities can influence a lot of people, while just being a bunch of kids in their bedrooms. The book's from 1985 after all.
It kills me how the Gladwell book brought this out of Joel. Nobody wants to be told their success is a good part luck and timing. They all want to believe it is because they are smarter and worked harder.
So suddenly the software world's number one anecdotal blowhard decides to slam another blowhard. Okay. Whatever.
Um, lemme see if I understand here, what you're saying... Are you claiming that (a) I'm successful, and (b) I think that I'm successful because I'm smarter and worked harder and (c) Malcolm Gladwell thinks I'm successful because of good luck and timing and that (d) therefore I'm mad at Gladwell's new book and that (e) therefore I decided to slam it? Is that your theory?
You've worked harder than most people I know, but didn't you a) get the first PC in Israel, b) go to Yale, c) get early '90s Microsoft stock, d) have a house you could use as an office when you started your business, e) define the category of software blogging by getting there first, and f) start a profitable company during a tech slump, giving you an advantage in hiring?
Joel Spolsky: Hard work + good luck = success! You could be Gladwell's next anecdote.
Hang on a minute. Gladwell's book is not about mere ordinary successes, but outlier successes. Like Michael Phelps or Bill Gates. (Joel, I hope you will forgive me for calling you an "ordinary" successful person).
I think you can see the effects of luck and diligence in just about everyone's life. That's not at issue. Gladwell is suggesting that to be a Bill Gates requires a good amount of diligence (10,000 hours of practice) and also utterly ridiculous good luck. That is, the skill component stops scaling really quickly, but there's no limit to how lucky you can be.
The critics are proclaiming this to be both unsubstantiated and a truism. But I think Gladwell is onto something, because certainly our culture treats successful people differently. Think about all the successful businesspeople invited to Davos. Maybe future generations will look at that and wonder what we were thinking. Like we gathered together a lot of people who won the lottery, in the hopes that they'd win the lottery again?
1. I'm saying your timing is suspicious.
2. My own anecdotal experience tells me successful people want to believe they earned their success through brains and hard work
3. Gladwell states that a good portion of success is due to hard work but that you have to be lucky enough to be able to put in the 10,000 hours at the right time and of course, have the luxury of putting in that kind of dedication
So bottom line, he really flatters successful people on the surface, while making the successful folk equal to the rest of us.
I don't think you are "mad" at Gladwell. I just think the motivation is strong and possibly an unconscious aversion to accepting that your success may be in huge part due to luck.
But then. Take with a huge grain of salt some asshole spouting off on a forum.
Believe it or not, you are one of my heroes, and I never seriously expected YOU of all people to be reading this.
Cheers to you and don't stop doing what you do. We are a better field because of it.
1. When someone "successful" criticizes Gladwell's thesis, it's suspicious because maybe they just don't want to hear that they weren't really smarter than everyone else.
2. When someone "unsuccessful" criticizes Gladwell's thesis, it's suspicious because maybe they just don't want to hear that their lack of success simply shows that they didn't work hard enough.
#1 is your argument; presumably you find it plausible. It seems to me that #2 is about equal in plausibility to #1; and #1+#2 would say that anyone should be viewed with suspicion, as probably motivated by something other than honest intellectual inquiry, if they criticize Gladwell's book. Which seems ... unhelpful.
It also seems curious that you describe someone as (a) "the number one anecdotal blowhard" and (b) "one of my heroes". Why should the rest of us take any notice of someone who knowingly takes an anecdotal blowhard as a hero?
Joel did get ahead by being smarter and working harder. He was doing the blogging/article thing back before everyone was doing it, and it takes some smarts to be the first. He also kept it up on a regular schedule, and that needs some discipline.
So people like 37signals had a good pinch of luck thrown in their pot, but Joel, I believe, actually got to the top rung of the internet food chain by persistence and hard work.
I'm not "successful" (beyond having a wonderful wife and daughter), but I find Gladwell sort of light in the same way Joel does. It's entertaining reading, but like most business books, the meat of it, sans anecdotes, could fit in a few pages. And sometimes the 'meat' is sort of dubious in any case.
Your data is correct, but you've got it backwards. People who believe they can be successful by working harder generally do become successful. The inverse holds as well.
Aside: watch for when people say "whatever." It means they care very much about something.
I dunno. I re-read the article after I read your comment, and I came to a different conclusion: It is very possible we are in one of those gaps in time where if you have put in your 10,000 hours, you can leverage them. You can be one of those lucky ones.
His point is, then, how do you know you aren't coming of age during a lucky time, when the old goes out the window? It is quite possible this is that "garage electronics" time when nobody has any money and some of us figure out unique ways to save and as a result, make millions.
You can bet, SOMEONE will. We are going to hear, in about 4-5 years, of someone down and out who "did it" during 2009 after they got laid off and were living in their parents' basement. Instead of shooting their employer, they proved everyone wrong and succeeded.
I am one of the jaded and cynical, however. This is just a "glass is half full" perspective.
I don't really disagree with anything you wrote. This might be one of those times, and you might be able to become the next captains of industry. But then again, any time might be one of those times. The statement isn't predictive.
I think the article went off the tracks when it theorized that now is one of those times, based only on the observations that Rockefeller et al. got rich when they were young, which also happened to be during a time of great economic turbulence. So I suppose the logic is that since the economy is currently screwed, and since there are currently 20-year-olds working hard somewhere on a business, this is the time when we're going to produce the next Rockefeller. QED, right?
My point is only that Gladwell's thesis revolves around the central role of chance in success, and this article seems to want to take his examples, and torture them into some kind of prediction about the future. I think that's a bit silly.
I think timr's point is that you'll only know AFTER the fact that you're lucky.
To try and extrapolate a single (and dubious) data point in history to the present time, and then conclude that this is the right time for 20 year olds to be lucky, is IMHO wildly misplaced optimism. You can't "time" luck... maybe it'll be the elderly who come out of this lucky...
I found the article useful in two ways, neither of which rely on the accuracy of the prediction.
One, if you've already made the decision to start a company, then it doesn't matter whether this is a good time or not. However, it could be motivating to think of this as a great time. When I think that way, that there are enormous opportunities for me to solve, I behave more confidently and spend more time doing rather than fretting. I think I'm not the only person who recognizes the role that emotion plays in their own success.
Two, I thought it was an interesting thought experiment to think about whether the rules have changed, what the changed rules are, what forces are driving them, and what are some of the repercussions? She doesn't get into them, but that doesn't mean we couldn't.
Off the top of my head:
1) Tighter credit. People who are bad situations will eventually work themselves out, but we could be in a situation where people and companies keep a more sustainable level of debt. What would the effect be?
2) Baby boomers get old. Supposedly they're going to retire, but their savings just went kaput. Are they going to keep working? Are they going to make the younger generation pay for their retirement and healthcare?
3) Energy covering climate and demand. Environmentalists are pushing for conservation but Vinod Khosla thinks we're going to solve it in a way that makes today's energy look expensive. What does a world of extremely expensive energy look like? What does a world of extremely cheap energy look like?
4) Internet related, dropping costs. This isn't as big as the first three but effects me personally. Where are the big plays? What about small plays that add up (37signals)?
I do say "...or you can look at this as a new economy. How will it be remade? What do you know now that will be wrong for the future? What will be right?" It is your choice to decide if you are feeling lucky.
I do say that this isn't about 20-year olds. Rather, it is about those whose mindset is not set by the old ways; those who can look at an idea/time differently and take advantage of it.
I do say that I am feeling lucky, and I am ready to look at this in a different way. History will tell if I am lucky, and I will be on the Forbes list in 1000 years.
I really hate over-simplified platitudes. They only comfort the stupid or short-sighted. Kind of like reading a sound-bite on trickle-down economics and applying it to your life.
I see your point... I really liked this story though. What I'm doing right now is building the pre and post-sales engineering/support groups for a hardware-based startup. We're bringing a new and interesting product to market, and several of us are out in the streets everyday saying "Hey! Want to buy a hot dog?". Tradeshows, marketing events, pretty much all the standard stuff. And, like the hot dog man, we're doing very very well with it so far.
Every day, though, I must hear about how the industry we're in and the world in general is cutting back spending, slowing down their purchases and so on. It would be very easy to listen to this news, and scale back our efforts and go off to cower somewhere. If we did this, we'd surely sell much less hotdogs than we do now.
A big part of my job is keeping folks in the sales team motivated, focused and ready to spot hot-dog selling opportunities. This story was deeply parallel to things encountered at our startup every week. It was a bit inspiring to me, and I thought it might also be a bit inspiring to people who are in the same position.
