Seems like a bit of a tail wagging the dog situation. How do we know the more relaxed/organized schedule leads to success, and not that success leads to a more relaxed/organized schedule?
This reminds me of some other advice I remember reading: No level of hard work or organization will substitute for talent and opportunity, and nearly all success stories to the contrary are missing key facts. ie Myth: Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Reality: Michael Jordan was put onto the junior team with players his own age/size so he could get more play time, instead of being prematurely promoted to the highest level of play. Myth: Bill Gates is a college drop out who found success in a technical field purely based on personal merit. Reality: Gates' private high school gave him more access to computers than Harvard, and continuing at Harvard would have been a waste of time given his level of experience in the field.
The lesson is that you need to figure out what you're good at and where you have opportunity, and then work hard in those areas. Just working hard is a recipe for failure for most people.
There is a false dichotomy here. Talented people who have seized the right opportunity can get overwhelmed or disorganized like everyone else. I've always assumed that all those tips for getting organized, getting this done, etc., are primarily intended for talented people who otherwise already know what they're doing.
> No level of hard work or organization will substitute for talent and opportunity
I find that very doubtful. A certain level of talent is needed, there is no doubt about that. Beyond that level, though, it seems to me that focus and continuous dedication (aka, hard work) in combination with being at the right place with right people at the right time are the most decisive success factors in any endeavour. Bill Gates is the perfect example. He has been working like crazy in his early years, was basically on the job all the time.
To be such an extreme outlier success as Bill Gates took extreme talent, extreme, all-consuming hard work, and extreme privilege and opportunity (luck) all combined in a perfect storm.
He still would have been successful without all of those things together, but not at the same level.
This is approximately the correct breakdown. Its interesting that ⅔ of the combo could be lumped into different kinds of luck.
You can't do much about your inherited or birth situation, but the extremely successful people I know usually have a very fortunate background and also worked hard to expand their future luck surface so that when outrageous opportunity lightning was looking to strike somewhere, they had an outsized chance to be the spot.
Well, offtopic a bit but.. People say you never know what they have to sacrifice for they success.
Listening lately news about Bill and he's circles of friends.. I can honestly say I am not surprised why these certain billionaires are never prosecuted of anything..
Leonardo Da Vinci is a good counter example. He wasn't organized at all and neither were his collaborators. A lot of his science breakthroughs went on unknown until somebody else totally unrelated did the same.
Kudos for debunking two myths knew about and believed at face value.
I agree with the talent + opportunity + hard work combination, and I would say that enjoyment is also necessary for the hard work not to become (self-)destructive in the long term.
The myths are promoted as means to raise hope in the "little man" and to attract new blood (workers) to the specific industries, thinking they can also become as big as the stars of that industry, starting with very little.
This is very deceptive, and probably gets people into trouble more often than not, changing their long term orbits based on fantasies built on selective factology about what is enough for success.
>The myths are promoted as means to raise hope in the "little man" and to attract new blood (workers) to the specific industries, thinking they can also become as big as the stars of that industry, starting with very little.
Why invoke conspiracy when mere venality will suffice? Optimism sells. Hollywood has warmed its benches with a never-ending stream of would-be stars and filmmakers despite the fact that the image of the struggling Hollywood hopeful is as cliche as that of the morally intermittent lawyer.
Perhaps one of the strangest things about our psychology-and-PR-dominated world is that psychology is so subtle and powerful that it affects us even when it is not affecting us, making us see ghosts in the shadows of folklore. What would be so nice is a list of criteria for determining when a meme may have been designed for cultural impact. Surely cui bono is not enough -- it implicates nearly everything!
You are making this out to be a conspiracy. It's perfectly possible people are just unconsciously working together towards this end.
Let's say I grow up in a poor working-class environment. Years later I find myself CEO of a multi-national corporation and the people working for me are poor working-class people. - And most companies are set up like this. There's very few people at the top and they have all the power while the subordniate masses have none. You give orders. They take orders. - One way to justify my own place in this system is to convince myself that my sucesses have some special property rather than just coincidence: "You can make it if you work hard like me."
And if you're a media company one might suspect that because of this you would tend to tell stories of individual endeavor. And one might suspect the same would be true for a marketing company.
There's a difference between "conspiracy" and "class solidarity among the wealthy". You're totally right that it's probably silly to attribute this to all management/ownership explicitly collaborating together on a scheme they're keeping secret from the workers, but I'd argue that the comment you're responding to is also totally right to point out that things can structurally support each other in a way that ultimately ends up being a small group of rich people working to keep a larger group of poor people poor, simply because all the small incentives for the individual decisions can support the larger structural whole. We can still attribute that as "wealthy people promulgate a narrative to inspire false hope" in a meaningful way, as long as we don't take it from an individualist frame.
"Just working hard is a recipe for failure for most people."
It is quite impossible to just work hard unless you are forced to. I mean there has to be some spark, some excitement about the work you are doing. Which typically means you have some inkling to do take on this task, which you may not be good at but with hard work you will make progress and eventually good at the task, and this self fulfilling cycle continues.
I am not however certain that this process will equip you to spot good opportunities. You can be really good at what you do and not even realize how many opportunities in that same space have gone by. You may be very content with your status quo. There could be multiple reasons for not spotting opportunities.
So I wouldn't say that just working hard is a sure recipe for failure.
You put it nicely and this is exactly what I've been thinking. As you said there has to be some spark within you to do that stuff that you are wanting to do. Rest of the part is about enjoying the process of doing that.
I personally believe that there is no clear-cut rule or path for success and it differs from person to person. So, this way - I wonder how people could come up with such an outrageous article saying that x will lead you to success if you do it this way?!
Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.
But crucially, at the peak of the game, both talent and hard work are just the cost of entry. The rest is luck and opportunity.
For example: Phelps won the Olympics by a knuckle. That’s a difference so subtle it’s down to chaotic systems and butterfly wings for that particular race. Overall everyone at that level is hugely talented and incredibly hardworking
Honestly, I'd say in quite a few fields, talent and hard work aren't even the cost of entry, they're semi irrelevant to how well someone does there. Sports is one of those cases where being extremely good at something is directly correlated to success, and there's no way around that.
And even that's got a certain element of opportunity in terms of the era you were born in. Tons of good athletes could have revolutionised their fields had they been born a few decades/centuries earlier. See British tennis pros, with the likes of Henman and Murray having had the potential to win a lot more grand slams in an era with worse rivals.
Still, other fields are a lot more opportunity and luck based. A lot of successful businesspeople got there by being well connected or simply having the right idea at the right time. Someone who had the foresight/luck to get into the vaping industry or bitcoin or whatever at the right time could become a millionaire/billionaire without any real talent. There are many YouTubers who can barely edit a video that got hundreds of thousands or milllions of subscribers via luck and timing. There are programmers who don't know what a switch statement here is how classes/OOP works who make thousands a month from game development on Patreon.
In many cases, talent and hard work sadly matters less than finding the right audience to appeal to, being good at marketing/sales and being able to network well/have good connections.
No, I agree with that. Being good at marketing, networking and seeking opportunities and trends are skills. And I don't think that technical brilliance/execution is what matters. As you say, if you're good enough at selling yourself, you can be pretty mediocre/genetically NOT gifted at what you succeed in and do really well off it.
But at the same time, there are definitely success stories who just kinda stumbled into it too. Hell, I'd count myself in that camp too, at least at a certain level based on past experiences. I look at some of my past sites, and genuinely wonder how some of them took off. I was terrible at design, mediocre at best at coding, had little idea about marketing and had no network to speak of... and was beating out people who by all means should have done much better.
Even now, I've had people I admire complain that their years of effort on YouTube haven't paid off, while I somehow got three times the subscribers without knowing how to properly edit a video.
I know tons of people who stumbled to undeserving success, and tons of others who should have done well but didn't.
Your hindsight bias is omitting the risk, or uncertain return on investment, in a business person throwing their lives at vaping, and the perseverance in keeping at it.
> That’s a difference so subtle it’s down to chaotic systems and butterfly wings for that particular race.
I don't know much about swimming but in bicycle races and skiing close results seem to be very common. Now if it really is "down to chaotic systems and butterfly wings" I wonder why we don't see much more variance amongst the winners?
That's a direct consequence of the aerodynamics of cycling. You need partners in the middle stage of a race to help overcome aerodynamic drag, only in the last stage of a race is there a pay-off for being a longer out ahead of everybody else. There is an immediate energy consumption penalty to cycling by yourself because you can't rotate the lead with someone else.
> The lesson is that you need to figure out what you're good at and where you have opportunity, and then work hard in those areas. Just working hard is a recipe for failure for most people.
You are right, but too often what people take from this is that the hard work doesn't matter and the people who succeed only did so because of random talent and/or opportunity. No, if you have talent and opportunity but don't work hard, you still won't succeed.
But the people who are really successful in a field don't find it hard work to do that. They genuinely enjoy it, and find it extremely satisfying to do what the rest of us would consider to be a gruelling schedule.
There's also a cohort of people who are insanely talented in a field but don't really enjoy it that much, and find it hard work. One of my best friends is an incredibly talented artist, but burnt out doing commercial work in his 20's and rarely puts pencil to paper these days. I consider it a criminal waste of talent, but it's his life ;)
Then there's the cohort of people who are a bit talented in the field, but have decided for whatever reason (usually parents) that this is what they'll do with their life, and hard work is how they're going to do it. Watching them beat their heads against the brick wall is horrifying.
In the end, we need to avoid survivor bias. For every person who says "I did this, and you can too!" look for other people who did the same and yet didn't succeed. Learn from them, too.
Life is so much more complicated. One could be born into success. Luck is a factor. Understanding and exploiting risk is a factor. Persistence is a factor - you could continue to fail until succeed, or you could continue to fail until you teach yourself what is needed to succeed. You could have brilliant ideas but no capital and still fail even though you work hard and are talented. Reducing to success to two or three factors may be true in some cases but those two or three factors may be different in the larger set of successful cases.
> Myth: Bill Gates is a college drop out who found success in a technical field purely based on personal merit. Reality: Gates' private high school gave him more access to computers than Harvard, and continuing at Harvard would have been a waste of time given his level of experience in the field.
In what sense is that a myth? He is a college dropout. Lots of people had access to computers at that time. True, not everyone, but extraordinarily few of the people that had access to computers at that time went on to found multibillion dollar companies. The idea that the fact that he had access to computers somehow debunks the story of his merit is absurd to me.
"Lots" isn't a scientific term but I still don't think it fits here. He was probably one of a few people at the time to have a few years of in-depth experience before leaving high school.
I'd call it a "myth of omission". It's technically true but the missing details are very, very important to the whole picture. That doesn't mean he didn't work hard or have a knack for it though.
Certainly everyone else at his high school could have been doing what he was doing. I'm sure this wasn't the only high school like this, though the number may have been small.
I don't think people are arguing Gates didn't do anything to warrant his success, but they are saying that if he hadn't been afforded early opportunities significantly more advanced than perhaps 99% of other high schoolers in the US, or 99.999% of other high schoolers in the world (and I don't think that's an exaggeration - seriously, search for articles about how his HS computer system was networked in with U of Washington ... in the early 70s), that he wouldn't have been nearly as successful.
Bill Gates' parents were board members at other companies with moderate influence in the local Seattle business community. There is a good chance that he would have been more successful than most people at even just selling office supplies due to his connections. It's not like he grew up in the rough part of town and got in to Harvard through a hardship scholarship.
Indeed it was Bill Gates' mother, Mary, who had the clout to introduce Bill to IBM's the president, chairman and CEO John Opel while both serving on the board of United Way of America. This paved the way for Microsoft's deal with IBM.
I've heard so many way below average dropouts from nameless universities or high-schools justify their "performance" by mentioning how Bill Gates was also a dropout without realizing that Gates dropped out of Harvard (!) after already having an excellent education and most likely being above average at all relevant topics for his future career.
The myth isn't that Gates is a dropout but that he's the average dropout, or that being a dropout is somehow a signal of greater things to come.
This comic makes for an eye opening read for many [0]. (Edit: updated link, thanks, it must have been a case of copy/pasta).
The myth is the usually intended implication that Gates fell into the category of people who for whatever reason couldn't cope with their college, and not somebody who actually had one of his college papers published in an academic journal before taking leave from Harvard to found a company
Nobody goes to Harvard for the education. They go for the degree. The thing he abandoned was the credential - and that his high school did not give him.
I've always wondered. Do you think someone studying Medicine or Mech. Eng. at Harvard wouldn't get a higher quality education than what many public colleges provide ?
One of my professors at an ivy would occasionally at the end of a lecture jokingly say something like, "ok here's what I think about all this, this five minutes is what you're paying 30 grand a year for so pay attention, everything else I've said today you could have read in the textbook. Nobody actually uses this algorithm, if you need it you're already overloaded, people just buy more capacity before utilization gets this high."
At the undergrad level I think the main benefit of a high end school is simply being grouped with other high end students and so getting a curriculum tailored for you. As if the Honors and AP classes in high school were only available in a few schools that were selective and more expensive.
I don't think this is completely true but I think there is a lot of truth to it... you go to fancy schools for the other fancy students as much as anything else.
Point being, at the undergrad level Harvard isn't better because it's Haaaard-vard, it's better because their curriculum is more advanced, which they can do because they have sufficient concentration of high-talent students who can handle it.
I can't speak to the quality of STEM education at top-tier universities, but having experienced humanities at a mid-level state school and watched a fair number of lectures for similar courses from Ivies, the main differences seemed to be:
1) The professor might be someone you've heard of,
2) Guest speakers/lecturers are both A Thing and are usually very important people (highly placed in government, NGOs, or corporations),
3) The students are way more engaged, which I think is a result both of actual higher levels of student interest in the material and more of the students having come through a K-12 education that was participation and discussion heavy (see: how most major prep high schools run their classes) so being used to behaving that way, because that's just what one does.
IIRC the consensus is that a Harvard undergrad education is high-quality, but not exceptional. The experience (including the networking, and the access to people and opportunities it grants) is what drives people to its gates.
If you want an exceptional education, with access to the hardest courses available, you go to MIT.
Yes, MIT is a level above. I have an M.S. from a good state school and took a graduate course where the text was SICP (Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programming). At MIT that's the freshman course text book!
"Lots" is an ambiguous term to use for how many people had access to computers in 1975, especially the type of access that you would let you become proficient at software development. I think you'll find an unusually high number of rich people in that list.
I'm not saying he didn't have advantages. He certainly did. That does not mean he didn't succeed by merit, though. Though certainly in percentage terms there weren't a lot of other kids with the access he had, the absolute numbers involved were still quite large. Most of those kids did not become Bill Gates.
That raises the question of how many in the other side of that percentage (an overwhelmingly higher absolute number) had similar "merit" but not access as Bill Gates.
Because, look, the reason we're talking about him is because he is an exceptional story of a man completely trashing his competition, standing head and shoulders and bottom-hem-of-dad-sweater above anyone stepping toe-to-toe with him. But then, how impressive does that become when you realize that his "competition" was essentially a small subsection of the in-the-know low-tier-wealthy-and-up? In launching an industry-leading, cutting-edge tech company, his strengths were revealed to be in how quickly and differently he thought and how tenaciously he acted, compared to the relatively comfortable people in his extended network (the caveat of a network being that its members must be sufficiently similar enough to engage with one another). Outside that bubble, it probably becomes much easier to find someone who thinks differently and somewhat easier to find someone who is very tenacious. So... do the bell curves of intelligence for affluent West Coasters and everyone else not overlap at all, or what?
See also: writers/musicians/artists/etc who talk about the hard work behind their success while omitting the part where their partner provided for them while they focused on that instead of working for someone else to pay the bills.
They might have made it anyway, but there's a good chance all the stress and worry from providing for themselves in the modern economy would have taken all their focus and energy for starting a creative career. I've seen too many independent ambitions crushed under unpredictable automated schedules, wage theft, repair and medical bills, and cascading overdraft fees.
I feel that something is lacking in this study. The environment.
Maybe the elite players had better support at home, maybe an only child? By the time these players, both elite and average, was picked out for this study, their life had already been clearly defined by their environment.
> The lesson is that you need to figure out what you're good at and where you have opportunity, and then work hard in those areas. Just working hard is a recipe for failure for most people.
It took me way too long to realize that I should focus most of my effort on things that are so easy for me that I'm taken aback when others find them difficult.
You are correct, but I think you have to make a distinction between being successful, and being the best in your craft. Those two not always align, and the article talks about the second one.
If you look at top athletes, where being the best in your craft is priority, talent, quality of training and rest are the most important factors. I agree that the same is true for mental work. Look at the daily schedules of famous writers and scientists. 6 hours is a full day of work, with a lot of resting and walking.
But if you move into the realm of successful people, all those things that you mention come into play. They can also handle more work hours because management is not as intensive as serious mental work on 1 topic.
> Seems like a bit of a tail wagging the dog situation. How do we know the more relaxed/organized schedule leads to success, and not that success leads to a more relaxed/organized schedule?
That's a facile rhetorical question. You could similarly ask, "How do we know that good food and exercise lead to healthy human beings, rather than that already-healthy human beings have access to good food and exercise?" The answer, of course, would be research. All the students were working the same amount. Their work habits were different.
Furthermore, although I can understand why success might lead to more relaxation (for instance, by making students feel less stressed about their future prospects), I don't see how it would lead to more discipline or a focus on deliberate practice. Successful people tend to do the same things they've always done, for the obvious reason that they are successful doing it. If they were undisciplined and successful, what motivation would they have for becoming disciplined?
In addition to the data and the research (and Newport has illuminated many more results than this one), two anecdotes come to mind. The first is from The Effective Executive by Peter Drucker, where he brings forward some examples:
> [Consider] Harry Hopkins, President Roosevelt’s confidential adviser in World War II. A dying, indeed almost a dead man for whom every step was torment, he could only work a few hours every other day or so. This forced him to cut out everything but truly vital matters. He did not lose effectiveness thereby; on the contrary, he became, as Churchill called him once, “Lord Heart of the Matter” and accomplished more than anyone else in wartime Washington.
The second is from my personal life. Having children forced me to concentrate my efforts and create a much more disciplined work life. I'm more successful and focused than ever. Although this is just an anecdote, this phenomenon is commonly reported by other people in demanding technical or executive roles.
> The answer, of course, would be research. All the students were working the same amount. Their work habits were different.
The proper research here would have been to make the student change their habit and see if they became better musicians as a result. This article isn't research, it's writing down a fact and then trying to extract conclusions when none can be made.
The “elite” people in this story aren’t relaxing more, they have their shit together and plan. They report that they work the same but probably actually work more because they are dedicating blocks of time.
Working smart, hard is how you get value from hard work. Good luck and timing manner, but fortune favors the bold.
> How do we know the more relaxed/organized schedule leads to success, and not that success leads to a more relaxed/organized schedule?
In the article, they looked at university students, prior to success. Of course this meant they had to predict the future, and they did this by asking the professors and by self-selection: The assumption was that music students who study to become teachers are average performers whereas music students who study to become performers and whose professors think they are great are also in fact going to be great.
Bill Gates is the epitome of a no-talent ass-clown who owes 100% his financial success to his personal family connections (his mother was personal friends with John Akers and John Opel of IBM due to their work on the United Way board together, and she leveraged this connection to get a fledgling Microsoft a sweetheart deal to develop the OS for the IBM PC) and his willingness to mercilessly steal the source code of people far smarter than him. Seeing this vicious bastard praised on a "hacker" forum is mind-boggling to me.
Is there any good reading or critical biography of this? Assuming your account isn't a gross exaggeration of Gates' misdeeds, this sounds like it would make good reading
This reminds me of some other advice I remember reading: No level of hard work or organization will substitute for talent and opportunity, and nearly all success stories to the contrary are missing key facts. ie Myth: Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team. Reality: Michael Jordan was put onto the junior team with players his own age/size so he could get more play time, instead of being prematurely promoted to the highest level of play. Myth: Bill Gates is a college drop out who found success in a technical field purely based on personal merit. Reality: Gates' private high school gave him more access to computers than Harvard, and continuing at Harvard would have been a waste of time given his level of experience in the field.
The lesson is that you need to figure out what you're good at and where you have opportunity, and then work hard in those areas. Just working hard is a recipe for failure for most people.