Introduction
This book investigates the reason behind why some people succeed using people who have succeeded in business and sport as case studies. Many people think that successful people are usually gifted or born with talent. This books primary goal is to explain why these kind of assumptions are wrong and instead show that it is instead a combination of other factors such as hard work, timing and opportunities.
Lessons learned
Children born in early months of year is going to have an advantage over children born in the later months especially when they are young. This applies to both sports and school. The is because of relative age, meaning how old you are compared to your competition or classmates. A kid born in January is almost going to be an entire year older than a kid born in December the same year. This is going to give them an advantage in both strength and intelligence since they have experienced life longer. For a January born 10 year old that would mean the kid is almost 10% older than a December born which is a large portion of their life.
In school and sports, kids who outshine their peers are also more likely get more attention and praise from their teachers. This puts them even further ahead and sets them up for more success. So there is a chance that “talented” and “untalented” kids get identified and labelled at an early age and the “talented” kids gets an advantage.
To become world-class at something, you have to put in 10000 hours of dedicated practice. This equals to around 5 years of 40 hours work weeks. So to master something it all comes down to being willing to try hard enough and staying disciplined and persistent for a long time.
After you become sufficiently good at a skill, to become even better its all about your own hard work and other related skills. For example if you are a graduate from law school who knows the basics of law. What is gonna separate you from other graduates is going to be other skills such as social, communication and reasoning skills and your willingness to learn.
Success is not correlated with high IQ.
Talent is overrated and hard work is underrated.
To succeed at something, you must feel that its meaningful and there is a trade-off between effort and reward. The work has to be satisfying since this will make you wanting to put time into it.
In general, kids from wealthy families learn much more than children from poorer families during holidays because of the influence from their parents. The parents in the wealthy family are also more involved in their kids life, such as giving advice on different topics.
A lot of successful tech entrepreneur were born during the 1950s. This books says that the reason was because the timing they had was perfect. They had just got their 10000 hours of software related skills that made them able to capitalise on the software industry, they were also around to right age of wanting to start a new company because if they had been older they might have had other priorities. So timing can also be important.
