SHOOT: In either of Vanek's examples she implies that success is entirely a matter of luck, that you can get something for nothing. She implies that hard work may have something to do with success. Actually, it has everything to do with it. But in this Pop Idols/Paris Hilton world, many people hope and wish and expect to get something for nothing. Well go and try it. Go to a shopping mall with no money and see how much something you get for nothing. I'm going to take a wild swing here and say, not much.
If you're like me you probably think Bill Gates was born with superior genes, you've given up learning Zulu after failing to speak a coherent sentence within 30 minutes and told yourself you don't have a knack for new languages or blamed your genes. But then you pick up a book like Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers* and you realise how wrong you've been ... that just maybe you could become more proficient in Zulu if you were prepared to devote more hours to it ... Perhaps it has little to do with your genes but more with hard work, culture and history. You realise that the richest man in the world and the founder of Microsoft didn't get to where he is because of superior genes, same for Bill Joy, who wrote the support code for the internet and helped find Sun Microsystems.
In fact, as Gladwell points out, it was because of the year they were born in, the hours they spent on computers, their culture, their history and being dealt the right hand at the right time.
|
No comments:
Post a Comment