Gladwell tries to deflate the myth of innate genius (that
great people are born great). Instead, he says that opportunity and hard work too often
go overlooked. He builds off the relative age effect (the magic birthday) to illustrate
how Bill Gates and the Beatles not only came along at the perfect time, but they had
logged the magic 10,000 hours faster than anyone else in order to best take advantage of
their opportunities in the personal computer industry and British Invasion
respectively.
Computer programmers Bill Joy and Bill Gates,
both born in the 1950s, have taken advantage of the relative-age effect to become
industry giants in the 1980s. Gates had access to a university mainframe as a teenager,
so he was light years ahead of the competition in terms of software development (he
dropped out of Harvard to write code.) Soon, Microsoft was born (while others his age
were still in college).
The same it is for the Beatles:
they toured Germany as teenagers in the infancy of rock 'n' roll, honing their skills,
while other bands were still in their garages. Gladwell not only debunks the romantic
mystique of self-determinism, but also the myth that genius is born, not made. He claims
that Mozart and The Beatles are not so much innate musical prodigies but grinders who
thrived only after 10,000 hours of practice. In short, whoever logs 10,000 hours of
experience in a booming industry has a distinct advantage over other
competitors.
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