What is common to the Beatles and Bill Gates?

What is it that makes people successful? Did they have talent that is inborn? Or did they get an opportunity to practise when it really mattered?

“If we scratch below the surface of every great achiever, do we always find…some sort of a special opportunity to practise?” questions Malcolm Gladwell in his latest book Outliers — The Story of Success.

Gladwell then goes around proving his point by taking up two examples: The Beatles and Bill Gates.

“The Beatles — John Lennon, Paul McCartney, George Harrison and Ringo Starr — came to the United States in February of 1964, starting the so-called British Invasion of the American music scene, and putting out a string of hit records that transformed the face of popular music,” writes Gladwell.

Before coming to the US, Lennon and McCartney, who were the backbone of the band, had been working together for almost 7 years. So, they had some experience of working together. But, what really seems to have got the band going is that they played long hours together.

“In 1960, while they were still just a struggling high school rock band, they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany….There was one particular club owner called Bruno, who was originally a fairground showman. He had the idea of bringing in rock groups to play in various clubs. They had this formula. It was a huge non-stop show, hour after hour, with a lot of people lurching in and other lot lurching out. And the bands would keep playing all the time to catch the passing traffic,” he writes.

The Hamburg gigs did not pay well. The music wasn’t the primary thing on the mind of the audience. What was extraordinary was the amount of time the band played together. “The Beatles ended up travelling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. On the first trip, they played 106 nights, five or more hours a night. On their second trip, they played 92 times. On their third trip, they played 48 times, for a total of 172 hours on stage. The last two Hamburg gigs, in November and December of 1962, involved another 90 hours of performing. All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and half,” writes Gladwell.

In fact by the time the Beatles burst onto the scene big time in 1962, they had performed together on stage an astonishing twelve hundred times. Most bands don’t perform so many live gigs in their entire careers. And to perform these live gigs, the Beatles had to build stamina and learn an enormous amount of songs. This is what made them highly disciplined. If ever there was a case of practice making perfect, this was it.

And what about Bill Gates?

Bill Gates as a child got easily bored with his studies. “So his parents took him out of public school, and at the beginning of his seventh grade, sent him to Lakeside, a private school that catered to Seattle’s elite families. Midway through Gates’ second year at Lakeside, the school started a computer club,” writes Gladwell.

Now, what is to be remembered is that this is the late sixties we are talking about. Even for a country that was as developed as the US was most schools did not have computer clubs. And more than that the computer Lakeside had bought was absolutely cutting edge. As Gladwell writes, “The school didn’t have its students learn programming by the laborious computer-card system, like virtually everyone else was doing in the 1960s. Instead Lakeside installed what was called an ASR-33 Teletype, which was a time-sharing terminal with a direct link to the mainframe computer in downtown Seattle,” writes Gladwell.

The whole idea of time sharing was developed only as late as 1965. So what Gates’ school had was absolutely cutting-edge technology. As Gladwell writes, “Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968.” From that moment on Gates lived practically in the computer room. “In one seven-month period in 1971, Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of computer time on the ISI mainframe, which averages out to eight hours a day, seven days a week.” Soon Gates found out that University of Washington had a computer that was free. Since he lived very close to the University, he was racking up computer hours there as well.

“By the time Gates had dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own software company he’d been programming non-stop for seven consecutive years,” writes Gladwell.  So, it was not only talent that made them successful. As Gladwell writes, “What truly distinguishes their histories is not their extraordinary talent, but their extraordinary opportunities.”