I breezed through Outliers The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell last night. It’s shows a pretty common sense theory by giving examples such as Canadian hockey players and Bill Gates to explain how success is attained. Lots of hard work (10,000 hours) and also a set of lucky circumstances: good hockey players are all born in Jan just after the cut-off date for recruiting and Bill Gates went to a Seattle high school that bought a series of cutting edge computer with the PTA funds.

And it got me thinking about my own journey. I always knew this, that publishing my first written manuscript had a lot to do with luck (I moved to Seattle because of unplanned circumstance, Seattle has an active RWA local chapter with two American Title finalists in it (one winner) and plenty of supportive published authors, my manuscript landed on the right editor’s desk, I happen to do my online campain when everyone was discovering MySpace and Facebook and were very active online and no one was really asking for votes).

I think if I’d still be in RI, I may not have won. In fact, I may not gave written the book at all.

I was discouraged by the 10,000 hours of practice Gladwell mentionned until I realized I’ve been writing my journal regularly since I was 12: 300 hours a year for about 30 years – 90,000 hours of writing! Looks like it’ll take me another 3 years to be real good at it!

So very little talent here but lots of practice and good circumstances.

I’m mostly interested in this because of my children. I want to give them the best chance at success and this study shows me that a small lag in Math or Reading, say, can be overcome by lots of practice. And that labeling children early on is a bit mistake.

For us adult, we can’t do much about our background anymore but whatever we want to achieve, nothing stops us from starting on those 10,000 hours of practice! It may take a while but we can get there! We can achieve success, whatever that definition means for us.