What makes high-achievers different?

The Matthew effect

Opportunity plays a critical role in success. It is those who are successful who are most likely to be given the kinds of special opportunities that lead to further success. So, those who have more advantage, have an advantage to acquire more and success is the result of what sociologists like to call “accumulative advantage”.

In the following two cases, we do ability grouping early on in childhood, confusing maturity with ability and prematurely writing off some people as failures. That small initial advantage persists over the years.

Canadian hockey

This effect can be found for example on who gets to the top of the hockey world. For some reason, there are an incredible number of January, February, and March birth dates. The reason for that is that the eligibility cutoff for age-class hockey is January 1 and in preadolescence, a twelve-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity. Those who are more likely to be seen as talented are the bigger and more coordinated players, who have had the benefit of critical extra months of maturity. By the age of thirteen or fourteen, with the benefit of better coaching and all that extra practice under his belt, they are really better.

Education

Exact same biases that in the previous example also show up in areas of much more consequence, like education. The oldest children score somewhere between four and twelve percentile points better than the youngest children (And that’s the difference between qualifying for a gifted program and not).

The 10,000-Hour Rule

Achievement is talent plus preparation. The smaller the role innate talent seems to play, the bigger the role preparation seems to play. The thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. The merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers had totaled just over four thousand hours. Researchers however, have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. Even Mozart — the greatest musical prodigy of all time — couldn’t hit his stride until he had his ten thousand hours in. Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough.

The Beatles

Lennon and McCartney first started playing together in 1957, seven years prior to landing in America. The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and the end of 1962. They performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. They had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back.

Bill gates

As a child Bill Gates was precocious and easily bored by his studies. His parents took him out of public school, and sent him to Lakeside. The school started a computer club. Bill got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968. Gates lived in the computer room. They gave Bill Gates extra time to practice. He’d been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years.

Intelligence

IQ measures the in some way our “innate” analytical ability. To get into and succeed in a reasonably competitive graduate program, you probably need an IQ of at least 115. In general, the higher your score, the more education you’ll get, the more money you’re likely to make, and — believe it or not — the longer you’ll live. However, once someone has reached an IQ of somewhere around 120, having additional IQ points doesn’t seem to translate into any measurable real-world advantage. Intelligence has a threshold, and matters only up to a point. On the other side, practical intelligence is about knowing how to do something without necessarily knowing why you know it or being able to explain it; it’s knowledge that helps you read situations correctly and get what you want. It is a kind of intelligence separate from the sort of “intelligence” measured by IQ.

The termites

Terman, an American psychologist, had sorted through the records of some 250,000 elementary and high school students and selected the best and the brightest, who had highest IQs. That group of young geniuses came to be known as the “Termites”. He believed that his Termites were destined to be the future elite of the United States, but he was wrong: By the time the Termites reached adulthood, they tended to earn good incomes — but not that good. Depending on the types of jobs they had and how successful they were, Terman divided them into A,B and C groups. The “As” (~20%) were the true success (engineers, doctors, etc.), and the “Cs” (~20%), those who had done the “least” with their intelligence. The biggest difference between all of them was their family background. Those that didn’t have it, were more likely to land in groups B or C.

Time and environment

In the autobiographies published every year by the billionaire/entrepreneur/rock star/celebrity, the story line is always the same: our hero is born in modest circumstances and by virtue of his own grit and talent fights his way to greatness. However…personal explanations of success don’t work; people don’t rise from nothing. It makes a big difference where and when they grew up. Successful people are products of particular places and environments. The sense of possibility so necessary for success comes not just from inside us or from our parents. It comes from our time: from the particular opportunities that our particular place in history presents us with

Time matters

1930 was the perfect birth date for a New York Jewish lawyer because that would give the lawyer the benefit of a blessedly small generation. Joe Flom’s life turns out to be much more intriguing than the mythological version because all the things in his life that seem to have been disadvantages — that he was a poor child of garment workers; that he was Jewish at a time when Jews were heavily discriminated against; that he grew up in the Depression — turn out, unexpectedly, to have been advantages. One of Joe Flom’s classmates at Harvard Law School was a man named Alexander Bickel. Like Flom, Bickel was the son of Eastern European Jewish immigrants and hel was a star in his law school class. The work that “came in the door” to the generation of Jewish lawyers from the Bronx and Brooklyn in the 1950s and 1960s, then, was the work the white-shoe firms disdained: litigation and, more important, “proxy fights,” which were the legal maneuvers at the center of any hostile-takeover bid. All of a sudden the things that the old-line law firms didn’t want to do — hostile takeovers and litigation — were the things that every law firm wanted to do. And who was the expert in these two suddenly critical areas of law? The once marginal, second-tier law firms started by the people who couldn’t get jobs at the downtown firms ten and fifteen years earlier. What started out as adversity ended up being an opportunity.Jewish lawyers did not become professionals in spite of their humble origins, they became professionals because of their humble origins.

Environment matters

The “loss” rate for an airline like the American carrier United Airlines in the period 1988 to 1998 was .27 per million departures, which means that they lost a plane in an accident about once in every four million flights. The loss rate for Korean Air, in the same period, was 4.79 per million departures — more than seventeen times higher.

The typical accident involves seven consecutive human errors and are rarely problems of knowledge or flying skill. I.e: The weather is bad enough that the pilot feels a little bit more stressed than usual, the plane is behind schedule and the pilots are hurrying, the pilot at the time of the accident has been awake for twelve hours or more, the two pilots have never flown together before, etc.

Planes are safer when the least experienced pilot is flying, because it means the second pilot isn’t going to be afraid to speak up. Every major airline now has what is called “Crew Resource Management” training, which is designed to teach junior crew members how to communicate clearly and assertively. Each of us has his or her own distinct personality. But overlaid on top of that are tendencies and assumptions and reflexes handed down to us by the history of the community we grew up in, and those differences are extraordinarily specific. Power distance is concerned with attitudes toward hierarchy, specifically with how much a particular culture values and respects authority. America is a classic low–power distance culture, so the air traffic controller is thought of as an equal. and if there is confusion, it is the fault of the speaker. Korea, like many Asian countries, is receiver oriented. It is up to the listener to make sense of what is being said. This doesn’t work in an airplane cockpit on a stormy night with an exhausted pilot trying to land at an airport with a broken glide scope.

In 2000, Korean Air finally acted, bringing in an outsider from Delta Air Lines, David Greenberg, to run their flight operations. The new language of Korean Air was English, and if you wanted to remain a pilot at the company, you had to be fluent in that language. Greenberg’s rationale was that English was the language of the aviation world. In English, they would be free of the sharply defined gradients of Korean hierarchy.

Finally, Korean Air turned itself around. Today, the airline is a member in good standing of the prestigious SkyTeam alliance. Its safety record since 1999 is spotless.

Final conclusion

Success follows a predictable course. It is not the brightest who succeed, are those who have been given opportunities — and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them. So, to build a better world we need to replace the patchwork of lucky breaks and arbitrary advantages that today determine success — the fortunate birth dates and the happy accidents of history — with a society that provides opportunities for all.