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I'm currently reading Malcolm Gladwell's new book, Outliers: http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwel...

It's a fascinating account of what makes people successful. Major points I've picked up so far:

* the contribution of IQ to success maxes out at around 120; beyond that, IQ points don't matter much, because you're smart enough to get by.

* What Robert Sternberg nicknames "practical intelligence" (http://www.indiana.edu/~intell/practicalintelligence.shtml) is extremely important to overall success. Affluent and middle-class parents tend to be much better at passing this sort of intelligence along to their kids than lower-income ones.

* Seemingly irrelevant details like birthdate play a major role too. He shows how the day you were born has >10% contribution to academic success, because if you don't make the cutoff date for going to school, you'll be one of the older, and thus more mentally mature individuals in your class. Consequently, these individuals are more likely to be selected for gifted programs. And because of the academic grooming, they end up being more likely to go to college. He also shows how, for example, professional Canadian hockey players are almost never born in the later months of the year for similar reasons; if you don't make the cutoff date, you'll be one of the older players on your team, and scouts will confuse your increased maturity for inborn talent and you'll move up the ranks and get better training as a result.

It's a somewhat disturbing book because it shows how success isn't a direct function of an individual's aptitude. But I think it's also important, because, by observing these factors, you can hack your way into success even if the factors are going against you.

Knowing what to work on is certainly more important than trying to brute force all problems with man hours, but unless you've spent hours and hours of hard work learning your field, you won't KNOW what to work on.

The only reason the Caterina people knew what to work on this time is because of the hundreds of hours of experience they got building flickr.

The importance of hard work to success is extremely well documented: http://www.boston.com/bostonglobe/ideas/articles/2009/08/02/...

http://blogmaverick.com/2009/05/13/success-motivation/

http://money.cnn.com/2008/10/21/magazines/fortune/talent_col...

http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwel...

⬐ akkartik

Yep. Alternative phrasing: it's not about how much you work but how immersed you get. That's what you have to optimize for. If it was just about how much work you get done startups would get done in twice the time if you worked at half the pace. But the result qualitatively changes if you never get immersed enough to find the important insights. Hard work is just a means. If it takes real work to find immersion, don't mess with that.

The danger of saying, "I don't need to work too hard," and scaling back on things that seem like dead ends is that they impact immersion. Dead ends are often useful in intangible ways.

Trevor Blackwell calls this tinkering (http://tlb.org/busywork.html)

⬐ joe_the_user

I think that the problem is the term "hard work".

I've spend a tremendous amount of time learning those fields that I enjoy and am successful at. But a lot of that time has felt more like 'play' or 'exploration' or curiosity than 'hard work'.

Hard evokes doggedly trying a thousand elements with only the hope that they might create light.

I am sure that Tesla spent at least as much time and energy as Edison in pursuing his field. It also seems he brought more play and imagination to it. And Tesla's inventions were the big ones that made electricity practical - the electric motor, the generator, alternating current, etc.

I think that argument isn't so spending time and energy but rather against thinking that merely putting forth time energy is enough....

⬐ hegemonicon

I great interpretation of Malcolm Gladwell's 10000 hours that I came across somewhere is "Don't be concerned with practicing 10000 hours at something - be concerned with finding something you enjoy so much that you don't notice when the 10000 hours have passed"

⬐ adg

Gladwell popularized the "10,000 hours rule", but he didn't invent it. It's originally from a paper by K. Anders Ericsson on "deliberate practice" [1]. It cites a ton of other research in the area and is definitely worth reading if you liked Outliers.

[1] http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...