Working hard won't get you that far

What if I told you that success is pure luck? That the month you were born in might have made the difference between you being super rich or not? In this edition, we’re going to discuss why success is pure luck, or almost…

A few months ago I finished reading one of the most interesting books I’ve ever read, Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, who also wrote books like “Blink” and “The Tipping Point”. In general, he always touches on career subjects and ideas we don’t usually think much about day to day. In this one specifically he focuses on one question:

Why do some people succeed, and others don’t?

The Myth of Talent#

Ever since I was a kid I heard that “whoever works hard and puts in the effort gets everything”, that “determination is the key to success”, or even that I had “talent” for something. But the reality is that all of this is nothing more than a story to make us feel good about ourselves. Or is it?

The reality is that talent as a whole is something very overrated. For example, we tend to praise people who have incredible talent, a football player, a guitarist, a visual artist. But, while talent is indeed important for those people to get where they got, it isn’t everything. They probably wouldn’t have had as much success as they had if they had only talent, but they’d still be successful all the same without it. I call this “the myth of talent”.

Talent as a whole is something very overrated.

Outliers is the book that popularized the concept that you need to put in 10,000 hours of practice to be a master at whatever it is you’re doing. And that’s completely true, for you to be really good at something, you need a lot of deliberate practice. And that’s also one of the metrics for success.

Or do you think the Beatles started out and were an instant hit right away?

The story of the Beatles, told in the book, says that, during the band’s first years, they met a manager who got them several gigs in Hamburg. The venue they played at was a place that needed an act that would keep playing all night long, and as beginners they saw the perfect opportunity to not just build a repertoire doing covers, but also test their own songs, plus gain stage experience and conditioning for long shows.

By the time the Beatles blew up, they had already done more than 1200 shows in that Hamburg bar alone, almost 9600 hours playing the most varied songs nonstop for the most varied crowds. That put them in contact with a lot of people who already knew the band, plus other managers and promoters who had other contacts for other gigs.

The Beatles’ story shows that talent alone isn’t enough. Even being exceptional musicians, without the 1200 shows in Hamburg, they wouldn’t have had the experience or the contacts needed to reach success. You do need to put in a big effort, but a lot depends on how prepared you are when the moment comes.

Talent matters, but context is essential

Talent is a mix of several factors, many of them tied to external factors you have no way of controlling, like:

• Historical context
• Cultural heritage
• Opportunities

Or even things that look like random luck. Talent and hard work definitely matter, but they’re amplified when you meet other conditions, and that’s not the only story I have to tell you. Like how one of the richest people in the world took advantage of his opportunities to become who he became.

Luck in success#

You’re reading this newsletter right now, you probably like computers (or you wouldn’t know who I am), so you must know Bill Gates. The Co-Founder of Microsoft, the biggest software company in the world (and my former boss), was once the richest man in the world and is still on that list today. And what if I told you all of that was luck? Sure, the talent was there, but luck was the main factor in his success. The book tells his story too.

External factors shape your life, even if you have no power over them

The year you were born in can determine a lot about your path. Me, for instance, I was born in 1995. If I’d been born 10 years later, I would have missed the explosion of computers and the internet. Ten years earlier, maybe I would never have gotten into tech. My timing gave me specific advantages, like learning to work well without internet and dealing with analog things. And the same happened with uncle Bill.

Bill Gates was born in 1955, at the perfect time to take advantage of the personal computer revolution of the 70s. If he’d been born 10 years earlier, he’d be too old. Ten years later, too young. Gates also got lucky studying at Lakeside School, an elite private school that, in 1968, acquired a computer terminal. There, he started programming young and already racking up his 10,000 hours of practice

On top of that, another improbable coincidence is that, if you remember the last edition, back then computers used time sharing, meaning they were connected to a nearby mainframe.

Because he lived close to the University of Washington, which had a mainframe and terminals available for night use. He spent nights programming, thanks to understanding parents who let him stay out late. The effort counted, but the context was essential.

If he’d had the opportunity and hadn’t programmed through the nights, nothing would have happened, it was the vision to understand this was an opportunity and to grab that opportunity that made the difference.

It’s not about individual effort, it’s about the context of that effort

To top it off, at 16, he still got the chance to work at TRW, alongside experienced engineers, on a software project. That experience put him years ahead of most students of his generation. All of this culminated in the creation of the BASIC interpreter for the Altair 8800, together with Paul Allen. If he’d been born 5 or 10 years later, none of that would have happened.

The point isn’t to diminish his effort or talent, but to highlight that he knew how to take advantage of a context of unique opportunities.

I’m not saying effort is useless, or that talent doesn’t count, but saying that talent and effort without taking advantage of opportunities are worth nothing

Another similar story is that of Bill Joy, creator of Vi (today Vim) and co-founder of Sun Microsystems, which I’ll tell in more detail in a future edition of Backlog. He was also extremely talented, but a lot of that thanks to where he was and the moment he lived in. But what if talent really didn’t matter?

Why does rice matter?#

So far, we’ve seen how talent was important, but not decisive, in some success stories. However, there are cases where talent really has nothing to do with someone’s success or skills.

For example, there’s a stereotype that Asian people are great at math. But what if I told you that has more to do with rice than with genetics?

Asian farmers worked 3000 hours a year versus the 1200 hours of an average European

For centuries, rice farming was the main economic and cultural pillar in parts of Asia, especially in China. Unlike other crops, planting rice demands constant attention all year round: the right amount of soil over the seed, the perfect leveling of the terrain and precise irrigation control. Complex flooding and drainage systems needed regular adjustment, making the cultivation an incredibly painstaking and laborious process. So the hard work is there, they’re doing it every day

Asian farmers worked, on average, 3,000 hours a year, while Europeans worked 1,200. Rice farming was painstaking and demanded constant effort, giving up wasn’t an option, or nobody would eat. That culture of intense effort, precision and long-term focus was passed down from generation to generation, creating a legacy that persists to this day.

And that persistence and focus on solving hard problems means these folks don’t give up easily, and keep going even when everything seems to be going wrong.

And that’s why they’re better at math, because it’s something that demands resilience, effort, you can’t give up because you’re stuck on a hard problem. These things need time, effort. That’s the trait rice gave this culture: persistence.

While in most of the western world children and teenagers tend to abandon a hard task after 5 minutes on average without making progress, eastern children tend to keep at it for at least 30 minutes, six times longer. And that persistence and focus on solving hard problems means these folks don’t give up easily, and keep going even when everything seems to be going wrong.

That has nothing to do with talent, but with a cultural heritage that gets passed down if you were born in a certain place, and only there. In this case it’s a positive trait, but what if that heritage were the biggest problem of your life?

Prejudice as opportunity#

Another story told in the book is how prejudice against foreigners ended up turning those foreigners into successful lawyers. And how things completely out of your control, like your racial heritage, can be decisive for your story.

If you were the child of Eastern European immigrants you would suffer prejudice

In the 1940s, the legal market in the US was dominated by big traditional firms, which recruited only lawyers from rich protestant families, graduated from prestigious universities like Harvard or Yale. Children of Eastern European immigrants, mostly Jewish, faced prejudice for not being as rich and, even with good educations, were excluded from those firms.

Without access to the traditional areas, those lawyers specialized in fields less prestigious at the time, like corporate litigation and mergers and acquisitions, areas seen as “dirty” and avoided by the big firms. For them, those practices were the only opportunities available, but also the beginning of something much bigger.

Luck is being prepared when the moment comes

However, in the 1970s, the market changed completely. Mergers and acquisitions became extremely profitable, and, suddenly, the legal market needed specialists. The best ones? Precisely the Jewish lawyers, who had more than a decade of experience in those neglected areas.

That initial exclusion, out of their control, forced them to specialize in a field that later became central to corporate law. Without that barrier, maybe they would have followed conventional paths and never stood out as leaders. Prejudice is never something positive, but this story shows how adverse situations can, unexpectedly, open doors to new opportunities.

And this has NOTHING TO DO with talent

If we transpose that same idea to today, taking out the part about being something “dirty”, the old Machine Learning and AI engineers who were previously considered as “disposable” or “low importance” areas have now become indispensable to a generation that depends on them more and more.

The same way these stories show how apparently unimportant things can turn into incredible opportunities, my own path had a bit of that too.

My Story#

To wrap up this edition, I want to tell a bit of what I think my story has to do with this. And I think it’s even a little similar to the story of others like Bill Gates (just a tiny bit smaller).

Ever since I was a kid I had constant contact with hardware, software

I was born in 1995 and got very lucky to grow up in a curious environment full of experimentation, thanks to my parents, especially my father. He had a VHS rental store and used a computer to do the spreadsheets, which gave me constant contact with technology from an early age.

My father was super self-taught and fixed everything himself, light bulbs, cables, showers, and I was always nearby, absorbing everything. Over time, that curiosity turned into learning. At 6, I was already taking computers apart and putting them back together (sometimes to clean the rental store’s parts) and could identify resistors, transistors and capacitors, even without understanding exactly what they were for. That early contact with hardware and software was a huge advantage that few people had.

At 6 years old I could assemble and disassemble computers

In the 2000s, during the boom of the Internet and computers, I was already messing with machines from early on, but I was still too young to get a job. When I got into technical school, I already knew most of what was being taught, which made my life a lot easier when it came time to look for work.

One day, at an event that, let’s say, wasn’t exactly popular with the cool crowd, I was offered a scholarship at a design school, something I’d always wanted to learn. I decided to start the course, and that’s when the first coincidence happened. There, I met someone who connected me to my first real job, where I stayed for 5 years, even without having a degree or formal education in the field. I never did an internship.

In the next 3 years I accumulated experiences few people at my university had

When I got into university, I had already been working as a developer for more than 2 years at that consultancy, the perfect place to learn, since I dealt with different clients almost every week. In the next 3 years, I accumulated more experience than others do in years in the field, something few classmates had, because while they only studied, I did both, at the cost of my health, unfortunately.

When I became a senior developer, I was 24, and had 6 years of experience. I was already giving talks and sharing what I knew, partly so I wouldn’t forget it, and that connected me with a lot of people and opened even more doors.

I don’t consider myself an exceptional programmer, nor extremely talented. I was just in the right place, at the right time, with the right skills for the moment. A mix of hard work, luck and context. Again, it’s never just talent.

The final question I leave you with is this:

How can you take advantage of the opportunities around you to turn your context into success?