[pchristensen]

You've worked harder than most people I know, but didn't you a) get the first PC in Israel, b) go to Yale, c) get early '90s Microsoft stock, d) have a house you could use as an office when you started your business, e) define the category of software blogging by getting there first, and f) start a profitable company during a tech slump, giving you an advantage in hiring?

Joel Spolsky: Hard work + good luck = success! You could be Gladwell's next anecdote.

[neilk]

Hang on a minute. Gladwell's book is not about mere ordinary successes, but outlier successes. Like Michael Phelps or Bill Gates. (Joel, I hope you will forgive me for calling you an "ordinary" successful person).

I think you can see the effects of luck and diligence in just about everyone's life. That's not at issue. Gladwell is suggesting that to be a Bill Gates requires a good amount of diligence (10,000 hours of practice) and also utterly ridiculous good luck. That is, the skill component stops scaling really quickly, but there's no limit to how lucky you can be.

The critics are proclaiming this to be both unsubstantiated and a truism. But I think Gladwell is onto something, because certainly our culture treats successful people differently. Think about all the successful businesspeople invited to Davos. Maybe future generations will look at that and wonder what we were thinking. Like we gathered together a lot of people who won the lottery, in the hopes that they'd win the lottery again?