Start tracking your hours… Malcolm Gladwell’s third book increases his lead in the ‘innovation as essay’ market. Outliers: The Story of Success walks in with a metaphor: that it takes 10k hours, as a general rule, of experience to become successful. Examples: Bill Joy of Sun Microsystems (early access to university computer labs), Bill Gates (early to high school computers), and The Beatles’ crucible (8-hour gigs in Hamburg 7 days a week, before they ‘invaded’ the US).

How does this consuming intensity of practice - of persistence - make do or compete with our multi-tasked lifestyles today? Gladwell appropriately calls the Beatles’ Hamburg transformation a “crucible.” As innovators or musical risk-takers, they were forced by situation and environment to move beyond the one-hour gigs in their homeland to literally full-time band play. Per Philip Norman, Beatles’ biographer:

They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back. They learned not only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers - cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren’t disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.

Of note, there was also little ‘adult or corporate supervision’ during these 8-hour sessions. And for the Beatles, they were in old strip joints whose owners were looking for a way to bring in more audiences. Call it the vacuum of late-night music clubs. For Bill Joy and Bill Gates, they were in their own private versions of the music studio: the vacuums of academia. Crunching code from two to eight a.m. in computer labs sounds about as sexy as sweaty cellars in Hamburg. In all cases, their ability to crunch hours to improve on their performances, codes and skills made them highly valuable and successful later.

As we each look at our individual time cards - separating out the countless hours spent online - can we match these 10k hours, which are roughly equivalent to ten years? We’ll be looking at breaking out the individual success stories - what were ‘the hours,’ where were they spent most effectively and how did they change to create greater impact?