Quote:
Originally Posted by DarkScribe
BTW, do you honestly feel that if Malcolm Gladwell was to walk into the boardrooms of the top 500 companies and check credentials, that he would find many there who were unqualified in a tertiary sense, board members who arrived at their position purely by "being lucky"? I truly doubt it. The recent dot.com phenomena is about the only real exception, several of the more successful among their CEOs dropped out of university, but in almost all cases they were recognised as autodidacts of exceptional tenacity and ability.
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Me? Goodness, I disagree with Gladwell across the board!
When I quoted his position as "luck and stubborness" I was being polite. His actual position is more like "luck and rote repetition" and implies that talent or lack thereof is irrelevant. Just sticking with it and racking up 10,000 hours worth of practice. As if that were sufficient unto itself to ensure success.
He does quote Gates and a few others as saying they were lucky and then takes that as gospel instead of (real or fake) modesty. Right, like somebody that visible is going to say "Oh, I'm successful because I'm smarter than 99.999% of the people that ever lived!" or something like that. (That's for doped-addled rockstars!)
It's just another example of the old statistical bugaboo: confusing correlation with causation.
He got a "bestseller" out of it, though.
(shrug)
Sometimes its not whether you're right or wrong but whether you can find enough people willing to "buy" what you're dishing. (As L. Ron Hubbard famously discovered.)