Is it talent and smarts—or is it luck. How real is the old saw ‘the luck of the draw’? Apparently more than you might think.

Not just luck of the draw, but definitely ‘right place/right time’.

First, I read an article regarding the serendipity-based success of Ustream.tv, a new website.

It started when a “Bay Area couple’s pet Shiba Inu, a kind of Japanese hunting dog, gave birth, and its owners decided to train a Webcam on the newborn pups so they could keep an eye on them from work…after a Ustream employee spotted the Webcast and began passing it around to friends and family, the video went, as they say, viral. It has had 6 million viewers, 4 million in the last week alone, spanning the globe from Egypt to Venezuela. Those viewers have streamed nearly 4 million hours, or 391 years, of doggie video…” Pretty good for a site that normally has around ten million US visitors a month.

A little over a week later I read a review of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success that documents the premise of luck and right time/right place.

Gladwell looks at impact of when you’re born. Consider these high tech legends, Bill Gates, born 1955, Paul Allen, born 1953, Steve Jobs, born 1955, and Bill Joy and Scott McNealy, born 1954.

Coincidence? No. timing offered opportunities that wouldn’t have been there otherwise.

More proof?

“Two-thirds of Canada’s pro hockey players were born in January or February. The same holds true in college and high-school all-star teams. Canada organize kids by age, based on the calendar year. Children born in the first two months of the year are inevitably larger and more coordinated than teammates six to 10 months younger. So they get more ice time, more coaching, and more chances to excel.”

Obviously, luck and right time/right place aren’t any kind of guarantee. It still takes a lot of hard work and effort. Companies can’t count on puppies and kids can’t count on being conceived in the merry month of May.

Companies need to pay better attention to serendipity and look for how it can be replicated or enhanced.

For kids, there needs to be a way to level the playing field, because we’re wasting an enormous amount of talent for silly reasons such as being born too late in the year. As Gladwell says, “When we misunderstand or ignore the real lessons of success, we squander talent,”

Image credit: sxc.hu

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 4th, 2008 at 4:30 am and is filed under Business info, Innovation. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.
Tags: luck, Malcolm Gladwell
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