Outliers Part 2 of 3: 10,000 Hours & The Beatles in Hamburg
December 10, 2008 by dr. lam
When the Beatles hit the U.S. shores in 1964, they were hailed as the vanguard of the British Invasion. However, did the Beatles simply succeed out of sheer talent? In Gladwell’s book, Outliers, he traces the Beatles’ growth, maturity, and success to a critical time that they spent in Hamburg, Germany. The Beatles began playing already since 1957 but it was not until 1960 when they were brought over to Hamburg to play 8 hours a day, 7 days a week in a strip joint that they were able to get the right experience they needed to be successful. Lennon recalls when they were in Liverpool, they played one-hour gigs once a week or so meaning they played the same songs over and over again, their hits. When forced to play continuously all the time, they were compelled to improvise, learn new material quickly, play all types of music, etc., just to keep their foreign audience engaged. Their raw talent was placed into a boiling crucible where, after 5 trips to Hamburg, they transformed into the Beatles that arrived in the U.S. in 1964. Gladwell speculates that it takes 10,000 hours to arrive at a definable success in many fields. Bill Gates, the subject of yesterday’s blog, arrived at his 10,000 hours through luck of circumstance that put him well ahead of everyone else by a sizable time differential.
I look at how YouTube and the entire Internet medium have become my voice, so to speak, to reach the masses across many shores. We have on this website regularly people from Asia, Europe, South America and from every part of the North American continent. Similarly, I now attract patients every single day from across the United States and the world, all by virtue of a singular message beamed out over the net. Back in December 2006, I had this crazy idea to start loading videos onto a nascent site, YouTube, because I had a message to deliver but had no platform for doing so. I remember that my sister and mother were laughing uproariously about my activity, thinking what a colossal waste of time. Now the attention that I have garnered through my Internet exposure accounts for 60 to 70% of my business.
I don’t know if I have logged my 10,000 hours in, but I am on track to do so and exceed that number. I work tirelessly every day between my busy patient practice, at night, and on weekends thinking about and working on the Internet. I learned Illustrator, Photoshop, Dreamweaver and work somewhat religiously on my site, as I am doing right now on a Saturday. In a way, this is not work for me; it is my love and passion. I love communicating my vision. I love thinking of new strategies to communicate that vision, and I love my ever expanding audience, which is now 1.5 million viewers on YouTube, almost every country in the world has seen this site (178 out of 195 countries according to my webmaster) with over 1,200 unique visitors to this site every day. I now come up with creative ideas that my webmaster implements for me at a furious pace because the execution of these creative thoughts come to me almost naturally by this point. I had a PR individual ask me last week, “Don’t you worry that someone will steal your ideas if you put them out there?” I frankly said, “No, they can’t keep up with me so I don’t even worry about it. By the time they copy what I have done, I have already thought of something else and far better.”
Although fruitless hard work backed up without talent and passion is not going to move you forward, hard work to the point of almost insanity is a requisite for success according to Gladwell’s thesis. Obviously, I subscribe to that philosophy. Cheers to hard work driven by inestimable passion!
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