What you probably didn't know about success (1st of 2 parts)

IQ and sky-high grades when you’re still in school have become the most common barometers for success. Schools, including my own, dedicate a day to honor the students who have shown what they would call ‘exemplary performance’ and who have achieved far more than what the rest of the student population could ever dream to achieve.

Many other schools even round up the crème dela crème of each year level into what we know as Honor Classes to make sure that these ‘gifted’ individuals not only get extra assignments, special projects, and intensive training, but they get the best teachers too. 

In the worlds of ballet, basketball, and hockey, it is no different. Those who are seen to be naturally leaner, or taller, or with the best builds are segregated from the rest. They are given intensive training, and those who are shown to possess to beat the others are further rounded up and given the best training. These are the people who are believed to be born to be the star dancers and star players since they started dancing or playing.

 But if IQ or natural ability were the sole basis for success, why do some people succeed far more than others do? To probe even deeper, is our notion of success truly that fool-proof?

Back in grade school, my teachers always told me that achievement was about talent plus perseverance. They were correct but only up to a particular point. Because if this was absolutely true, then all those who had exemplary talent and who worked hard to develop that talent would all have had experience unimaginable success and achievement. Obviously, one more element was missing and Malcolm Gladwell, the author of Outliers, had it down pat.

Achievement wasn’t just about talent and preparation. It was about talent, preparation, and most importantly arbitrary advantage. In the many studies that he was able to gather, it was obvious that many of the world’s most phenomenal successes from athletes to musicians to bands, Nobel laureates to billionaires were all products of roughly the same formula.

 To put it bluntly, success was, in a big part, about lucky breaks. According to Gladwell, in the lives of those who made it in Time’s persons of the century list and Forbes’ list, lucky breaks were the rule rather than the exception so if you think that talent and IQ are all there is to it, honey, you’d better start thinking again.

In the mid 1980s, Roger Barnsley, a Canadian psychologist put the spotlight on a phenomenon that, for so long, so many people in the world of sports had missed out—relative age. Barnsley, his wife, and his colleague poured over the birth dates of as many professional hockey players as they could and found a strange pattern in terms of the players’ birth months—many of them were born within the months of January, February, and March. They drew the same results after going over the data on every player of the Ontario Junior Hockey League. 

When others replicated this study in other sports like baseball, the discovery was roughly the same. Majority of those who made it to the upper class of their batches in both hockey and baseball recorded birth dates that were just as close to the cut-off dates for their age-class. If the cut-off date was January 1, as is the case of Canadian hockey, and a boy who turns 2 on January 2 will play against someone born on, say, December 15, the almost 10 month gap between them can represent a world of a difference.

 “…In pre-adolescence, a 12-month gap in age represents an enormous difference in physical maturity,” Gladwell said. This is also why, in elementary school intramurals, in a basketball match between Grade 5 and Grade 6, the sixth graders never fail to beat the crap out of the fifth graders—just because they’re bigger, taller, and more physically mature. In hockey and baseball, it was discovered that a staggering percentage of those who had the perfect birthdates to gain a physical upper hand on those who were not, were eventually seeded out from the rest of the pack, trained harder, got better because they clocked in more hours at hard training, and eventually made it to the major leagues—on field and not on the bench. 

(To be continued)