The road to success is fraught with misconceptions?

Outliers, The Story of Success
Author: Malcolm Gladwell (2008)

Life had never been easy. Now it has been made more complicated. Kids all around the world had been fed with the idea that if you put in the hours and do as you are told, your future would be bliss. Nah, don’t buy that!

The secret to success still remains an enigma. Many factors affect the success of an individual. The author goes through the lives of a few successful people and a few who had the potential but did not quite make it.

One has to be born at the correct time. Sometimes the window of opportunity only comes once. One has to be of the proper state of mind and of the right age to grasp it. At the spur of the time when it happens, he must be willing to put in the long hours. That indulgence itself, an awful lot of hours, would determine your future success. The examples of Beatles and Bill Gates are mentioned here. Beatles' acid test was in Hamburg in 1962 when they took the challenge of playing long hours despite the difficulty. Computer maestros were obsessed with the new gadget to know it inside out. 

Of course, social strata of the individual’s family makes an impact. A rich kid has all the exposure, a parent who is willing enough to ferry him around, who would identify his aptitude, give him the coaching to be confident and assertive and to create an environment suitable for his goal.

However, the poor, if given the push in the right direction, would prosper. There, however, must be a concerted effort on the part of the individual, his family and perhaps the administrators and the governing bodies to organise appropriate platforms. The zest to succeed must also come from the individual.

The author goes on to analyse a few air crashes and to suggest that possibly cultural aspects played a minor but relevant role in them. He proffered the idea of Power Distance Index (PDI) - the measure of existence of hierarchy in a society, how it is accepted by a particular community and how it affects day to day conversation, particularly in life-threatening situations like a plane crash. A child nurtured in affluence would probably be more self-confident and assertive in getting his way around. One in a family taught to conform to authority or growing up in a dysfunctional environment may end up not trusting people in power and hence losing out many chances laid in front of him.

A lengthy discussion on PDI resulting from a cultural background as a contributing factor to plane crashes is put forward. Cultures which tend to hold people in high esteem (i.e. high PDI index) tend not to tell off their bosses when they are wrong and fail to exert their authority when needed. This had led to disastrous outcomes in many cases.

Unfortunately, I think the one on which he tries to explain the superiority of Chinese students in Mathematics as being too simplistic. He asserts that the labour intensive, highly skilled, lengthy duration of rice duration as well as the simplicity in the pronunciation of numbers as the reason for their excellence. He compares this to short planting days in the West and the shorter days there. Maybe he is saying that this may have engrained in the genetic level as many of these students are no longer planters' kids. And Singapore is hardly a farming society.

This dilemma is nothing new. Scholars from the Indian subcontinent, for aeons, have been trying to understand this conundrum - why two people develop and perform differently from each other. They try to invoke the time of birth, to place planetary positions as well as the constellation to predict the personality and aptitude of an individual towards a particular field. Unfortunately, it is not specific. Hence, its sensitivity is questionable.

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Then what?

Anand Kumar and his students

My brother from a different father and mother sent me a mail recently about a certain Mathematics tutor from Patna, Bihar, who would tutor students pro bono for them to pass the coveted Indian Institute of Technology entrance examinations. He hand picks a group of 30, motivates them, arranges hostel facilities, cooks healthy meals and literally drills them day and night to achieve 100% pass rate.
The students swarms in from remote and impoverished regions of the land to slog it out for about 7 months with the sole intention of passing the test. A pass, to them, is the panacea of their woes. A rewarding career and perhaps a post in a multinational company or even an overseas posting is a sure way to uplift their living conditions and their immediate loved ones. 

The spill over effect can be seen even to the relatives whose background and caste is irrelevant anymore. I can relate to the hopeful eyes of the illiterate parents who put all their hope, putting aside their difficulties and poverty, to educate their offspring. In the year that the documentary was shot, 29 of the 30 students passed their exams.

Audience with President Kallam

A little melodrama occurs after that. You can watch it below if you have the time.

So what happens afterwards? The teenagers go on to IIT, get a comfortable job, parents continue their  tortuous job albeit at a less strenuous pace. Then what? They get married, perhaps stay in a big mansion or migrate to a developed country and enjoy the fruit of their labour. They themselves would have offsprings who after growing up guarded against poverty and shielded from harsh reality of needing to acquire street-smartness and survival skills, would think that it is their birthright to demand for luxuries that their parents tried to offer to the kids. Whatever they missed, they did not want their children not to have.

On the part of the children, hard work and motivation would be alien vocabularies. They would talk about enjoying life. having a complete life, not to miss out on finer things of life and the now well renowned phrase of that it is their life and they can live any which way that they please!

In the immortal words of Confucius, wealth in a family would only last 3 generations. And the cycle of life would go back to square one!

The go-getter and the waiter?

I have been in the company of many grown men. That does not sound right, does it? The main agenda of union may vary from group to group. Some try to relive their loss of youth, other of the same testosterone driven deprived males may instead pursue their dream to compensate their losing prowess either in the athletic and conjugal fields.
An interesting discussion took place in the running group recently - Lifeless Footwear!
One party was vehemently arguing that his success in his field of indulgence was not primarily due to his outstanding academic achievements but rather his aesthetically pleasing personality, charming demeanor and his utmost care that he takes on his physical appearance. With his alluring and assertive manner of handling situations, he, in his lifetime had superseded many other more qualified individuals with much more impressive CV.
The other party reiterated that even though he looked impressive and would fit the bill of every mother's prospective son in law and every CEO's manager to do his dirty job, they are some things that looks do not decide. This party, being the pacifist and leaving to-the-fate kind of fellow, stressed that some things are determined by unspecified unexplainable forces. No matter how qualified one he is, certain things are beyond control. He attributed his success in life to karma, guidance from people around him, good progressive friends and lots of hard work, the only thing he knows. The divine forces paved his way to good fortune by clearing obstacles along the way, like not getting chicken pox during an important examination. But then, a dynamic and assertive person could even fight fate.....