Top performers’ success may have more to do with great timing than great talent

[Quantum]

It's hard to beat being born in a well-off country to well-off parents. Then again what about Larry Page and Sergey Brin, the founders of Google?

For example, Gates’s upper-class background and private education enabled him to gain extra programming experience when less than 0.01% of his generation then had access to computers. His mother’s social connection with IBM’s chairman enabled him to gain a contract from the then-leading PC company that was crucial for establishing his software empire.

This is important because most customers who used IBM computers were forced to learn how to use Microsoft’s software that came along with it. This created an inertia in Microsoft’s favour. The next software these customers chose was more likely to be Microsoft’s, not because their software was necessarily the best, but because most people were too busy to learn how to use anything else.

Microsoft’s success and market share may differ from the rest by several orders of magnitude but the difference was really enabled by Gate’s early fortune, reinforced by a strong success-breeds-success dynamic. Of course, Gates’s talent and effort played important roles in the extreme success of Microsoft. But that’s not enough for creating such an outlier. Talent and effort are likely to be less important than circumstances in the sense that he could not have been so successful without the latter.
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Being in the right place (succeeding in a context where early outcome has an enduring impact) at the right time (having early luck) can be so important that it overwhelms merits. With this in mind there’s a good case that we shouldn’t just reward or imitate life’s winners and expect to have similar success. But there is a case that the winners should consider imitating the likes of Gates (who became a philanthropist) or Warren Buffett (who argues that richer Americans should pay higher taxes) who have chosen to use their wealth and success to do good things. The winners who appreciate their luck and do not take it all deserve more of our respect.

(http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/2017...)

[Ian]

There is no doubt at all timing is everything. You still have to play it right, though. For example, the Google founders still had to compete with the likes of Yahoo and Alta Vista, but they predominated. However, anyone coming in five years later would have had a real difficult time. Same with Microsoft. They got a deal with IBM - exactly how I have no idea - and never looked back because they had IBM's clout. Microsoft is now bigger than IBM.