In 2007, I wrote an article about a book addressing one of the most confounding questions in poker: “How do we trust our snap reads and decisions?” That book is Blink by Malcolm Gladwell, and to be honest, steely and other long-time PocketFivers had beaten me to its discovery. Gladwell’s new work is just as interesting, and tackles another perplexing question applicable to our poker society: “How do we explain those among us who have had the greatest success?”

The new book is called Outliers and is sure to stir up its fair share of controversy. Gladwell confronts one of the fundamental tenets of American society, i.e. if you’re smart and you work hard, you can achieve anything. Outliers takes this bromide a step further; Gladwell states one must also have a set of extenuating circumstances and various degrees of benefactor and luck, to separate the leaders from the pack. Evidence is presented in a variety of forms, across a wide scope of professions:

- Birth date has as much to do with someone’s rise through junior hockey into the NHL as any other factor.

- Playing Hamburg strip clubs formed the Beatles’ brilliance.

- 20% of the 75 richest people in the history of the world were born within 9 years of each other, in the eastern half of the United States.

- The climate in Southern China causes those students to be world leaders in mathematical aptitude.

Through its 285 densely-packed pages, Gladwell takes disparate examples and returns to a common theme: to become a master of something, one must spend 10,000 hours in its focused, concentrated practice. And for a person to be able to devote this extraordinary amount of time, numerous external factors have to line up. As a prime example, Gladwell dedicates much of one chapter to the “be smart & work hard” poster child: the college dropout turned richest man in the world, Bill Gates.

And yes, Bill Gates is smart. And yes he worked. Bill Gates worked very hard. But he also had access to the computer center at the University of Washington in 1968, one of the first real-time university computer terminals in the country…at age 13. A teenager never would have bothered with the tedium of punch-card programming, but Gates didn’t have to, so he learned programming as early as anyone in the country. His parents were tremendously supportive of his education, even when it meant spending all night at the computer lab throughout his high school years.

As Gates was building up his 10,000 hours, local Seattle companies needed experienced programmers familiar with the same mainframe software & new Teletype terminals, and this high-schooler fit the bill. He wasn’t a naive kid when he dropped out of Harvard after one year; he was already a savvy professional.

Bill Gates was also born at just the right time to experience the dawn of personal computing. In 1975, the Altair 8800 kit was available for less than $400, the first computer priced for home use. Experienced professionals were set in their mainframe ways, and couldn’t see the potential in the new Altair. Younger kids couldn’t afford to spend the money on a bare-bones kit and didn’t have the technical expertise to get it to work. Like Bill Gates and his Microsoft co-founders, Paul Allen & Steve Ballmer were best equipped to take advantage of the new technology. Like Oracle founder Larry Ellison. Like Steve Jobs from Apple. Like the founders of Sun Microsystems. Thirty years after Silicon Valley exploded the majority of multi-millionaires and CEOs in the computer industry are, to this day, born between 1954 and 1956.

So, what’s the point? What’s this all have to do with poker?

As we’ve been told, the key to winning poker is volume. To achieve 10,000 hours, you have to play and study 50 hours a week for four years. You’ve got to spend your time at the table, review hands, define your style and learn how to deviate from it. But dramatic poker success is driven by the same external forces which provide success to others in all walks of life. Yes, we may be smart, and work hard at playing and studying the game. But if we:

- Were in junior high or high school when the movie “Rounders” came on HBO, so we could get enthused about poker with the energy of youth, and had excessive amounts of free time to learn the game with friends…

- Were in college when ESPN made Chris Moneymaker a household name, driving the level of enthusiasm even higher amongst people who could stay up all night and all weekend…

- Developed a circle of poker friends, good players, with whom you could talk away from the table and continue to accumulate knowledge and hours (practice is not “focused and concentrated” if your buddies stink and you develop incorrect theories about the game)…

- Opened an online poker account during the Moneymaker Boom, at an age where we could easily and legally deposit money…as could our competition, who were playing because poker was the hot new fad, and didn’t mind losing to be part of it…

- Had a big win early on, so we had some bankroll cushion to play with and push our learning curve against stiffer competition…

- Didn’t have to (or want to) withdraw regularly and use poker money for real life, keeping our roll intact longer…

…then we were far more likely to keep going in poker, and live a life which let us put in our 10,000 hours.

For those of us who don’t fit this “online superstar” profile…well, the news is discouraging. Our dreams of being AJKHoosier1 or BigRiskky are exceedingly unlikely to come to fruition. But there’s a silver lining to this realization.

It’s OK to be good at something, but never reach greatness. The goal should be improvement, not immortality. The pressure to be the very best is off. I’ll never be a professional poker player. I’ll never be as talented or successful as most pros half my age. When “Rounders” was in heavy cable rotation, I was 30 years old, with a wife, a demanding job, and a baby on the way. When the WSOP exploded on ESPN, I was scrambling to support a second kid. My online wins in 2005-2007 were quickly withdrawn without a second thought – I’d rather enjoy the profit with my family rather than the distinct possibility of giving it back to the poker community. There was no way I could put myself in a position to take advantage of the circumstances which make someone a poker outlier, even if I knew what they were at the time.

This doesn’t mean I can’t be profitable. I can still be a winning player. I can still be competitive. I can still enjoy learning about the game, and playing it as well as I can. When I focus the lens of brutal truth on what I’ve achieved, I can be comfortable with what I see, rather than looking for some invisible flaw which separates me from Annette_15.

For those of you just starting out…the path to greatness has changed. Don’t just think, “I’m gonna read and maybe join a training site, and I’ll be the next SCTrojans!” Establish a new vision.

I’m excited to see who comes along next, blazing a new trail to the peak of success. Who are the next wave of outliers, and how will they reach the top?

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