1955 was a golden year for tech billionaires

2023-02-28 · Short · Ali · recording, 0:53 · watch on YouTube

Topic: Mindset, motivation and happiness · mode: Explanation and tutorial · tags: Lesson from a book

Retelling Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Ali notes that Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were both born in 1955, like many tech moguls who reached the right age just as computing developed; success, he concludes, takes an extraordinary opportunity as well as extraordinary talent.

What is said

The parts of the video and what is said in each (★ — how much it matters to the video).

00:00:00 — Why so many tech billionaires were born around 1955, from Gladwell's Outliers

• ★★ Bill Gates was born in October 1955 and Steve Jobs in February 1955. — 00:00:00
• ★★ Malcolm Gladwell (quoted): Malcolm Gladwell holds that Gates and Jobs both being born in 1955 is no coincidence: many other tech moguls were born near 1955, because they reached the right age just as computing technology developed and were well placed to take advantage of it. — 00:00:00
• ★★ Bill Gates was famously one of the very few 13-year-olds in the world with access to a computer on which he could practise programming. — 00:00:00
• ★★★ Malcolm Gladwell (quoted): In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that we think about success the wrong way: opportunity plays a much larger role in success than we like to admit. — 00:00:00
• ★★ Malcolm Gladwell (quoted): Gladwell's example in Outliers: of the 75 richest people of all time, 14 are American men born within nine years of each other in the 1830s and 1840s, the right age to take advantage of the US industrial revolution. — 00:00:29
• ★★ Ali concludes that becoming an outlier and being successful takes not only extraordinary talent but also an extraordinary opportunity. — 00:00:29

Threads in this video

• refine · Is success a matter of luck or hard work? — In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell argues that we think about success the wrong way: opportunity plays a much larger role in success than we like to admit. (00:00:00)

Mentioned

Central: Bill Gates · Malcolm Gladwell · Outliers

Also: Steve Jobs

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