(air swoosh)
- What's up, Believe Nation?
It's Evan, my one word is believe
and I believe in people more than they believe
in themselves.
And my sincere hope is that if you see in you
what I see in you, you'll be able to change the planet.
I started the Meant to Me series with the goal
to try to learn from people who've done a lot more than us.
Try to hang out with people who've had more success than us
and hopefully some of their beliefs,
some of their mindsets, some of their way of working
seeps into us to help us become the best version
of ourselves.
So today we're going to learn from Malcolm Glagwell
and his outliers advice.
MentorMe, Malcolm.
Rule number two is my personal favorite
and I'd love to know which one you guys like the best.
Also as you're watching, if you hear something
that really resonates with you,
please leave it down the comments below
and put quotes around it so other people can be inspired
by it as well.
And if you leave it within the first couple hours
of this video going live, you have a chance to win
one of two daily prizes.
(orchestral music)
- An outlier, if you do some sort of scientific experiment,
there's this thing out there,
that is sort of this aberration that is way off the charts
and that's an outlier, right?
- Yes, that's right.
- OK, so let's talk about some outliers.
One of the examples of success you use in the book
are The Beatles.
- Yeah.
- Tell the story of The Beatles and why they defy
the norms and why they were as successful as they were.
- Well I was really taken by what happened to them
before they came to America.
They come here in '64, instant Beatles invasion.
- [Harry] Explode.
- [Malcome] Explode.
But before they came, they were the house band
in a strip club in Homburg, Germany.
- [Harry] Right.
- [Malcom] And they would play eight hour sets,
seven days a week for months at a stretch.
And the idea there is that is what that,
we think of them as these geniuses who just come out
of nowhere and who are naturally brilliant,
but in fact they put in an apprenticeship of thousands
of hours before--
- These overnight successes
aren't overnight successes at all.
- Yeah, that's one of the big themes of the book, actually,
is that we sometimes look at people and we think
they must have this great innate talent
and we forget the enormous amount of work that went
in to what looks like genius.
There's a principle I talk about in the book
called the Ten Thousand Hour Rule, which says that
in a wide variety of disciplines, from being a good doctor
to being a great golfer, it doesn't matter really what
it is, it looks like we need to spend 10,000 hours
practicing before we get good.
So there's never been a great classical music,
piece of classical music composed by someone who
hasn't spent 10,000 hours first.
- Well, you write about Mozart and everybody talks
about Mozart composing as a little kid.
He didn't really compose anything anybody cared about
until he was what?
- 23, at which point he had been composing
for over 10 years.
(Harry laughs)
- So it really, really does make sense.
- I remain, I'm uninterested in that topic.
- [Charlie] Which one?
The relation between gift and practice?
- No I'm more interested in natural gifts.
I know they exist and I know there's such a thing
as talent, but blah blah blah,
but I just feel like, and so what?
Because there people and I always think of,
you're a basketball fan, I always think of Derrick Coleman.
- Yes.
- I remember chatting with a guy who worked for the '6ers
and he said,
"You have to understand that Derrick Coleman
was the most gifted man ever to set foot
on a basketball court."
He said,
"You've heard million other names, nobody was as good
as Derrick."
Who has heard today, who thinks, who puts Derrick Coleman
up there in the pantheon?
No one.
He didn't want to work.
He had bad habits, he had a bad attitude.
I mean, so what?
Give me somebody who wants to go to practice in the morning
and who wants to try in games and I'll want to celebrate him.
When you put forth effort, you get reward.
When you throw your heart and mind and soul
into something, you get something back.
Now in my book, I call that notion, that belief,
that effort brings reward Meaningful Work.
And when you look at the lives of people
who are really successful, what you see over and over again
is this idea of meaningful work is embedded
in their consciousness.
You know, I tell the story in the book of The Beatles.
Everybody knows about The Beatles, they come here in 1964,
and the British Invasion.
The most interesting thing about the Beatles
is what happened to them before they came to America.
In 1960, 1959, when they were just kids,
they were invited to go to Homburg in Germany
to be the house band at a strip club.
And they went there and they stayed there for months
on end and seven days a week, they played eight hour sets,
night after night in this strip club, right?
And over the course of that extraordinary crucible,
that experience of playing, they taught themselves
how to be a great band.
In fact, we know, we think now, that by the time The Beatles
came to America, they had played together as a live band
1,200 times.
We could go to all of the clubs on Friday night
in San Francisco, where all of the clubs where all the
promising young bands are playing,
I submit to you, you would not find a single band
that has played together 1,200 times, right?
Just doesn't happen.
So what made The Beatles special?
What made them special is that they were willing
to play together 1,200 times.
Willing to play eight hour sets, seven nights a week
for months at a stretch.
And why were they willing, because they believed
in the notion of meaningful work.
They had an opportunity to throw their heart and mind
into something and get something back.
And that made all the difference in the world.
And to my annoyance, some reviewers of my book
have accused me of being a cultural determinist.
In fact, I'm the opposite.
The culture that we come from is only deterministic
of our behavior if we choose to ignore it, right?
If you never address, they chapter that I was talking about
in my talk, the plane crash chapter,
it's really about Korean Air and how Korean Air goes
from being an airline that almost gets pushed out
of business because it has so many plane crashes,
to being one of the, now today, one of the premier
airlines in the world.
And they transformed themselves over the last 10 years
precisely because they say they decide, at long last,
to confront their cultural legacy and deal with it.
And what they discover is if they are honest and open
about the fact that in this particular instance,
the cockpit, acting like you're a Korean is not a good idea.
Then you can change it, and they do.
They take that airline from, literally, it was this close
to not existing anymore and is now an absolutely
world class airline.
And what they've showed, and I continue this theme
in the second half of the book is,
once we can talk about and confront culture,
we can change culture.
We're not prisoners of it.
We're only prisoners of it if we pretend it doesn't exist.
I had a conversation a couple weeks ago,
I was giving a talk and I was seated next to a guy
who ran a regional bank in Akron, Ohio
and I said to him, talking about his business,
"How's your business? Your banking business?"
He says,
"Oh, we're fine.
In fact, we're more than fine, we're about to buy
a big bank in Chicago."
And I said,
"Well why are you fine and no one else is?"
He was an older man, he was probably in his, I'd say 60s.
And he said,
"I've been through this three times before."
And I suspect, we sort of talked a bit,
and suspect that he got humbled 25 years ago,
or in the early 70s or late 70s,
and never forgot that lesson.
And it's that kind of, it is in times like that
that we understand why experience
and learning from experience is so important.
It's more than simply, that word is not
a kind of meaningless triviality.
Experience matters because there's certain kinds
of things that you only learned when you've been humbled,
right?
You can't just explain to a 28 year-old things are going
to get bad, it's not going to sink in.
But to this man I was speaking to, who saw it first hand
and dealt with it and I'm sure went through all manner
of crisis before,
it's a lesson that he kept with him, you know?
Colin Powell, before the Iraq war, was the,
he was the in-house skeptic.
Why?
Because he'd been through Vietnam.
You know, in a very first-hand way and a way that many
of the other decision makers had not and had never
forgotten those lessons.
There's another sort of case of someone who appropriately
was humbled and learned from experience.
And you've got to have people like that around.
All my work is about storytelling,
but using stories to kind of get at deeper truths.
But fundamentally I'm a storyteller and every,
you know in revisionist history,
everyone of the episodes is a story.
It's not me ranting on about this or that
and the other thing (laughs).
It's we meet really interesting people
and we tell their stories and we use that as a way of,
and that's a theme in all of my work.
I think that the way into complicated ideas is
through people and their stories.
- Thank you guys so much for watching.
I hope you enjoyed.
I'd love to know what did you learn from this video?
What clips spoke the most to you and how are you going
to apply it immediately somehow in your life
or in your business.
Please leave it down in the comments below.
Also, if you're leaving a comment within the first
few hours of this video going live, you have a chance
to win one of two daily prizes.
I also want to give a quick shout out to Joshua Rodriguez
from the Josh Speaks.
Thank you so mch, man, for picking up a copy of my book,
Your One Word and doing that fun collaboration
on your channel together to showcase the book.
I really, really appreciate the support, man
and I'm so glad you enjoyed the read.
- I feel so honored to be able to directly pass this
video along to Evan, so that he can share his ideas
of what it means to live a life of purpose,
which ultimately is all about being your best self.
- Thank you guys again for watching.
I believe in you, I hope you continue to believe
in yourself and whatever your one word is.
Much love, I'll see you soon.