What have you done for more than 10,000 hours? Is it something meaningful to you? In the book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell asserts that success is not just about innate ability but a combination of a number of key factors including opportunity, meaningful hard work and your cultural legacy.
Almost everyone has heard of The Beatles and cannot deny that they were talented musical individuals. But, what made them so successful in the 1960’s was the fact that they spent so much time perfecting their working relationship. In 1960 while in Hamburg, Lennon said: "We had to play for hours and hours on end. Every song lasted twenty minutes and had twenty solos in it. That's what improved the playing. There was nobody to copy from. We played what we liked best and the Germans liked it as long as it was loud.“ Gladwell asserts that 10,000 hours is the amount of time it typically takes to “master” something. Some people have the opportunity to “do” the 10,000 hours and others don’t. Hamburg was the “opportunity” for The Beatles, and they thrived.
But it’s not just about doing the work; you must have purpose. Having a real purpose makes it more likely you will work hard and enjoy it. At IT Radix, our purpose is to help others succeed through the use of technology. How have we become masters at this: by handling literally thousands of requests for technical help; by reviewing hundreds of alerts and responding as needed; by ensuring over 10,000 backup jobs ran successfully last year and fixing those that didn’t; by rolling out thousands of new PCs, servers, business applications, network devices and more; and by offering our technical professionals opportunities to train on new technologies and challenging them to learn more and apply this learning to our clients’ businesses.
The opportunities to master something don’t stop with just the technical consulting team at IT Radix. We’re constantly working to improve our “game” and master being a successful business. For example, on the financial side, our team is leveraging our business software to enhance our invoicing process and approve accuracy. We’re upgrading our credit card system to make processing more secure. That same business software is a repository for every technical issue or request that we’ve handled, and we’re using data analytics to look for trends on areas to improve our clients’ technology and use.
Through the years, we’ve offered educational opportunities to our clients and prospects to make them more productive, raise awareness about security, or introduce new technology solutions to make their businesses more successful. Doing this has forced us to learn how to organize and manage training events. While we may not yet be masters, we enjoy having them; and therefore, have gladly put in the time and effort to conduct them.
Then, of course, there is this newsletter. It is entirely self-written and produced. Our marketing team has learned to develop and follow a publishing schedule, research and tap into a variety of resources to create a newsletter that we’re proud of and receive lots of positive feedback about. Why do we put in all this effort? Because, we believe our clients can benefit from the knowledge we share.
So, while IT Radix may not be known worldwide like The Beatles, we believe that we have the magic that qualifies us to be an Outlier in Gladwell’s eyes.
First published in our November 2017 IT Radix Resource newsletter
