My children hate
Malcolm Gladwell and they don’t even know him. In his book Outliers, Gladwell
proposed that you had to spend 10,000 hours practising something to become an
expert.
I won’t let them read
The Click Moment, a book from Frans Johansson that proposes that luck has just
as big a role to play in success – unless you want to be a chess grandmaster, a
tennis star or a classical musician.
But The Click Moment
will make me more sympathetic when they complain about the long work. Maybe
they will get lucky early, I think. But I doubt it.
Take the story of Ray
Preston who found the perfect spot for his independent bookstore in New York. A
month after he opened, a major civic project started that diverted foot traffic
away from his shop.
Ray tried lots of
different things to save his shop. He sold his apartment and moved into the
stock room to invest in it. But he reached the point when he thought he would
go bust in three weeks’ time.
I might as well have
some fun, he told himself, so he asked a friend to draw a life-size portrait of
the Dude from the Big Lebowski and he started to sell Dude t-shirts. To his
surprise he sold out, so he ordered some more.
One weekend morning,
dishevelled and barely dressed he got up and put the portrait outside. Two
magazine reporters by chance happened to walk past and what they saw was
someone who looked like the Dude putting out a billboard of the Dude.
What’s going on, they
asked. Ashamed of his real story, Ray just lied. “This is a Big Lebowski
store,” he told them and suddenly he had a Lebowski shop. Today people travel
from all over the world to visit his shop and buy merchandise.
But I am not
recommending that you move into your stock room and open up shop in your
dressing gown, hoping that a TV crew will find you remarkable. The great thing
about Johansson’s book is that he exposes just how random the secrets of
success were for companies like Starbucks, Microsoft and Google. How the owner
of Facebook didn’t really want to create a social media site. And so on.
The stories are great
to read. What is of utility is some of the rules that Johansson proposes to
help you take advantage of the click moment. In particular, he argues that you
should:
- make lots of small purposeful bets (constantly refreshing your merchandise)
- make affordable bets (work out how much you might lose rather than how much you will grow profits, on the basis that exposure to lots of ideas increases your chance of success)
- stick to what you are passionate about
- get out and meet new people, people who are not like you and who have different ideas.
If you are leading
your business, this book shows that putting in the long hours of practice is
unlikely to make you successful. The rules of the game are mostly stacked against
you.
If you are the type
of retailer who loves novelty, who loves trying new things, who is passionate
about making a difference locally, then this book may help you rethink what you
do and give you a boost.
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