Karen Kaplan- Chairman & CEO Hill Holliday, Inc.
Advice:
No coasting. Personally, I’ve found that it is remarkably easy to outwork most people. When I started out in the advertising business, I knew that if I worked a few hours a day longer than most people, with a couple of hours thrown in on the weekends, that in a few years I would pass by people who had a 10-year head start on me.
In Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, he writes about people who, for one reason or another, are so accomplished that they are truly outliers. He says that when you ask a successful person why they’re successful, they always say it’s because they wanted it more, they worked harder and they sacrificed more; no one ever says it’s because they’re smarter.
Malcolm Gladwell’s hypothesis in the book is that talent doesn’t matter much; that it’s all about determination, application and practice, and that’s how he explains the careers of really successful people. He says it takes 10,000 hours – or 10 years at the rate of 40 hours per week – to get really good at something; and that the first one to reach 10,000 hours wins.
He gives the example of The Beatles, who before they were discovered were the house band at a club in Hamburg Germany, playing 8 hours a day, 7 days a week when most bands were only playing a few quick sets a week. The Beatles got to 10,000 hours really early in their careers, and they won.