Another recent book that I read was Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell. The book discusses the reasons why outliers (successful people) become who they are. According to the book the main reason behind people’s success is their environment and opportunities. That is to say that if they didn’t have the opportunities available to them they would have never become who they are and also if those opportunities were given to someone else, that other person would have become successful too.

Malcolm gives the example of Bill Gates. Bill Gates had access to computer and computer programming many hours of the day in his childhood when many university professors in US didn’t have such access. He was from a well off family that could easily afford those tools for him.

Another good example given in the Outliers is about hokey players in Canada. The age cut offs for hokey in Canada is December 31st of each year. So someone that is born on January 5th would have to compete with a person that is born on the December of the same year. Obviously the first person is almost one year older and therefore is in better physical shape. It is therefore no surprise that a large majority of the best hokey players in Canadian league are born in the first months of the year (Jan, Feb, Mar).

I mostly agree with Malcolm Gladwell. I certainly agree that outliers are who they are because of their environment. We are who we are because of people around us and our environment. Our friends and opportunities define us much more than what we might think. However, I disagree with Malcolm on one point. In my opinion if those outliers were not given the opportunity to become who they are (CEO of Microsoft) it doesn’t mean that he would have been an unsuccessful person. Bill would find another opportunity because that is who entrepreneurs are.

Almost every entrepreneur’s success can be marked by meeting someone by luck or given one particular opportunity. Does that mean that without meeting that one person or opportunity, the entrepreneur would have been unsuccessful? No. I don’t believe in luck to begin with. A true entrepreneur constantly looks for opportunities and meeting people, so sooner or later he will find them. It is not luck that makes people successful but hard work.

Another concept that Malcolm Gladwell talks about is the 10,000 hours required to be successful. His idea is that success is only possible with hard work and no other way (I 100% agree with him). No world class musician is as great as he/she is because he was a genius musician or was born with the gift. Every one of the best musicians in the world have worked extremely hard. The more they worked/practiced the more successful they are. The magic number of hours required to master a a skill/task is 10,000. Bill Gates put that many hours and more into programming before becoming who he is, so did Steve Jobs, and every other successful person.

While our opportunities with no doubt define who we are and how our lived will be shaped, hard work is the only way to explore those opportunities and take advantage of them.

Try to look closer at your life and find opportunities that are unique to you and exploit them and don’t forget nothing comes without hard work.

I read Blue Ocean Strategy by W. Chan Kim and Renée Mauborgne last month. It is a marketing book. It argues that it is not possible to beat the competition by competing and that a marketer should find new markets (blue oceans) instead competing in the (currently) saturated markets (the red oceans).

Blue Ocean Strategy suggests to find new line of customers. Competing with many other competitors in a market only reduces the profit for all parties. The only way a company can have long term success is to be open to change and consistently try to find new markets. For example if your products main target is certain gender (let’s say males) try to find a way to make that product to appeal to women instead. You can keep selling to the male customers, but you should invest your marketing resources mostly into the new blue oceans. This way you will be first to that blue ocean and therefore will have substantial advantages over the competitors.

The books gives many examples such as NetJets. NetJets is a company that offers fractional jet ownership. The idea is that people who need/like to travel by jets do so for saving time, comfort, and productivity. However, jets are expensive and therefore targeted toward very wealthy people and corporations. NetJets opened new blue ocean market by allowing its members to have fractional membership of the jets. This way instead of competing with other jet companies on selling to limited number of wealthy people NetJets opened up a whole new uncontested market.

The book also gives tools and suggestions as how to go about finding blue ocean markets and make the necessary changes in the business plan.

I don’t completely agree with the book as I believe competing can prove successful and you can’t always find new markets. However, it is a very good read as it helped me look at marketing with better understanding of it and can give myself more options when making business marketing decisions.

In terms of internet entreprenuership and online businesss, here is an absolutely great example of what blue ocean strategy is: an article by Shoemoney on making money online.