In studying creative people who are passionate about what they do, we can enhance our own creativity, and business savvy, even if we work in a completely different arena.
Of course, it’s easier for most people to relate to musicians and other creative people work than to people who design furniture. The obvious emotion underlying a great song makes us feel that we have at least some understanding of the performers and their motivations. The authors of “Come Together,” both Nashville residents and avid Beatles fans, make the most of that idea: that in the beginning at least, the Beatles were just like you and me.
According Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers: The Story of Success," the Beatles success was based on those years after Lennon and McCartney first stated playing together in 1957, seven years prior to landing in America. In 1960, while they were still just a struggling high school rock band, they were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany. There the band would play hour after hour to catch passing traffic. It didn't pay well but, the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play, the band gained more confidence as they put their heart and soul into their performance. In Hamburg, they played for eight hours at a time, seven days a week, which resulted in a new way of playing: all told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Most bands today don't perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers.
Hewlett-Packard, Google, Apple and Medtronic all have thousands of employees today but it wasn't always that way. All four companies got their start in humble garages. In the garage working environment, operating expenses were low and tinkering was encouraged while you got your hands dirty. At Lakeside School, an elite private school in Seattle, Bill Gates had access to computer time-sharing to tinker with to plant the seeds for what later bloomed into Microsoft.
Bill Gates's story is almost as well known as the Beatles'. Brilliant, young math whiz discovers computer programming. Drops out of Harvard. Starts a little computer company called Microsoft with his friends. At the beginning of seventh grade, his parents took him out of public school at sent him to Lakeside, where the school started a computer club. This was in 1968, when I was an Information Technology Marketing Specialist working for Eastman Kodak Company in Seattle. At that time, most colleges didn't have computer clubs nor utilize the new "time-sharing" technology that was invented in 1965. Yet, Bill Gates got to do real-time programming as an eighth grader in 1968. From that moment forward, Gates lived in the computer room. In one seven-month period in 1971, Gates and his cohorts ran up 1,575 hours of computer time-sharing which averages out to eight hours a day, seven days a week.
Those five years, from eighth grade through the end of high school, were Bill Gates's Hamburg. This gave Bill Gates extra time to practice. By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own software company, he'd been programming for seven consecutive years.
Malcolm Gladwell: Outliers: The Story of Success
Richard Courtney: Come Together: The Business Wisdom of The Beatles