The Hindu Business Line : Exploring mysteries of success

On the other hand, there are enough proverbs and stories in every language promising success to anyone who brings passion, dedication and determination to bear on whatever enterprise he undertakes. Even Fate can be thwarted by one who works untiringly to reach his goal, says the eminent Tamil sage, Thiruvalluvar, who lived 2,500 years ago.

There has been no lack of attempts to lay bare the anatomy of success, though it is as elusive as the will-o'-the-wisp.

Indeed, the corpus of what are called "How to..?" writings is enormous. There is even a book on How to Succeed in Business Without Really Trying! And yet, only some succeed and many don't. Why? That is the precise question a book Outliers: Why Some People Succeed and Some Don't written by Mr Malcolm Gladwell and due to be released in November, seeks to answer.

His contention, going by the blurb, is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from: That is, their culture, their family, their generation, and the idiosyncratic experiences of their upbringing. We will have to wait to see how he develops his thesis and, incidentally, how well he succeeds in unravelling why and how others succeed.

The idea, however, of the various aspects of a person's upbringing shaping his personality in all its dimensions, including creativity, tenacity and the itch to achieve, (or its aggressive variant, the killer instinct) is a stale one that has been around for a hundred years.

In the air

His exploration of the mysteries of success apart, Mr Caldwell advances a proposition in an article, "In the Air" published in the June 30 issue of the New Yorker magazine which is really interesting.

It has to do with the phenomenon of simultaneous discovery, technically named `multiples' by scientific historians.

It is about scientific and technological discoveries which are associated with one famous person in public mind, but in reality other scientists too had hit upon them at the same time.

In short, it makes evident that scientific discoveries are not the exclusive products of a single brilliant person's fertile mind, but are `in the air' all the time and within the reach of anyone who has the alertness to `snatch' them.

For instance, as Mr Caldwell points out, Newton and Leibniz both discovered calculus. Charles Darwin and Alfred Russel Wallace both discovered evolution.

Three mathematicians "invented" decimal fractions. Oxygen was discovered by Joseph Priestley and Carl Wilhelm Scheele. Color photography was invented at the same time by Charles Cros and by Louis Ducos du Hauron, in France.

Logarithms were invented by John Napier and Henry Briggs in Britain, and by Joost Brgi in Switzerland.

There were four independent discoveries of sunspots, all in 1611; by Galileo in Italy, Scheiner in Germany, Fabricius in Holland and Harriott in England

The law of conservation of energy, so significant in science and philosophy, was formulated four times independently in 1847, by Joule, Thomson, Colding and Helmholz. They had been anticipated by Robert Mayer in 1842.

There seem to have been at least six different inventors of the thermometer and no less than nine claimants of the invention of the telescope.

Typewriting machines were invented simultaneously in England and in America by several individuals in these countries. The steamboat is claimed as the "exclusive" discovery of Fulton, Jouffroy, Rumsey, Stevens and Symmington.

There are 148 such major scientific discoveries for which credit can be claimed by more than one person, but is actually given to only one!

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