Katie Couric The Best Advice I Ever Got, Part 18

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Part 2 The Bank of Experience

On Hard Work and Tenacity

I'm a great believer in luck, and I find the harder I work, the more I have of it.
                                                                                     --- Thomas Jefferson

In April of 2009, I had the privilege of interviewing Captain Chesley “Sully” Sullenberger, the pilot who landed that incapacitated US Airways flight on the Hudson River after geese had knocked out both engines. Sully's split-second judgment and calm demeanor that winter day saved all on hundred fifty-five passengers and crew members on board. While his story is about grace under pressure, it's also about the value of hard work and the importance of logging enough hours that the expertise you've built up almost goes on autopilot. “For forty two years,” he told me, “I've been making small,regular deposits in this bank of experience. And on January 15th the balance was sufficient so that I could make a sudden, large withdrawal.”

Success really is ten percent inspiration and ninety percent perspiration. As Malcolm Gladwell wrote in his now famous book Outliers, to truly master something you need to spend at least ten thousand hours doing it. One example he cites: The Fab Four. The Beatles might have seemed like an overnight sensation, but they had played together more than a thousand times before that famous appearance on the Ed Sullivan Show back in 1964. For them, it really was a hard day's night – night after night after night for years! Bill Gates's birthday set him up perfectly for the technical revolution that was taking hold in this country, but good timing wasn't everything. He dropped out of Harvard and spent every waking moment building and understanding computer codes.