initial advantage

"They say the secret of success is being at the right place at the right time, but since you never know when the right time is going to be, I figure the trick is to find the right place and just hang around."
— Bill Watterson

I have saved this strip – I think it follows where Calvin hopes if the right place is a comic book store, so you can hang around in front of that.

I was thinking about this initial advantage. Heard this in Radiolab podcast On Success with Malcolm Gladwell as well – about a random initial advantage maximized over a period of time. Of course, small things like hardwork, passion, attitude and a little bit of genius helps. It is not about the initial advantage through quirks such as which year you were born etc, but advantage created by people with own initiative. I have been involved in setting up a new team recently – given everybody gets same chance and starts from same place, looking at how people come up differently. I have seen people becoming go-to persons in projects without anyone realizing that is what is happening. Last week I was hearing about someone where customer is saying they can start a project, but need one particular person even though he doesn’t have background on the project, but the potential was very obvious. I feel those are people who keep working on some aspects of the project – be it business knowledge or technology – and with enough time and effort spent on their own – eventually it widens the gap with others. I had one person join my previous account during a major technical upgrade project, kept digging into product issues which was not exactly his responsibility and within months became highly regarded by vendor and business partners – it was in an area where we had multiple people released from project due to complaints from a nasty customer contact and I had almost written it off as not possible to turn around.

That is my second thing – I think many people wait for assigning responsibilities before doing something. I think many times we can go beyond the typical assigned responsibilities – yes, some time we get managers who ask you not to be overenthusiastic. I don’t mean it in a way of being over ambitious or doing it in a calculated way. But there are people who learn the most and become such go-to persons (linchpins?) without anybody telling them to be.
Lastly – being hungry for it. I think we need to watch out for that time when we stop learning and stop wanting to do anything other than minimum required.