In the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, he explained the success of great figures such as Bill Gates and the Beatles by covering topics like education, values and even dates of birth in order to identify if a person has the ingredients to become an outlier and be successful.** He also talks about what makes a job fulfilling and motivating, making us wake up every morning looking for our next challenge.**

Before **the Beatles **had a major breakthrough in the mid 1960s they had already played and insane number of hours. They moved to Hamburg Germany in 1959 to play in a strip-club for seven days a week eight hour sets during many years, at almost a minimum wage. They threw the heart and mind into what they loved and worked hard to pursue their dream.

When Bill Gates was a teenager, access to computers was something farther than a commodity. He first discovered computers in the Lakeside School computer club, an ASR-33 Teletype terminal, he was fascinated. Later, his classmate Paul Allen found out that a mainframe at the Health Centre at the University of Washington was free from 2 am to 6 am. Despite the early morning hours, the two friends started going to the University to make use of the mainframe, throwing their heart and mind completely into exploring the world of computing. Gates would escape from home to spend the nights programming at the University. When his mother heard this story years later, she finally understood why it was sohard to get him out of bed in the mornings.

How can we explain their motivation and spark that fired their energy to put such an insane number of hours and effort into their passion despite any obstacles? As Malcolm Gladwell states, they believed in the notion of meaningful work, and the cornerstone of this concept, is the idea that if you put effort and work you get back reward. More precisely, the notion of meaningful work is composed of three pillars:

• Autonomy: Being in control of our own decisions.
• Complexity: Being challenged by the difficulty of a task.
• Connection between effort and reward.

Those three things — autonomy, complexity, and a connection between effort and reward — are, most people will agree, the three qualities that work has to have if it is to be satisfying.”

Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success

#work #artificial-intelligence #work-life-balance #data-science #motivation