• Hi, I’m Brad Abare

  I'm a make-it-happen guy working with big idea people. I design teams and orchestrate strategy so that great ideas I believe in get done.
  
  I am Jamaica's husband, Foursquare's comm director, Personality's founder, and a catalyst for CFCC.
  
  
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Maybe I’m late to the game or maybe I’m paying too much attention to random patterns, but I’ve been coming across the name, face and wisdom of Meredith Whitney a lot lately. She’s the managing director of Oppenheimer and has been referred to as the most important woman in business. From what I’ve read about her and seen from her, Meredith is definitely someone I am adding to my radar of people to watch. A recent BusinessWeek interview offers a great snapshot of Meredith and her perspective.

My friend Jeff Sinabarger is always finding great media that communicates stories of significance. On his blog today was a link to the “What Matters to Me” video for the VFS and YouTube “What Matters to You” Scholarship Competition. Love it!

“This is a book about the meaning of work.”

I became a Malcolm Gladwell fan after reading his first book, The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. His second book, Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking, was equally engaging yet more of a shift from the business/marketing angle found in Tipping Point.

In his third book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm continues his journey toward pop-sociologist. Outliers is a fascinating perspective on success, and blows away so many of the myths we have for what success looks like and how we achieve it.

In typical Gladwell fashion, Outliers is packed with stories that bring research to life. A premise of the book suggests, “It is only by asking where they are from that we can unravel the logic behind who succeeds and who doesn’t.” Gladwell says that “the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.”

A reoccurring theme throughout the book that Malcolm observes is the “ten thousand hour” rule. Every story of success can point back to a person who has invested at minimum and approximately ten thousand hours of practice. Bill Gates. The Beatles. Lawyers. Immigrants from Europe to America in the early 1900s who brought their experience in making clothes. The list goes on.

The power of the ten thousand hour rule (about 4 hours a day for 10 years) is that you’re ready to “succeed” when the time is right. It’s tempting to pick a trendy thing and attempt to get good at it, but the trend might be over by the time you’ve mastered the craft. Outliers suggests that we should get good at what we’re passionate about. “Practicing isn’t the thing you do once you’re good. It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Malcolm continues, “And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.”

“Hard work is a prison sentence only if it does not have meaning. Once it does, it becomes the kind of thing that makes you grab your wife around the waist and dance a jig.”

There were two phrases in the book that deserve to be unpacked further, and Malcolm merely scratches the surface of their definitions. The idea of “social inheritance” and “concerted cultivation” are powerful allies in the journey of Outliers.

One should be careful when absorbing Outliers because a premise of the book assumes we all measure success in terms of wealth, health, influence and power. “If you work hard enough and assert yourself, and use your mind and imagination, you can shape the world to your desires.”

The conclusion of Outliers gets personal as Malcolm tells the story of his own life and family background, including generations of slavery in Jamaica. Gladwell goes on to argue that more of us would become Outliers if we lived in a “society that provides opportunity for all.”

“Outliers are those who have been given opportunities—and who have had the strength and presence of mind to seize them.”

In 1998 I started a company (known today as Personality) that provided design and marketing services to a handful of great clients. They were from relationships I had built over the years through a publishing start-up I helped to found. Although that publishing company eventually went out of business, the relationships lived on and helped to start Personality, which I have been building ever since those early days in Chicago in the late 90s.

Shortly after I moved to Los Angeles in 2000, I realized quickly that design and marketing was not really the business I was in. Sure, that’s what clients thought they were paying for, but it didn’t take much looking around to see that the work I was providing was just as good—if not worse—than the next guy’s. The difference was in how I delivered the work. I was dependable, trustworthy and fast. I made things happen. I brought together the right people to make the project work. If I didn’t know how to do it, I figured out how to do it. I hardly ever said no.

And the business grew.

After five years into the life of the company, it was time to take things to the next level. The design and marketing business was consistent work, but it wasn’t what I was wired to do nor was it my dream. I did it because it was a bridge to what was next. If the business was ever going to be all that I dreamed for it to be, it was going to take more than just me to dream it and build it.

It’s been a bumpy ride ever since I made that shift five years ago. Where we’ve landed is better than I would have ever imagined, but the ride hasn’t been easy. It’s been full of risk at every turn.

When I read Seth Godin’s post earlier this week on building an albatross, I immediately resonated with his journey building Squidoo. Using the example of an albatross bird, Seth distills two great points that I have been following but never put it into words quite like Seth does:

1. Plan for the long slow ramp up. That means super low overhead and patience and not trying to launch with a huge splash because you’re impatient.

2. Architecture matters. If you intend to build an albatross, you’ll want to design a business where each customer brings you new customers, where the more it gets used, the better it works.

The “slow ramp up” continues for Personality. We’re years away from any sort of splash, but I think the journey and the stuff we’re working on is worth it.

For the past few months, my friend Charles Lee has been putting together an “unconference” that is shaping up to be pretty sweet. On February 27-28, 2009, yours truly and a bunch of other cool kids, will be gathering in Orange County for The Idea Camp. It’s a free hybrid conference for people that find themselves using words like social entrepreneurialism, non-profit, technology, media, creativity, culture making, church future, spiritual formation and compassionate justice.

If you’re interested in joining other innovative and creative leaders from around the country to share ideas, intentionally network, and think collaboratively, I’d love to see you there.