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One night last week as I headed home from another late flight, I punched-up our client 92.5 Fox News to catch their delayed-play Andy Dean show. Andy joined me on a conference call several months ago hawking his new show and predicting great ratings potential. Since then we've placed the show in a few markets. Dean is Premier's new thirty-something poster boy signaling a youth movement. Dean is loaded with self confidence and I admire that in principle; you can't become a star without reaching for one.
Back to last week's show. Dean was featuring a psychologist who is a regular on the show and who professed her delight with Andy and his rapidly growing ratings, to wit Andy replied, "I'm a ratings machine...I have a gift." Dean's staccato delivery and Gen-Y referencing sometimes get in the way of otherwise compelling content, but his self-image as a gifted ratings magnet made me smile. My mind went spinning back to an earlier time where, when endowed with a studio and microphone, I believed I could be bigger than The Beatles. Andy Dean may instantly accomplish that but the odds are stacked against him. For example, when we look at the life and times of people like Bill Gates, the late Steve Jobs, or The Beatles, we want to believe their stories are rags to riches; a meteoric ride from obscurity to world-renown superstar, poised on the summit. Those 0-to-60 in three seconds myths can be comforting to a rising impresario, though rarely true.
Consider the legacy of The Beatles; remembered as a sudden apparition of stardom, in reality the group toiled for 7 years before the British Invasion. In fact they can account for about 10,000 hours of stage time at the smoky club Indra in Hamburg, Germany. Pete Best was the drummer at that time and remembers the group getting better because they played all night, 7 days a week. Eight hours for 7 days a week, ten thousand hours...
Then there's Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Paul Allen and several more--all born within the same range of the 1950's; too late for the mainframe age but just in time for the personal computer and software-writing era. Several were classmates at Seattle's prestigious Lakeside School, and worked overnight and weekends at the University of Washington's huge mainframe facility (there were no "computers" as we know them). When Malcolm Gladwell asked Gates how long it took him to reach the gifted level, with no prompting Gates acquiesced "At least ten thousand hours." When sifting through the truth of historic success, we are left to accept that people we want to see as sudden phenomenon in fact did not become champions when they made their first million or won their Olympic event; instead, over the hours, days, weeks and years they spent preparing for it. Extraordinary achievement is less about talent or IQ than it is about opportunity and circumstance. As for Andy Dean, born in 1981, Harvard educated and incubated at WSB, only time, skill, and the winds of media war will determine if in fact he is a "ratings magnet."
A few factors remain constant. Ability is necessary, credibility is crucial, durability is critical. As for Dean's hubris...perhaps it's a necessary component of confidence. No one knows what he or she can do until they try. As Lombardi quipped, "Life's battles don't always go to the stronger or faster person; but sooner or later to the person who thinks they can." Andy won't likely seek this column's advice but were he to do so I'd submit that the only way of finding the limits of the possible is by going beyond them into the impossible. Ten thousand hours, Andy, ten thousand.
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