Below is a list of people who born in the 1950s, the best year to be born as they will be in their 20s when the computer and internet start booming (1970s)

• Bill Gates: October 28, 1955
• Paul Allen: January 21, 1953
• Steve Ballmer: March 24, 1956
• Steve Jobs: February 24, 1955
• Eric Schmidt: April 27, 1955
• Bill Joy: November 8, 1954
• Scott McNealy: November 13, 1954
• Vinod Khosla: January 28, 1955
• Andy Bechtolsheim: September 30, 1955

• This doesn't means that every software tycoon in Silicon Valley was born in 1955, or every business titan in United States was born in mid 1830s
• But there are very clear patterns and what's striking is how little we seem to want to acknowledge them. We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit.
• They are the people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society

The other interesting thing about that ten thousand hours, of course, is that ten thousand hours is an enormous amount of time. It's all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you're a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can't be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won't be time left in the day to practice enough. In fact, most people can reach that number only if they get into some kind of special program-like a hockey all-star squad.