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Do you think that Paul McCartney and John Lennon are geniuses? Think again. According to Malcolm Gladwell, they’re primarily just hard workers, who played together so often in the early part of their careers that they couldn’t be anything but successful. The story of many “outliers” such as these is essentially the same, Gladwell told the London Business Forum (LBF) – what at first glance looks like spontaneous, exceptional performance is actually the result of factors that can be identified and, in theory, emulated.

Gladwell doesn’t stride around the stage as he talks but uses subtle changes in pitch and tone to entice and captivate his audience. With his broad-curled afro, and with his watchful, deliberative, sometimes fanatical, face projected onto the six stories high BFI IMAX screen there was nowhere to hide.

It was the content of Gladwell’s speech, however, that made this such an electrifying event. “I had thought of summarising what the book is about,” he said early on, referring to his new work Outliers. “[But] that’s a little bit boring, so then I thought, ‘Well, why don’t I take advantage of the fact that I am here in England and use some of the ideas in the book to analyse a great English institution?’ And by that I mean the band Fleetwood Mac.”

To understand how outlying success comes about, it’s useful to look at phenomena that seem to spring from nowhere, he explained.

Fleetwood Mac was founded in the UK by blues guitarist Peter Green, plus Mick Fleetwood, John McPhee and various others. They played clubs in London and across America. They even toured with the Grateful Dead for a while. But money was too tight to mention and Mick ended up working at a supermarket just outside Los Angeles. It was there he ran into a friend from the UK who had a recording studio. And it was at the studio where he ran into Stevie Nix, the singer who would help make him famous. At the time, Stevie was working as a Flapper girl at a themed restaurant. She and Mick jammed together and hit it off. Soon, they had released two hit albums: Fleetwood Mac and Rumours.

“It’s the quintessential rock and roll story,” Gladwell said. “A bunch of scruffy young musicians get together in some haphazard fashion, play together in someone’s basement, something magical happens, they put out a record, and boom: they explode… Whenever we hear those stories, we assume that there is no lesson to be learned from them because they seem so random, right?” Wrong. “That story is the furthest thing from random,” he argued. “I am going to tell the story again, only this time I am going to tell it properly.”

The full story of Fleetwood Mac takes into account the fact that, before their “breakthrough” album Rumours, they had already cut 15 other records. The band had a lot of members, and a high churn-rate, in its early days. Green took a lot of LSD and joined a German cult. The band decamped to a decrepit manor where they smoked a lot of hashish and parked their E-type Jaguars on the lawn. There were numerous spats, love triangles, hirings and firings – “constant mutations”, as Gladwell put it. Yet they managed to keep on recording.

They were “a decade in the making”, and therefore a typical example of the gestation period of most cultural hits. There is now robust evidence from the field of psychology, Gladwell revealed, showing that the amount of time required to become good at anything is the same in most industries. “It seems to be impossible to achieve any kind of true expertise unless you have practiced for 10,000 hours.”

The “10,000 hours rule” is true of chess grandmasters, classical musicians and doctors. “It is almost impossible to find an exception,” Gladwell said. Even the Beatles, he argued, did not burst onto the scene fully formed in 1964, as people assume. Beginning the story with their famous US tour “leaves out such an extraordinary amount of history. In fact, it leaves out the critical period of development of the Beatles, which was when they want to Hamburg.”

Lennon and McCartney were only teenagers when they got the Beatles a regular gig as the house band for a strip club in Hamburg. They played together for eight hours a day, seven days a week, for months at a time. In such circumstances, Gladwell said, “you are forced to improvise, you are forced to write your own music, you are forced to master a staggering array of styles, and forms, and conventions, and genres. You are forced to learn how to play as a band.”

“Hamburg was the making of the Beatles,” said biographer Philip Norman. But what he actually meant was that it gave them a chance get in their 10,000 hours of practice before their peers. By 1964, they’d played together around 1,200 times – more often than most of today’s bands would stick together during their whole careers.

“When we think about the Beatles, we almost never get past this naive notion that the band’s success was all about the extraordinary once-in a lifetime talent of Lennon and McCartney,” Gladwell pointed out. “Wrong. It is about people with extraordinary talent who happened to be in a situation that allowed them to put in an extraordinary amount of training and effort.”

People tend to think we have innate abilities. They say, for instance, that their child either does or doesn’t have a “head for maths”. But this isn’t borne out by the best comparative data on national standards for mathematics worldwide – the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS). The TIMSS exam, taken by 13 to 17-year-olds worldwide every four years, includes an extensive lifestyle questionnaire that most don’t bother to finish. It turns out, according to recent research from the University of Pennsylvania, that a pupil’s ability to complete this questionnaire correlates exactly with their later performance as mathematicians. In other words, being good at maths simply means being good at concentrating on and completing onerous tasks.

So, the number-one lesson provided by Fleetwood Mac and others is that exceptional performance is within reach of most people, provided they’re willing to put in enough – typically 10,000 hours – of effort. The second lesson, Gladwell continued, is that success tends to follow serious difficulty. Most people try to follow a “capitalisation strategy,” in their careers, he argued, where success builds on success. So, for example, “from Eton to Oxford, and from Oxford to a job in the City with Goldman Sachs”. But actually there is evidence to suggest that exceptional performers more often follow a “compensation strategy”, where success builds on failure.

“The correlation between disabilities and entrepreneurship,” Gladwell pointed out, is remarkable. “Julie Logan at the London Business School [recently] did a survey of American Entrepreneurs and found that a third of them, at some point in their life, had been diagnosed with a serious learning disability.” Admittedly, he added, many children respond to learning difficulties by turning to crime. However, those who stay straight, typically manage to develop compensatory skills. “You become a great talker, you become a great problem-solver, you build a network,” Gladwell suggested. “Eighty per cent of dyslexic entrepreneurs were sports captains at school.” And non-academic skills such as leadership can obviously become very useful later on, in the business world.

Success also requires failure, Gladwell continued. Fleetwood Mac’s development was not linear but highly experimental, with numerous cul-de-sacs and diversions. As psychologist David Galenson points out, creatives fall into two main camps: “conceptual innovators”, such as Picasso, who execute bold, revolutionary ideas; and “experimental innovators”, like Cezanne, who work more slowly, by trial and error. The former is much rarer, and Gladwell argued that the latter is now the prevalent style of innovation, especially in organisations. “Modern problems are so complex that they demand, I think, a much more cautious style,” he said, “a style that involves a great deal of trial and error and experimentation.”

The final and most important lesson of Fleetwood Mac, Gladwell concluded, is based on the fact that the band were supported for their entire careers by one record label, Warner Brothers. “Back then, there was a notion in that world that any kind of greatness or great achievement on the part of the band necessarily involved a partnership,” he said. “This is a really critical notion that I feel has been lost, not just in the music industry but in many industries.” After all, he pointed out, if inexperienced traders had been given greater supervision by certain investment banks before being allowed to play with other people’s money, we may not have experienced the biggest credit crunch in history.