If you have read Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers: The Story of Success then you’re familiar with his theory about how all successful men and women besides having wonderful and enduring qualities have a continuous common factor among them which is an incredible amount of hours at practicing and getting perfect at what they love and what they are passionate about. Gladwell claims that in order to be an “Outlier” one should complete 10,000 hours doing what one wants to excel in. The book is way deeper and more explanatory and it goes into greater details about his theory and how everything makes totally sense, so if you haven’t read it, I strongly suggest that you do.
I can’t help connecting everything I read to design, so the first American designer in my list of Outliers In Interior Design that came to my mind was Albert Hadley and with him some members of what I call “The magic circle.” No I don’t mean Palates, you!, I mean all the successful designers who once worked for Albert Hadley and seem to have enduring success. I’m not going to go into detail as how I calculated the hours because it could be tedious but only the period from 1962 to 1999 during the time of Parish-Hadley partnership He seems to have had under his belt more than 72,224 hours; business hours only. That is not counting the times when a designer keeps working mentally and takes every detail of the work home. Isn’t that amazing!?
Bunny Williams who worked for Alber Hadley for 22 years. During that time she had only 42,944 hours. Amazing!
Miles Redd, even though he didn’t work directly for Mr. Hadley but he got some of the magic circle through Bunny. Miles opened his firm in 1998 and before that he worked for Bunny Williams for 5 years and before that for John Rosselli. That is approximately a total of 23 years. You do the math…
David Easton worked for Parish-Hadley from 1967 to 1972 to then found David Eston Interiors. He’s been working ever since. Yes, that many hours! Uhm… I wonder if blogging counts. ah.. I don’t think so. 🙁