The thesis of Malcolm Gladwell’s best‐selling Outliers is that preeminence in a field is not principally the result of genius. Rather it is the product of cultural heritage, opportunity (often linked to the prior factor), and perhaps most important in Gladwell’s eyes, subject matter mastery that comes from 10,000 hours of hard work.

Gladwell cited Bill Gates as Exhibit A for that proposition. When Gates was in his teens, his private school offered training in computer coding. Gates immersed himself in it obsessively, as he freely admits. Later he became enormously successful.

But in the years since Outliers was published, Gladwell’s theory about mastery has come under increasing criticism (Baer 2014), as have other aspects of his work, as well (Gottlieb 2019). Yes, computer training for high schoolers was rare in the late 1960s, yet hundreds of other students across the country—no, certainly thousands of them—must have been just as fanatical. And a subset of them may have been equally smart and privileged. Yet even with those advantages, those other people never made the front page.

But there is another way to tell the Gates story and it underscores the significant role that luck can play in negotiation. It involves an on‐again/off‐again business deal where Gates made a bad mistake, then out of the blue had a stroke of good luck. And that was followed by an even bigger mistake by his counterpart in the negotiation, IBM1 (Wheeler 2013).

The episode was a major turning point in Gates’s career. One could argue that if any of those elements had gone differently, we never would have heard of him. If that is too bold a statement, it is still fair to say that Gates’s ascendance would have been much slower and likely less impressive, were it not for those three critical moments in his IBM negotiation back when he was in his mid‐twenties.

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