Natalie Portman is an outlier, and other entrepreneurial lessons learned from her career

Natalie won best actress Oscar for her terrifying portrayal in "Black Swan." 


I was not at all surprised and yet was super excited at that moment. How can I not feel exhilarated, when someone I've deeply rooted for in years finally received the ultimate recognition in her profession? When numerous daunting challenges have to be overcome with tenacity before success emerges in the line of sight? When brilliance and hard work paid off? 

Natalie's success story is inspiring to a young entrepreneur.

1. The 10,000 Hours' practice

Malcolm Gladwell's book "Outliers" quantifies the amount of hard work that one has to put in before she masters a subject -- 10,000 hours' practice. This number might have intimidated you at the first sight, but rest assured that it is quite reachable. Say, if you have a sharp focus, and put in 8 hours a day, 250 days a year, it will only take 5 years to reach. If you are extra hard-working and energetic, and put in 80 hours a week, 50 weeks a year, you will get there in 2.5 years. By the way, 80-hour weeks are not uncommon for professions such as start-up employees and tenure-track assistant professors. 


Natalie's movie career has been longer than that. She was only 13 when she made her powerful debut in the movie The Professional (1994) (aka "Léon"). Though she was pursuing her education in parallel for many years, she has obtained abundant experiences in her movie career. Here is a back-of-the-envelope calculation -- from her IMDB page, she has been a lead actress for at least a dozen movies. Say each movie takes 90 days to shoot, where she put in 10 hours' work per day (not a demanding standard), that's 12 * 90 * 10 = 10800 hours. 


The movie "Black Swan" is a must-see -- if you are an entrepreneur, it will teach you a lot about what not to do. :-) Also, the book "Outliers" is an entrepreneur must-read.


2. Diversify your skill sets, and trust the dots will connect
A successful entrepreneur is a generalist. She draws inspiration and insights from various sources. Natalie spent 4 years at Harvard studying psychology. This might have been considered by conventional wisdom a waste of time for such a talented actress, but here are her own words: "psychology seemed also a way where I could learn things that would be eventually helpful to my acting career without actually taking acting classes." What a farsighted statement it is -- will she have grasped in such a compelling fashion the role of Nina in "Black Swan," had it not been the in-depth training she has received in psychology? And yet, to quote Steve jobs, "you can't connect the dots looking forward. You can only connect them looking backwards, so you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future."


Some more food for thought from Jobs' now classic "dot connecting" theory: "You have to trust in something --your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever-- because believing that the dots will connect down the road will give you the confidence to follow your heart, even when it leads you off the well-worn path, and that will make all the difference."



Are you comfortable with what you do? Are you still learning and growing?


3. The power of work/life balance and multi-tasking
When shooting the "Black Swan", Natalie also got engaged with the choreographer Benjamin Millepied, with whom she is expecting their first child. Congrats Natalie!


This is a sweet slap in the face to those who equate a balance between work and life with a complete separation between work and life, to those whose hands come off the keyboard the moment the clock strikes 5pm, day in and day out. Who says work and life cannot be weaved into a harmonious symphony? Who says you had better work on only one thing at a time? Haven't you ever had interesting ideas or gained new insights when you mind wanders off, such as when taking a shower? 


Don't separate; integrate.


You have taught us well, Natalie. May the force be with you.