10,000 hours to greatness

I'm not sure this guy is fully grasping the idea that Gladwell was pushing across. I don't think the point was that 10,000 hours is a magic number to strive for in order to become an expert (although he does say that persistently), rather he was emphasizing the direct correlation between work and ability that we often don't recognize, and that realistically, 10,000 hours will put you far ahead of your friends. I think 10,000 hours is known as the statistical breaking point because leaders of industry are often there at their peak, but they would still be experts if they were at 8000 and everyone else was at 6000. The idea is purely comparative, and the number has no special counterintuitive quality to it. I spend about an hour a day pissing, but that doesn't mean that by 27 ill be THE EXPERT. Ill miss and exercise poor urinal decorum like I always do, and no breaking point will allow the gift of expertise to show up at my doorstep. The point of this idea is to understand that anybody can be the beatles if they've worked effectively harder than the norm, not that they have worked enough to be the beatles. This is still an important point though, and I think this author should attempted to work above and beyond the expected norms, but not so he can hit the magic number. He just needs enough that he's better than everybody else.

See also: <a href="http://norvig.com/21-days.html" rel="nofollow">http://norvig.com/21-days.html</a> (Teach Yourself Programming in Ten Years by Peter Norvig)

&#62; Perhaps biased, my wife’s pursuit of her undergrad and master’s degrees, coupled with her unbridled passion for learning what we need to do to give our daughter the best education and upbringing possible is surely close to that number. It shows; my daughter has an insatiable curiosity that, according to Gladwell, is a direct result of how we’re raising her.<p>Having recently devoured a bunch of the works of Steven Pinker, I question this. If their daughter is naturally curious, it could be inherited rather than learned. In "The Blank Slate" Steven Pinker has an entire chapter on children. There he says that all studies that try to figure out what styles of parenting lead to what results, none of them control for heritability. They simply assume that the child's behavior due to styles of parenting. But what if curious parents lead to curious children because of their genes, and not their style of parenting? Pinker goes on to argue that what the evidence shows is that the style of parenting has absolutely no long-term effect on a person's behavior. Instead, what matters is genes, culture (in particular the child's peers), and chance events.

The ability to spend 10,000 hours of deliberate practice on something is an inherited talent.

Just out of curiosity, would working 2000 hours a year for five years make you a "superstar" too?