Ten Thousand Hours

So . . . Malcolm Gladwell introduced to popular culture the idea of the outlier, the data point that lies outside the regular distribution, the exceptional. In his well-written and highly interesting book he puts forward the idea that there are identifiable reasons why the exceptional are, well, exceptional. One concept that has already made it into the zeitgeist (I saw it on The Good Wife) is that of ten thousand hours: in order be exceptional at something, you need to practice for ten thousand hours. The Beatles played for that long in a basement strip club in Hamburg, Germany before hitting it big, and their experience made them polished performers. NBA players tend to have played and practiced for that length of time in high school and college before going pro. Bill Gates logged that amount of time on an early computer at a young age. You get the idea.

(P.S. I seem to be having trouble with the font and spacing today. Sorry. I keep correcting it and it keeps coming back to this smaller font with no spaces between paragraphs. I'm tired of trying to fix it, hopefully things will be back to normal tomorrow).

I take exception with the ten thousand hours idea because it ignores a key consideration. The book Outliers makes it seem like if you log the hours, you will be successful. This is just untrue. There are way, way more musicians, athletes, and nerds who put in their time than are successful. The Beatles succeeded because they were lucky, they were discovered by a (also lucky) guy named Brian Epstein who put them in the right place at the right time. After all, if they were so polished and great, why did nearly every record label reject them? NBA players are lucky that they avoided injury, other mishaps, that they played for the right coaches and right teams and go the right attention. Bill Gates was only one of many aspiring tech entrepreneurs, and he happened to get the contract with IBM.

This is not to say that the ten thousand hours don’t help – of course they do. In fact, I would say they are nearly necessary to success (in order for them to be completely necessary, then every successful person must have put in their time, which is not the case). But they do not guarantee success. It’s like the lottery – if you own a ticket, it’s not a sure thing you will win; but if you don’t own a ticket, you definitely won’t win. The practice is your ticket.

I’m hoping to be an exceptional blogger. Over the past month I’ve been doing this, I have probably put in about 20 hours. Only 9,980 to go!