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Archive for September, 2009

I just finished reading a book by Malcolm Gladwell titled Outliers. It is a book about some extremely successful people and how they came to succeed.  In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell  looked at things about these successful people such as their family, birthplace, and even their birthdate.  What I want to write about, and it is just one part of the book, is about the 10,000 hour rule.

I’m only going to cover two of the examples that he wrote about, after all this is not meant to be a book report. In the first example I’m going to use, Gladwell states that achievement is talent plus preparation. He tells of a study done at Berlin’s Elite Academy of Music. They divided the school’s top violinists into 3 groups. The first were the stars, the students most likely to become world class soloists. In the second were those judged to be merely “good”. The third students were the ones who were unlikely to play professionally and who intended to become music teachers in the public school systems. The researchers found that all of the students started playing at the same age, around 5 years old, and all practiced roughly the same amount, about 2 to 3 hours per week. But when the students were around the age of 8 is when the real differences started showing. The students who would turn out to be the best began to practice more than everyone else; six hours a week by age 9, 8 hours a week by the age of 12, 16 hours by 14, up and up until by the age of 20 they were practicing their instruments with the intent to get better- well over 30 hours per week. The elite players had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice. By contrast the merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours, and the future music teachers totaled just over four thousand hours.

The researchers did this study on other musicians and came up with the same results. The thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. And what’s more, the people don’t just work much harder than everyone else, but rather, much, much harder. The researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise, ten thousand hours.

One other example that Malcolm uses and which I wanted to add, because I have been a fan of theirs for years, is The Beatles. What was interesting about the Beatles is how long they were together before they came to the United States. Lennon and McCartney started playing together in 1957, seven years before coming to America. If you looked into their history you would find that in 1960 they were a struggling high school rock and roll band. During this time they were invited to play in Hamburg Germany. Hamburg in those days did not have rock and roll music clubs. They had strip clubs. The idea was for these clubs to have non-stop shows hour after hour, with a lot of people straggling in and out. And the band would play all the time to catch the passing traffic. They were playing 8 hours a day, seven days a week! The Beatles ended up traveling to Hamburg five times between 1960 and 1962. All told they performed 270 nights in just a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers! They were no good on stage when they got there and they were very good when they got back. They weren’t disciplined on stage before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.

What I got out of this story is that with some talent you can be extremely successful in whatever endeavor you choose, as long as you are willing to put in long hours of practice in order to achieve it.