10,000 Hours Away from Success: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

In Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers: The Story of Success, he describes what sets apart people who are successful. The good news is that according to his research, you don't necessarily need any special talent or skill. The not so good news is that it can take you putting in 10,000 hours of work to reach success. In his book, he describes that becoming successful is a mixture of opportunity and how much you take advantage of that opportunity. This opportunity knocks as a result of an individual's circumstance, environment, social status, even culture and religion.

The 10,000 rule was derived from a study by Anders Ericsson, who researched successful violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music. In Ericsson's study, he asked the students how much time they spent practicing and found that in every case that the violinists that performed better spent more time practicing.

"The curious thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals" - musicians who could float effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction of the time that their peers did. Nor could they find "grinds", people who worked harder than everyone else and yet just didn't have what it takes to break into the top ranks. Their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. What's more, the people at the very top don't just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder."

This magic number of 10,000 hours of practice showed up across the board in various studies:

"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... "

This book gives a detail account of the stories behind the success of many celebrities like Bill Gates, Bill Joy, and The Beatles. Their success turned out to be a mixture of many circumstances such as when they were born, the opportunities placed before them, and of course putting in 10,000 hours of more into their passions. Outliers also has various studies that show how your culture, how much money you have, and your date of birth can either be advantageous or disadvantageous for you.

Even though there were other factors that accounted for the success of most of the people in the study, I found that the 10,000 hour rule was still very encouraging and motivating. If you end up put 10,000 hours into something you enjoy, then definitely have a win-win situation. Putting in 10,000 hours over 10 years may see like a like a long time, but the important lesson to take away from this is that, most people don't set out to put in this kind of time. What happens first is that a passion for a skill is realized. Before you know it, you end up working at it simply because you love it and you want to find out all there is to know about it. For example, when Bill Gates became interested in computers, it was no way for him to even dream about the kind of success his passion for computers would bring him.

Finding your passion is the most important aspect of the 10,000 hour rule, after all time flies when you are having fun. Once you have a passion for your work, then it doesn't seem like work at all. If you have a passion for a skill or interest then I would say that you are already half way there. Your next step is to start your 10,000 hour journey toward success.