10,000 Hours
Books, Success, Work
This past Friday, I finished the second selection of Non-Fiction books towards goal #94. In “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell tries to adjust our perception of success by proving that it is not quite as miraculous as we might think.
The book is split in to two parts, the first about opportunity and the second about legacy. In the first, he argues that a fine intellect is much lower on the totem pole of requirements for greatness. Bill Gates would never have been THE Bill Gates without a steady series of very fortunate (and quite rare) opportunities in his early years. Likewise, the Beatles would never have been world-renowned rock stars without the benefit of playing 10 to 12 hour sets 6 times a week for months on end at various strip clubs in Hamburg. That is also not to say that they just got lucky. There’s a huge difference between getting lucky and getting an opportunity. Lucky is winning the lottery. An opportunity is not just being in the right place at the right time, but also knowing what to do with it, and having the desire to milk it for all its worth.
Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.
To that end, Gladwell presents a theory akin to the old adage “practice makes perfect.” Through various examples including Mozart, Bill Joy, and many other celebrated figures, Gladwell discusses the sociological phenomenon of 10,000 hours. 10,000 hours being the requisite number of practice hours required to become truly great at any particular skill or craft. For the Beatles, it was Hamburg strip clubs. For Gates, it was having the great fortune to be at a particular school that allowed him almost unlimited access to some rather advanced equipment to hone his skills. By this standard, Mozart actually developed quite late in his career. True he started very young, but it was abnormally long after he achieved his 10,000 that he started writing some of his great works.
Gladwell spends the second half of the book discussing how success is equally related to your cultural background. For example, he attempts at length to prove that all (ok, let’s say ‘most’ for the sake of being PC) Chinese people are good at math because the system of counting in their language is substantially less complex than in the English language. He also argues that poor children are less likely to succeed than middle- or upper-class children because of the attitudes and sense of entitlement their parents instill in them at an early age. The second part of his book didn’t resonate with me nearly as much as the first, so I’m not going to go in to much detail about it. I personally found his arguments on legacy to be substantially less founded and less relevant.
As a whole, the book was valuable not only for its breadth of “impress-your-friends trivia,” but also its added perspective on the concepts of genius, success, and opportunity. As I read, I found myself trying to tally in my head how many hours of coding practice I’d had thus far in my life. Needless to say, I fell a bit short, I’m a ways away from building the next Facebook. But it is also quite inspiring. The idea that, although a baseline of talent is preferable, anyone can be an expert in almost anything presuming you have the chance to get your 10,000 hours in is definitely alluring. It is refreshing to be able to believe that there is no such thing as a “natural” or someone who was “born in to greatness.” The most important thing you need is good old-fashioned hard work. That’s definitely an idea I can get behind.
[...] show interview for the brand-new Pipeline series at 5×5. He’s one of those guys that got his 10,000 hours in while working as the head of the Web Standards Project back in its early days, which coincidentally [...]