What does the 10,000 hour rule in Outliers imply about social class and success?
The answer to this question can be found near the end of Part 2 of Chapter 2 in Outliers. (I have this book in electronic form so I cannot give page numbers.) There, Gladwell tells us that one implication of the 10,000 hour rule is that you generally cannot reach that threshold unless you are somewhat wealthy.
The idea of the 10,000 hour rule is that a person has to engage in working on their skills for 10,000 hours before they can truly become great at those skills. This is, of course, a tremendous number of hours. It is the equivalent of working 20 hours each week for more than 9.5 years.
In most cases, people do not have the opportunity to work that many hours for that many years on a particular set of skills. The people who are most likely to have these opportunities are those from...
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a relatively high social class. Such people can afford to put their children in the kinds of special programs that can give them the required number of hours of practice. As Gladwell says,
It’s all but impossible to reach that number all by yourself by the time you’re a young adult. You have to have parents who encourage and support you. You can’t be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side to help make ends meet, there won’t be time left in the day to practice enough.
What this tells us is that people are much more likely to reach greatness if they already start from a position of decent wealth. This means that social class and success (at least the sort of success Gladwell is talking about in his 10,000 hour rule) are closely connected with one another.
What is the 10,000 hour rule in Outliers: The Story of Success?
In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell repeatedly refers to what he calls "the 10,000 hour rule," which he believes is applicable across a wide range of fields. Gladwell's hypothesis is that the role of such vague factors as genius, inspiration, and even talent has been overrated in the traditional view of success. He believes that effective practice for 10,000 hours will normally lead to mastery in disciplines as diverse as music composition and computer programming.
Gladwell gives Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, often quoted as an example of someone who was divinely gifted, as an example of the former. He does not deny that Mozart had innate talent as a musician, but he also practiced the necessary skills for thousands of hours. Bill Gates, he says, took the same approach to computer programming.
Gladwell emphasizes that the 10,000 hours must be spent in properly directed practice. Mozart achieved such success at a young age because his father, a composer and music theorist, was able to teach him and direct his efforts. Bill Gates also had an unusual amount of access to computer equipment at an early age for someone of his generation. However, neither would have achieved the results they did without putting in the requisite amounts of time. It should be noted, however, that Gladwell's 10,000 hour-rule has been widely criticized, and that even the authors of the study on which he bases the rule have disputed his use of their work.