In Malcolm Gladwell's "Outliers", how does opportunity influence the 10,000-hour rule?
The essential premise of the ten thousand hour rule is key to understanding the role of opportunity in it. From the onset of Chapter 2, Malcolm Gladwell explains that the truly great are not just inherently gifted. Instead, the truly great are also very well practiced. His explains that K. Anderson Ericsson, a psychologist, researched the concept of gifted musicians and found that ten thousand hours of practice are a critical minimum that the greatest musicians shared. These studies have been replicated time and time again and shown to really display the ten thousand hour rule in many other disciplines, too. Still, practice isn't the only component of the equation.
Gladwell analyzes the lives of Bill Joy, Bill Gates, and the Beatles to uncover another primal component of being a successful outlier. He explains,
We pretend that success Is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there's nothing in any...
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of the histories we've looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. These are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seize it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. (Pg 67)
Gladwell contends success is not only a matter of practicing a minimum of ten thousand hours. Rather, success is being given the opportunity to practice greatness in the first place. Had it not been for Bill Joy walking around campus one day, he may never have become a programmer. If Bill Gates hadn't had a series of 8 beneficial opportunities, he would not have been Bill Gates. And lastly, the Beatles were invited, rather opportunistically, to Hamburg where they had nonstop practice of their craft, and went on to do amazing things. They were an average band before Germany. Opportunity, then, is critical to being able to learn and hone skills.
What does the 10,000 hours rule mean in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell?
In his nonfiction book Outliers: The Story of Success (2008), Malcolm Gladwell investigates the qualities that successful people have in common, analyzes the various factors that contribute to success, and and suggests strategies for anyone (for example, the reader) to find more success in his or her life.
One of the key factors and strategies that Gladwell writes about in the book is the "10,000-Hour Rule." The concept of this rule is that for any person to become an expert in anything, he or she must spend 10,000 hours practicing it. Those 10,000 hours must be spent in a correct, rigorous, and focused way: Gladwell calls this, "deliberate practice."
Gladwell gives examples of famous people who have employed the 10,000-Hour Rule to achieve their goals. Dedication to "deliberate practice," he writes, helped the Beatles become world-famous (they played for a long time together before they became well-known internationally), and it helped Bill Gates (who spent many hours on his computer as a teenager and young man) make great technological advancements.
Gladwell's 10,000-Hour Rule was based in part on a 1993 study by Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer. The trio observed violin students at a music academy in Berlin, noting that the best musicians had clocked an average of 10,000 hours of practice by the age of twenty. After Outliers was published, Ericsson co-wrote a book on the science of expertise. In it, he addressed some of the flaws or misconceptions about the 10,000-Hour Rule:
The rule is irresistibly appealing. It's easy to remember, for one thing. It would've been far less effective if those violinists had put in, say, eleven thousand hours of practice by the time they were twenty. And it satisfies the human desire to discover a simple cause-and-effect relationship: just put in ten thousand hours of practice at anything, and you will become a master. . . . [but] there is nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours.
The number, they point out, is just an average of how much their students practiced. Gladwell responded to the criticism by slightly clarifying his concept after Outliers was published:
There is a lot of confusion about the 10,000 rule that I talk about in Outliers. It doesn't apply to sports. And practice isn't a SUFFICIENT condition for success. I could play chess for 100 years and I'll never be a grand master. The point is simply that natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest. Unfortunately, sometimes complex ideas get oversimplified in translation.