OK I’ll say it. I like his writing a lot. I love that he narrates his own audiobooks. I know that he is sometimes criticized for overgeneralizing (and I do think some of you are taking the 10K hours out of context if you just take it at face value without reading what he said exactly, and I do think he attributed it, never stating it was his idea), but his big fish in a small pond argument about college choice I think makes a lot of sense, though is perhaps student/personality-dependent.
I will add from considerable experience in training of chess at high levels, the 10,000 hours idea is without merit. Talent comes first, and the number of hours needed depends on just how high is the level of talent, and on the type of talent.
I think you can learn things from Gladwell and I really enjoy reading his books.
For me the main idea of the 10,000 hours was that no one gets to the top of any field without a lot of dedication and practice. I just think that choosing a specific number made it more interesting to discuss, but the exact number is arbitrary.
I don’t recall Gladwell ever discounting natural ability. In fact, he tends to emphasize an underlying aptitude before delving into his other concepts. In addition to the 10,000 hour concept, you also have to look at his discussions around the “January Rule” and other constructs in society that give some people advantages over others.
I don’t think the 10,000 rule is applicable in the case of swimming or other areas that are not particularly complex. Gladwell focuses his discussions around musicians, scientists, computer programmers, lawyers, and others that work in very complex environments.
The idea of the “January Rule” for example comes from observations that top athletes have a disproportionate distribution of birthdays that correlates to the cutoff dates for their sports at the youth level. One of the examples he uses is youth hockey, where the cutoff is in January. Kids born before the cutoff date have to compete on the same team that were born after, and they are at a very real physical disadvantage. For example, if the cutoff is Jan 1 for a league of 8 year-olds, a child turning 8 on Jan 2 would not make the cutoff for that season. The would not be able to play until they are a couple days short of nine years old. On the other hand, a child that turns 8 two days earlier would be on the team, and would have to compete with many that are nearly a full year older. The older kids have an advantage that grows over time as they get assigned starting positions and can get selected for more competitive teams.
Gladwell acknowledges that attitude, effort, and natural ability are important, but the data seems to show that these social constructs give distinct advantages early on to those who happen to be on the right side of the cutoff. In fact, I’m probably going to anger some parents on this forum by pointing out that it’s not uncommon at all for parents to keep their child from entering primary school for a year to give them that kind of early advantage. By having their child start school more mature and organized than their peers, they believe they are giving them an advantage.
I do too–he’s a superb writer and editor, and his stuff is very fun to read. Impeccable info flow at all times!
He wants to go against the conventional wisdom, which is that talent and practice are both important. So he privileges preparation (and I don’t believe ANYONE here thinks he’s saying exactly 10,000 hours–everyone gets that’s an approximation), but then he goes on to say, well, these folks are extremely talented to start.
So then what you’re back to is conventional wisdom plus facile, amazingly digestible verbiage.
In the chapter of the “Outliers” where the 10,000 hour rule comes from, the main focus is on the very special opportunity that the extremely successful person has. That part of the story seems pretty solid.
Bill Joy, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs were all born in 1954 and all wound up in Palo Alto about 20 years later. They were all in exactly the right place at the right time if you wanted to become a leader in computers. Carnegie, Vanderbilt and Rockefeller were all contemporaries and came of age at just the right time if you wanted to be a monopolist plutocrat (industrial technology revolution, no income tax, no estate tax, no antitrust laws, etc.).
Gates went to a private school as a teenager which was one of the few in the U.S. that had a computer available for student use. He also grew up within a bike ride of the UW computer center. He would sneak out of his house in the middle of the night and use their mainframe computer for free all night long (which is where/how he logged his 10,000 hours). At that time, large computers stayed powered up 24/7 but no one used them in the middle of the night, so the folks at UW let teen Gates hack around for free.
So the real story is (i) Gates had uber-talent, (ii) Gates logged the 10k hours as a teenager, and (iii) most importantly, Gates as a teenager was provided a rare and expensive opportunity to do the 10k hours at a time when computers were unavailable outside of large corporations and universities. If Gates is born in North Dakota he doesn’t become Bill Gates. He also doesn’t become Billl Gates if he is born 10 years earlier or 10 years later.
Mozart similarly had the opportunity to apply his talent by being the son of a successful court composer and musician in Salzburg, Austria in the late 1700s. He doesn’t become Mozart if he is born as a rural farm boy.
Microsoft bought the rights to 86-DOS and Bill Gate’s mom was important in getting them their first big contract from IBM. It’s not clear Bill Gate’s coding ability was a crucial element of his success.
About the Bill Gates story-my husband often muses about what would Bill Gates have been if he’d been born 100 years before computers, or Mozart 1000 years before paper and musical instruments? Did there have to be a serendipitous meeting of that particular mind with that particular technology for magic to happen?
Or would they just have turned their minds to something else and it would have been Bill Gates, the dude who invented the movable printing press?
But re: Asian vs. Chinese @ucbalumnus, the stereotype comes from the influx of educated Chinese immigrants to the US in recent decades. Add “tiger parenting” and a cultural emphasis on mathematics (borrowed from the Chinese education system) and that is why the ‘Asians are good at math’ stereotype actually correlates specifically with Chinese people. To clarify what I mean by the Chinese education system, they just teach more advanced math at younger ages and do more practice, so that American school (easy) math is second nature.
@tonymom For really smart kids, they will do just as well at a lower-ranked school (big fish in a small pond approach, then go to a well-known graduate school etc.) than at HYPSM – that I agree with. However, in life you cannot just look at the goal as an end in itself. For average student in both types of schools, I don’t agree.
The “Chinese education system” does not explain the educational success (generally and in math) of kids of Indian immigrants. Nor does Gladwell’s claim about language structure of number words.
What really explains the educational success of kids of Chinese and Indian immigrants is that immigration selected their parents for being college educated, often in math, science, and engineering subjects (50% of Chinese and 70% of Indian immigrants have bachelor’s or higher degrees, which is much higher than the US non-immigrant population, or the overall populations of China or India). Regardless of whether you look at educational success as a product of nature or nurture, either or both are favorable for the kids of these immigrants.
It’s also relevant that in some of the Asian countries (I can only speak from personal knowledge of Korea), education is a cultural obsession and is almost universally seen as the one goal for all families and their children. In Korea this can be traced back centuries.
In ancient Egypt he would probably have monopolized the papyrus scroll market, and sold millions of slightly defective scrolls that constantly need replacement.
Gary Kildall, rest in power.