<p>Hunt wrote:</p>
<p>“thought Gladwell was really onto something with the 10,000 hours of practice, and I still do. I really couldn’t understand, though, why he couldn’t seem to see that it was the practice plus talent that resulted in the greatest success–something that seemed pretty obvious to me even in his examples.”</p>
<p>Gladwell never said that talent didn’t matter, he said that the idea that Talent alone is what drives success (call it intelligence, natural gifts, whatever), he didn’t say the Beatles were not talented, he said they became successful because whatever their gifts were, they also put the time in to master their trade, pure and simple. Bill Gates and Bill Joy are incredibly brilliant people and Gladwell isn’t saying they became successful only because they did the 10,000 hours and other things, he said it was the combination. </p>
<p>On the other hand, there are people who don’t have the intellectual gifts of Joy or Gates yet who achieved some level of success and a lot of it was through hard work and using what talents they had to the utmost. Part of the problem with the Times article is they zero in on uber academic success, like getting a PHd in science, where intelligence may play a higher role, given that to understood the complexities of physics or math on a high level requires a lot of what intelligence is about, including strong memory…but in other fields, that may not apply. In music, things like passion for the music, feeling for it, understanding of it plays a major role I believe between those who play exceedingly well and those who are musicians people would want to hear perform, so talent/inate abilities do play a role there (one of the most pathetic sights I have ever seen quite honestly has been music students trying to fake passion and musicality, they basically have been taught to move in a certain way, to use certain phrasing, to make it seem like they are musical, and if you saw them play multiple times, you would see exactly the same performance, time after time) as well, and it is a bigger one then even many music teachers seem to understand). </p>
<p>Keep in mind that Gladwell’s book doesn’t focus on any one thing, his book attempted to explain outliers, and he outlines the factors, rather then inate talent alone, that make it happen. It reminds me of claims of ‘self made people’, we have all heard people claiming how they were self made, they did it all without help, and so forth (with the obvious claim that those not so fortunate had something wrong with them), yet when you study their life story, you find out that no matter how humble the background, they had help, they had people who mentored them, supported them, gave them other kinds of support and so forth (David McCullough, the historian, made the statement that show him any so called ‘self made man’ and on investigation he will show you at least 10 people who helped the person get to where they are). It is the same with outliers, those who achieve ‘out there’, he is simply saying that inate ability isn’t the only thing, that it takes a combination of factors that include mastery of the skills required. If I take an average kid at the age of 5 and make him practice the piano 5 hours a day, by the time they are a teenager they probably will have achieved a certain level of proficiency, probably pretty high level, but it wouldn’t make them a promising pianist, either.</p>