Okay, we’re just gonna have to disagree on Gladwell. Don’t want to deal with any more Ayn Rand guilt by association tactics.
To close this, I wasn’t using Ayn Rand for guilt by association, I was using her as an extreme example of the school of thought that people who succeed do so because they are so special, have some inate genius, and I certainly wasn’t associating any poster, including yourself @garland, with her, any more than I would associate some of the extremist "talent doesn’t exist, giftedness doesn’t exist, everyone is a blank canvas who can achieve anything if they just are given the resources’ school of granola head.
I’m with garland on Gladwell. Found his books Outliers and the Tipping Point to be deeply flawed and the examples contradicted themselves in many cases. He made a huge point about the 10,000 hours.
Of course success is complicated and there may well have been other groups with Beatles level quality that did not ever make it due to other factors, including luck and perseverance. But not sure that the Beatles needed 10,000 hours to become who they were! And there are many other bands who have likely played that many gigs or more and have never achieved even a small slice of the success of the Beatles.
Most college or early career athletes have likely not made it to 10,000 hours. For an 18 yo kid, that started to play at age 9, that would require 1,000 hours per year which is almost 20 hours per week. No young kid is doing that. Say for the first five years, the kid spends 10 hours a week on their sport (which is a lot for a young kid), for the next five they would have to put in close to 30 hours a week to catch up. While some may, most are not doing that and yet may still be the best player on a very good team.
Of course personality plays almost as much of a role in success for most people as innate ability (IQ or talent). Being very smart, but not very driven, may get a person to the same point as one who is very driven, but not as smart. Being super smart or super talented may overcome challenges in personality to become successful.
@mom2and:
I don’t think the point is that 10,000 hours is a magic number, I think the concept is that to achieve in almost anything you have to put the time in. Gladwell’s 10,000 hours is to achieve mastery, and I think he means at the time someone finally achieves whatever it is. College athletes (I am talking let’s say division 1 pro aiming athletes, like basketball and football) don’t come in with the 10,000 hours, but by the time they leave they have that kind of training. Gladwell is talking about the finished product (let’s say when someone becomes a Tom Brady or Lebron James), so no one would consider a college athlete, or even a kid in his first couple of years, there yet. Remember that in the big time football programs that generally turn out pro athletes, those kids are in reality majoring in football, they spend a significant portion of each day on the sport, almost year round, they probably spend in a given week close to 40 hours a week (over 7 days) either practicing, studying playbooks, game film , working with coaches, and working out, and that goes on for 4 years, so let’s say they do 40 hours a week for 40 weeks to be conservative, that is 1600 hours a year for 3 years, plus let’s say another 800 hours senior year, that is over 5000 hours just in college, plus they likely have several thousand hours accumulated in the years between pee wee football at age 6, sports camps, coaching, travel teams, school teams, etc…then they hit the pros, and it becomes year long training, training camps, etc, where they likely have several thousands of hours a year, add that all up and it isn’t all that far from 10k (keep in mind that a typical superstar football player doesn’t hit their stride until their third year in general). You see what happens to those who don’t put in the work, Michael Vick was one of the most talented athletes around, naturally so, but because he relied on his athletic ability he never achieved what he could of, he was able to get by on pretty much his athletic ability alone, and in the end it left him as one of those “shoulda been a champion, ended up a footnote” kind of player.
With serious level sports, kids often do have significant hours, we aren’t talking the kid who played little league baseball here. Kids seriously into sports spend a lot of time on the sport, it isn’t just the games, baseball and football kids spend time with travel teams, they spend time going to sports clinics, they spend time in weight training and physical training and it can be a significant amount of time, a lot of the kids who excel in sports spend the entire summer at sports camps where they are working on it many hours a day, and that adds up. With basketball the guys who make it into the pros eventually spend their whole time growing up playing basketball hours and hours a day, whether in formal practice of pickup games and the like, or summer rec leagues and so forth.
In music, it is much the same thing these days, the kids who end up in music are not kids who played in the high school band and had lessons in school, it starts young, and the top musical kids have done intense work starting from a young age. I haven’t added it up, but by the time my son hit conservatory, between private lessons, youth orchestras, chamber music, the pre college program he did in high school, his daily practice (that if I had to average it over the whole time, prob average 2 hours a day 6 or 7 days a week) he would have many thousands of hours by the time he graduated, and in the 4 years of conservatory, he is probably up to territory not far removed from 10k…vocal music is different, kids start later and they can’t practice as much (plus the voice itself developes physically much later), and classically trained singers end up hitting their top form in their 30’s, some of that is physical, some of that is catching up from what i have been told.
I think the mistake is assuming that 10,000 hours is a magic number that if you hit that you will be great, as you and others have pointed out, other factors are at play, too, as Gladwell himself pointed out in that same book, it is just as silly to assume that success is all about pluck and hard work and perseverence, the old Horatio Alger myth/self made man nonsese, that grindign through 10,000 hours (or any ‘magic number’) will cause success, any more than those that proclaim someone is successful because of ‘natural ability’ alone, the key factor is you need to put the work in, no matter how talented you are, and then you also have to count on other factors, some of them being pure luck, some of them things like networking and things like family connections as well:).
An independent study found commercial test prep added on average 30 points to a student’s composite SAT score. Commercial test prep companies are known to play games, where they give a kid a diagnostic test harder than the actual SAT, so the gains look as large as possible when the student takes the real exam. While test prep has value, since for students on the edge plus or minus 30 points can turn a reject or waitlist to an admit, I think you’re overestimating the gains attributable to test prep. What you can’t possibly know is how much better you would have done if you spent more time on test prep or how much worse your friend would have done if they spent less time on test prep.
I’ve been reading Peak (https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise/dp/0544456238/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1483570218&sr=8-1&keywords=peak+book) – which points out that 10,000 hours of BAD practice does not help you improve, but that regular specific targeted (deliberate) practice will help you improve. It’s a point that is also made in this Freakonomics podcast: http://freakonomics.com/podcast/peak-rebroadcast/ (which is partly about the book).
One of the commercial test prep places gave free tests to kids at S2’s hs. He got a 490 CR+W score on it after getting a 71 on the PSAT and a 650 CR in the 8th grade. He did not sign up for the prep classes.
Did you drop a digit off the PSAT score?
IQ is controversial because someone’s bound to jump in with a discussion of multiple intelligences. If you don’t think college entrance exams are at least correlated to some type of intelligence, or at least innate ability, you need to scrap all the SMPY research, since SAT/PSAT/ACT scores are how they screen for giftedness. The 1% article you reference would be irredeemably flawed because it uses a measure of talent that you’re claiming is invalid.
There is also question about how applicable measured IQ is, since it is how well one does on whatever IQ test is used, which may not necessarily test the aspects of intelligence that one is really looking for. Of course, there is also the question of some IQ tests being coachable, or correlated with specific types of previous schooling or experiences that some but not others have (i.e. it can be hard to measure innate intelligence or ability isolated from environmental effects).