There have been a lot of articles recently that suggest that high performers are made, not born. I have never agreed with this. So, I have taken a skeptical eye and reviewed the studies carefully to see what, if anything, can be drawn from them.
You'll hear a lot about "10,000 hours" in the press these days. The most famous person to bring up the number is Malcom Gladwell who discusses it in his book "Outliers". However, other researchers are coming up with the same number. Basically, the assertion is that it takes 10,000 to gain mastery at something.
Here's where I'm going to quibble a little bit. Folks who know my views on the subject know that I think that about 90% (or more) of success in life is determined at birth.
Forrest Gump may have been a multigozillionaire in the movie, but in real life, the prospects for a young person who is borderline mentally retarded are limited. They will be limited in education and opportunities for jobs. They will be limited in how they perform those jobs. All the effort in the world isn't going to take a person who is borderline mentally retarded and put them into a neurosurgery residency after med school.
Physically, I think the differences are even more stark. You can take the slowest kid in the school and put him through 10,000 hours of training and sorry, he'll still probably get absolutely annihilated by he most athletic kid in the school. It just works out that way.
Life isn't fair and the tools you're born with is one of the most unfair aspects of life.
Where I think the 10,000 hours comes in to play is when you already have the tools. For instance, Gladwell mentions the Beatles. As any Beatle freak knows, the Beatles were regarded as being a band that wasn't very good, even compared to the local bands in the Liverpool area. They went to Hamburg and became the house band at the Kieserkeller. There, they spent a few years playing 8, 10 or 12 hours a day. They got kicked out of Germany a couple of times (once for lighting a condom on fire, another time when it was found out that George Harrison was too young to legally work.) But they kept going over.
Eventually, they got so sharp that they played backup on a record by an artist named Tony Sherridan. ("Ain't She Sweet".) The record sold like hotcakes in Brian Epstein's family's furniture store (where Brian sold records in a corner.) Man (or men) met moment, and the rest is history.
Gladwell's assertion is that the Beatles weren't exceptional. They just had the benefit of putting in their 10,000 hours. Frankly, I think that's a bunch of crap. What this argument ignores is that a LOT of bands from Liverpool did house gigs in Hamburg. Only one of them became the Beatles. Other than a few die-hard Mersey-beats like me and a few of my friends, I doubt anybody today can tell you who Rory Storm or Gerry Marsden are.
They not only had the same incubation period as the Beatles, they actually were regarded as having been MUCH BETTER at the time.
What made the Beatles exceptional is that two of the best composers in Rock and Roll coincidentally joined forces in the same band. In fact, even after the band, McCartney went on to have over a dozen platinum albums without Lennon. Lennon went into quasi retirement, but charted every time he recorded and had, if memory serves, 3 or 4 platinum albums. Either career, in and of itself, would have made either artist sensationally successful.
There are other examples, and I would offer similar rebuttals to all of them. I agree that the 10,000 hour figure is informational. It may very well be axiomatic. Where I disagree is that it trumps innate talent. I believe it refines innate talent, but I don't believe for a minute that it trumps it.
Let me give an example that bears out my point. Folks who have little kids can tell you how much they develop in a single year. In feats of athleticism, one year is pretty much all it takes for one kid to be completely superior to another.
Our city holds open tryouts and tries to sponsor two travel teams for each age group. The top 12 players are selected for the "heavy travel" team. The next 12 are selected for the "light travel" team.
Before the season, my son's team, the U9 heavy ("9 and under") scrimmaged the U10 light team. This was our kids' first year of travel ball. The other team not only had the benefit of one more year of growth and physical development, they also had the benefit of having already done one year of travel baseball.
There should have been no contest, if experience were a factor. They had lots of experience and more than twice as much practice than our boys did. Our boys hadn't played a single actual game, yet. PLUS, they were a year older.
Instead, the U9s beat them rather handily. At no point during that game did it appear that the U10s were going to win.
THAT is what I mean by innate genetics. They're such a strong factor that it allowed a bunch of completely inexperienced 9 year olds to defeat a team of older, more seasoned, more practiced 10 year olds. The 10 year olds, by the way, were no slouches. They were hand-selected from a pool of kids who tried out.
Just that, to be the best, you gotta be born on the skinny part of the bell-curve.
If you're there, the 10,000 hours is what you need to function at your optimal level. However, if you're not there, my assertion is that 10,000 or a million hours of practice will never get you to perform at elite level.
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