the 10 000 hours philosophy. The research he referred to in the book was conducted by K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer, who published a paper called ‘The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance', which stated that while they could not find evidence of natural gifts they did notice something else: no matter the activity, excellence took years of disciplined practice to achieve.
Adding weight and engaging narrative to the argument, Gladwell gave two business examples of the relevance of 10 000 hours – Bill Joy, computer scientist and co-founder of Sun Microsystems; and Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft.
In the 1970s computers were the size of tennis courts, cost an absolute fortune and took forever to program. Plus they were not very powerful (the smartphone in your pocket is probably more powerful!). Needless to say, their size and cost didn't exactly make them accessible to the general public. Programming involved punching rows and rows of holes into cardboard, which then needed to be input by an operator. Complex codes often required hundreds, sometimes thousands, of hole-punched lines, and computers could only run one program at a time. Time-sharing changed all that and the programmer could input straight to the mainframe using a telephone line.
At the time Bill Joy was at the University of Michigan, one of the first places in the US to have time-sharing computers. Joy had initially planned to be a biologist or mathematician, but then he discovered the computer centre and became obsessed.
The same is true of Bill Gates. Most people know the Microsoft legend … the story of how Gates dropped out of Harvard to build the BASIC programming language with Paul Allen after informing Micro Instrumentation and Telemetry Systems (MITS; the makers of the Altair 8080, billed as the world's first microcomputer) that they had developed a programming language that could be used on the Altair 8080. (All this despite having never even seen an Altair 8080 or programmed a line of code.) What's less well known is how Gates got to be so ‘talented' with computers and therefore confident enough to make the bluff and deliver.
Gates was not born a computer genius; he made himself one through thousands of hours of practice. He went to Lakeside, a private school in Seattle that, in his second year, started a computer club. The computers were time-sharing – not bad, considering that most colleges and universities didn't even have time-sharing computers at the time. Gates said, ‘It was my obsession … It would be a rare week that we wouldn't get twenty or thirty hours in'. Gates even tracked down a computer lab at the University of Washington that had a slack period between 3 am and 6 am. Such was his obsession that he would sneak out of his house in the middle of the night, walk or take the bus to the university, program for three hours and then sneak back in time for breakfast. Gates's mother later said that she'd wondered why it was so hard for him to get out of bed in the morning.
Both Bill Joy and Bill Gates admit that they must have spent thousands of hours mastering computers. In Outliers Gladwell presents a convincing argument that they would each have spent at least 10 000 hours, and that was what created their formidable ‘talent'. He goes on to quote neurologist Daniel Levitin: ‘… no-one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to achieve true mastery'.
Nobel Prize–winner Herbert Simon and William Chase proposed another version of the 10 000 hour rule with the ‘ten year rule'. Their research focused on chess masters and they concluded that it wasn't possible to reach the upper echelons of chess without a decade or so of intensive study.
In his book Talent Is Overrated Geoff Colvin states that despite serious scientific enquiry over the last 150 years, and a mountain of research gathered over the past 30 years, there isn't a single study that has successfully proven that talent even exists.
Colvin suggests that our rush to assume talent exists is based on faulty information and assumptions. To demonstrate his point he tells the stories of Mozart and Tiger Woods.
The legend tells us that Mozart was composing music at age five and giving public performances by age eight. What is less well known is that Mozart's father was a famous composer in his own right. He was a domineering man who started his son on intensive composition training by the time he was three. His father had a passion for music and how it was taught to children. In addition, many of Mozart's early compositions were not in his own hand; his father would ‘correct' them before anyone saw them. Mozart's first work universally considered a masterpiece is his Piano Concerto No. 9. But he composed that at age 21 – some 18 years after he first started learning and composing music.
Tiger Woods is the other example that people regularly point to as an expression of innate talent, but again there is much more to the story. His father Earl Woods had retired from the army, was golf crazy and loved to teach. Tiger Woods was universally recognised as brilliant at age 19 when he was a member of the US Walker Cup team. What is less well known is that Tiger was just seven months old when his father first placed a proper metal putter in his hand. By the age of two he and his father would go to the golf course to play and practise regularly and he appeared on the Mike Douglas Show demonstrating his already apparent skill. By the time he was considered a genius Tiger Woods had been practising golf with unprecedented intensity for 17 years. Neither Tiger Woods nor his father ever suggested that Tiger had a gift for golf; both put his success down to sheer hard work.
Mozart and Tiger Woods are both powerful examples of just how influential environment is in shaping personality and in determining what talents manifest in the first place.
Rory McIlroy has a similar story to Tiger Woods in that he also started playing golf at a very young age (18 months old). He was also coached by his father (Gerry, who played off scratch), and Rory also appeared on national TV demonstrating his skill – by chipping golf balls into a washing machine! He won the US Open, his first major, by eight shots with a record-breaking 16 under par. And since then he's gone from strength to strength.
In My Story, legendary golfer Jack Nicklaus identifies important traits beyond the expected attributes such as confidence, concentration and discipline. He pinpointed four qualities shared by those who would consistently win: thinking clearly under pressure, patience, self-centredness (to not be distracted by what competitors are doing), and to work harder at all of these qualities ‘when you are playing poorly than when you are playing well'.
The argument is clear: talent is not bestowed upon anyone; it is earned by doing what others can't or won't do. Of course, as Colvin himself acknowledges, ‘Such findings do not prove that talent doesn't exist. But they do suggest that if it does, it may be irrelevant'. Quite a turnaround from the ‘talent is everything' argument!
The truth, of course, is that both of these arguments are flawed and both have merit. There are plenty of examples of talented people who have made a significant positive contribution to their business or sport, so it's easy to see why people assume that talent is important. But there are also plenty of examples of talented people who have made a significant negative contribution to their business or sport – so it's also easy to see why people say that talent is not as important as we may at first imagine.
That said, I know for a fact that I could have started playing golf in my mother's womb and I would never possess a fraction of the golfing ability consistently demonstrated by Tiger Woods, Jack Nicklaus or Rory McIlroy.
So what's really going on?
IDENTIFYING THE RED HERRINGS
Let's take the ‘talent is the answer' argument first. There is little doubt that some people are better at certain things than others. And that doesn't necessarily manifest as something as specific as golfing ability or leadership; it can be the way someone communicates, the way they interact with others, the way they think, or their ability to draw or describe something. There is absolutely no doubt in my mind, having worked closely with thousands of individuals, that we are all wired differently. What appears easy to one person is close to impossible to another, and that rarely has anything to do with IQ. There is something going on that makes some people better suited to certain roles or tasks than others.
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