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As with anything in the real world there is always a "yes but" and "it depends". 10k hours succeeded because it is generally the right idea. It's not a mathematical rule. Some common sense is still required. You can't stop people interpreting it to hear only what they want to hear.

If people would actual read the book Peak they'd understand that it isn't even about those 10k hours.

What Ericsson says is that what creates peak performance is studying just beyond the edge of your comfort zone with (as much) personal feedback (as possible) from an experienced mentor; so not just playing around a bit by yourself.

For quite a few fields 'expert' levels happen to come down to about 10k hours of such practice, which is where the number comes from, but he also warns that you will need increasingly more than that to rise to the top as more people put in more hours.

We can show them the authors summary

https://www.salon.com/2016/04/10/malcolm_gladwell_got_us_wro...

I think the most part of the talent is that your brain likes doing given thing. You enjoy it. That is, unless somebody is forced to, she's unlikely to spend 10K hours on something she doesn't like.

"Talent is a pursued interest. Anything that you're willing to practice, you can do." - Bob Ross

But it doesn't mean that anybody can achieve anything. Just that one can become a master in a field in which he's happy to put these 10K hours.

I'm yet to meet a great coder who wouldn't enjoy coding.

> I'm yet to meet a great coder who wouldn't enjoy coding.

Maybe great coders like it so much because they are good at it. It would be reasonable from an evolutionary point of view to focus on what we are better than others at. At university I have seen people get into a field on the basis of an unexpected excellent grade and conclude they love it, and reject whole fields as stupid and uninteresting after failing - where the directly of causality is clearly result first and love/hate second.

Doing something well releases dopamine - isn't that why doing something that you're good at is recommended as being good for mental health and to relieve stress?

I've thought I was good at coding since middle school. Of course my code actually sucked back then, but at the time I thought I was really good. So I kept doing it on and off throughout my life.

was it good for a middle schooler?

I think so.

> Maybe great coders like it so much because they are good at it.

I think there's more to it than that. When I first started writing code it was pretty clear that I was not very good at it (at the time), but absolutely loved it anyway. Man, the rush of power when you realize you can get the computer to obey you... that's what got me hooked.

> I think the most part of the talent is that your brain likes doing given thing. You enjoy it. That is, unless somebody is forced to, she's unlikely to spend 10K hours on something she doesn't like.

This feeds into the myth of passion equating talent/skill, which has been incorrect in my (admittedly short) experience. I can think of more than a few athletes who had no passion for the game but were phenomenal players.

Bob Ross really was a well of creative wisdom. I've been enjoying watching through all the episodes of his show on Netflix.

Personally I don't enjoy the mechanics of coding. I do like solving problems, and coding is generally the means to that end.

that said, it's also very possible that I'm not a great coder

I'm sure you can attain mastery in anything by practicing for 10,000 hours. Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard.

The caveat is that you will not be the best. You might not even be world class. Or even national class. But you are going to be better than somebody who practiced only 1,000 hours no matter how talented they are.

What people forget is that at the very high levels of achievement in any field, 20,000 hours is just the price of entry. Everyone who's playing has practiced for 20,000 hours. Difference between 1st, 2nd, and 10th comes down to talent and a bit of luck.

> Difference between 1st, 2nd, and 10th comes down to talent and a bit of luck.

Or maybe a lot of luck.

How many times have you struggled with a problem, but then someone gives you an explanation from a different point of view, or you think of something that makes you think of the problem in a different way? Then everything clicks and after that it's all easy?

From the article, "For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach "master" ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours." And given that this excludes everybody who gives up before reaching master, I believe the real gap is much wider.

>Difference between 1st, 2nd, and 10th comes down to talent and a bit of luck.

In a sufficiently competitive field, the difference between 1st and 10,000th comes down to talent and luck.

Chess is incredibly instructive in this respect. Some players soar through the rankings in their teens with remarkably little effort; some battle on for years with little to show for it. Some very promising players just run out of talent and hit a hard ceiling on their rank, while others keep finding room for improvement.

I agree with the broad thrust of the linked article - there's a real cruelty to the 10,000 hour rule.

at the same time, it is immensely frustrating to practice a long time to become mediocre, then some kid walks up and just does it, effortlessly.

i like riding motorcycle, been riding for 10+ years. but i don't have the talent, the motor skills to really let if fly. but i know a guy who just has it, put him into/on any vehicle and he is fast.

talent is the best example of how unfair life is :)

>But you are going to be better than somebody who practiced only 1,000 hours no matter how talented they are. //

I disagree. You'll probably be better than the average 1000-hour practicee but not necessarily any particular one. Some people really do have a knack [innate talent] for certain things.

> you (practicing for 10,000 hours) are going to be better than somebody who practiced only 1,000 hours no matter how talented they are.

There's a lot of counter-examples that contradict that statement, at least in areas like sports, chess, probably music as well, were a very "talented" individual achieved in one year what other people haven't in ten.

Let's hear what Ericsson says:

https://www.salon.com/2016/04/10/malcolm_gladwell_got_us_wro...

>but rather that they have the potential to become those things if they want to, by practicing enough.

We live at a strange time where capitalism lets us try our hands at almost anything. Want to be x, then go to school for it and try to get a job at it or start a company with those skills. Or get a job and practice x in your spare time. There's no local communist officials who say 'put this person to work here doing this.' If there's a finance path to doing x work, then you're good. In other words, we more or less choose our destinies, within reason.

But we are have a lot of cargo-cult science and pop-social sentiment of being able to excel at all things via a strnge protestant work ethic argument of 'just trying harder.' We skirt around determinism of the brain, personality types, what we call natural talent, focus endurance, whether we're primarily fast or slow thinkers, etc. Schools also don't do a good job assessing what a student would excel in and I imagine some parents don't want to hear their kid won't be a math genius or creative superstar, so they're dis-incentivized to perform this kind of testing.

So we live in this weird middle ground and feed each other little myths that are actually untrue, but emotionally pleasing. We remind each other Bill Gates dropped out of college, thus the college drop out could be the next Bill Gates, but we forget that he did only because running MS made a lot more sense than staying in school. We play up Steve Jobs as this wonderful grown-up hippie-type personality shepherding us into the future, but he was cruel and hated man who left behind a string of failures as much as success. Or that if we only could get those 10,000 hours then we'd be great too.

No one wants to admit they are mediocre talent or have no talent in some field they desire to be successful at. It took me a long time to realize how mediocre I am in general and only have the possibility of excelling at certain things. I think this is a classic case of ego vs reality. Our egos want to believe we're these universal machines that can excel at anything if needed. Reality suggests otherwise.

Gladwell's writing is seductive, providing surprising insight which appears to make complex phenomena understandable and manageable.

Unfortunately, I fact checked him. He's an entertainment writer at best, an intentional distributor of misinformation packaged as research at worst.

Examples:

Blink featured John Gottman's research into relationships. He could predict relationship outcomes with 91% accuracy. Unfortunately he never split out a test dataset and the model was overfit; real world accuracy is no better than existing techniques. This was known at publish time.

Tipping Point drove companies to seek out Mavens and Connectors, only to find that they don't really exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point#Scientific

For an actual evidence-based review of many Malcolm concepts, I recommend "Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer".

I would say that most people can do most jobs or handle most skills with sufficient practice. Natural ability and drive probably account for more. The person who will naturally practice their craft on their own time, or beyond that of a job, be it in an educational setting, self taught or some mixture including work time probably accounts for far more than anything.

Mindset and approach can be incredibly influential. And sometimes people want to be/do things they just can't handle. It's a range, not black and white.

Edit: I say this as someone who learned software development on his own, and has no formal higher education. That said, I spend 5-10 hours a week learning and expanding my knowledge and have for nearly two decades now.

Of those I have worked with, individual drive has been the leading differentiator in terms of quality that I've seen. Even if they no longer dedicate any of their own time anymore.

There's Mark Ames's claimed tobacco links.

https://pando.com/2015/07/07/shillers-killers/b3741e29bc9adb...

Gladwell denies this.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/08/malcolm-gladwell-sm...

"how I taught myself physics in one year" links pls