I read the 10,000 hour part of Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers and learnt few things that I would love to share.
- Once you are above the threshold of talent as a parameter, the only thing that matters is how hard effective work you put in,i.e. the number of hours you practice your art. For example; if you reach the best film school of the world, the only thing that separates you from the person next to you is how how many hours have you trained.
- 10,000 hours is golden number in the scientific community to measure expertise. He mentions that people only start performing at expert level once they have crossed the 10,000 hour mark. Malcolm gives an example of Mozart. He mentions that studies have shown that Mozart wasn’t a child prodigy, in fact until the age of 21 he didn’t create any original piece of work and instead used previous work modified to some extent. Studies call mozart as a late expert turner. He started showing expert level performance only later in life, specifically once he crossed his 10,000 hours threshold.
- Lastly, he gives examples of chess prodigies. He mentions that historically all the grand masters title holder in chess have become grandmasters only after 10 years of playing chess, roughly the time it requires for 10,000 hours of training. The only exception being Bobby, who got his title only after 9 years.
