December 16th, 2008

If it isn’t on Google, it doesn’t exist.
-Horatio Kemeny, fellow M.

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To capture the zeitgeist and therefore render this rant of limited (short-term) value, I want to talk about something that came out of the book Outliers by Malcom Gladwell:

He asks the question: why do some people have large successful lives and others wallow in their minutiae? He answers his own question by saying that the successful folks put in the requisite hours, roughly 10,000 of them. As examples, he cites the Beatles in Hamburg, playing many sets seven times a week. He also cites Bill Gates' access to a computer terminal at age 13 when almost no one in the world had access—Young Bill spent his 10,000 hours at the computer terminal late at night and after school when everyone else was out kicking the ball around, getting hickeys and hot-wiring the neighbors' cars.

And then I got to thinking about that 10K number a little more:

When I was in university I was in class after class with other pianists and we got to know each other pretty well. It became obvious who of us would "go far" and who (like me) were B list material. The ones who loved playing piano spent more time playing ... and more time extending their skills, while the rest of us pub-crawling reprobates may have liked playing piano, but didn't spend as much time playing ... and often played the same old pieces and same old warm ups as always. We weren't interested in extending our abilities.

So I would say that measure is probably true as far as it goes, though I think it may start with an innate love of whatever it is that one is doing. It doesn't feel like work if you love what you are doing. And so you tend to do more of it. Furthermore, if someone has a natural aptitude for something, one is probably going to enjoy it more, since mistakes and frustrations are fewer. So talent and love of the activity are two factors that contribute to that 10K-hour observation.

I don't think Gladwell himself would disagree with that.

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