To me Gladwell makes a lot of sense and I agree with him. Along with family support for encouragement. Personally, I feel like that's difficult and nearly impossible to reach but Gladwell states that it's easier to accomplish if you are in some type of program that allows you to immerse yourself in that particular activity and get those hours. You have to put in the HOURS (preferably 10,000 hrs) of practice and experience like Bill Joy, Bill Gates, Pete Best, and others mentioned in the book did in order to succeed and become the BEST of the BEST! Sure, you can be smart and really good at something but this chapter is saying that natural talent can only get you so far. Before reading ch.2, I had never put much thought into how much time and effort that you put into something really does make a difference in your outcome. Parents are always stressing 'practice makes perfect' and I realized that professors are always stressing to double the time that you spend in class on homework and now I understand why. Or, another question: what kinds of conflicts do you see between the notions of studying hard as opposed to practicing long? That is, to what extent, if any, do the conventional processes of going to college (without unique resources and opportunities, for instance) hinder the kind of practice routines necessary for extraordinary success? If we buy into the “10,000 hour rule,” then we would need to also acknowledge the enormous and certainly unique resources and opportunities required for someone to take advantage of so much practice time.īut what did you think about practice and mastery as it relates to the idea of a 10,000 hour rule? Gladwell cites the early careers of computer whizzes Bill Joy and Bill Gates as well as the rock group The Beatles as examples and explains how all of them achieved their 10,000 hours of practice before (or perhaps as an entry into) achieving tremendous levels of success. In other words, people would have to work on perfecting their skills for approximately 20 hours a week over the course of 10 years in order to acquire and display exceptional degrees of expertise in their fields.

In chapter two of Outliers, he argues that that it’s not simply practice that matters but rather that it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to gain a truly remarkable mastery of a given skill. But Gladwell prefers to move beyond those clichéd or somewhat vague ideas and offer a more specific treatment on the roots of success.

We’ve also heard how practice makes perfect. Time after time, we’ve heard about how being in the right place at the right time doing the right things with the right people contributes significantly to success.

10 000 hours outliers