To those not satisfied with the ‘how to’ aspect…have you picked an area in which (like the Beatles) you want to get your 10,000 hours? Is there a way you can redo your day to day schedule to speed up your 10,000 hr acquisition time (eg. 3 years instead of 10)?

I wish I’d been born at the right time and had 10k hours of practice at doing something. Maybe blogging will help my writing skills.

http://www.paunchiness.com/i-finished-outliers-last-night/

Indeed, for instance in terms of Asian success at mathematics (when you look at averages, as opposed to individuals) this is predicted by psychometric tests where Asians consistently score above average on the non-verbal component. This has also been shown in transracial adoption studies, which suggests the disparity is not purely cultural.

http://abbeville.wordpress.com/2008/11/12/malcolm-gladwell-is-wrong/

The main flaw in Gladwell’s theory is that it has no predictive power. He takes case examples of successful people/groups, enumerates the advantages and opportunities they’ve enjoyed, and tells a neat “just so” story about their having succeeded as a result of those opportunities. This is easy to do because hindsight is 20/20–also because no one is willing to sit through the 10,000 stories of people/groups who enjoyed very similar opportunities, worked just as hard, and did NOT become the best of the best. So what truly separates the outliers from the rest? Innate ability: precisely what Gladwell argues is not the “salient fact” about them.

For one quick example: take those junior hockey players. Assume they’re from Canada (obviously an advantage because Canada invests a lot in cultivating this kind of talent). Now take the half of the group that, as Gladwell points out, is helped by having a birthdate in the first half of the year. Now take the subset of that group that will benefit from good coaching, good teams, a strong work ethic, the financial ability to keep playing the sport, etc. This still works out to be a pretty large group, in Canada! Now, all else being equal, how do you predict which of THAT group will go on to become Wayne Gretzy or Mario Lemieux? Well, you’d have to look at speed, strength, dexterity…in other words, innate ability, plain and simple. That’s what truly makes them outliers, and that’s where Gladwell’s argument fails.