Malcolm Gladwell Ten Thousand Hours

In his 2008 book, Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell introduced a revolutionary idea that has changed how our society views success and practice. This idea is the “Ten Thousand Hour
Rule”. Gladwell’s assertion is that “. . .ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert--in anything”. Although I agree with Gladwell that rigorous practice is necessary to become a world-class expert, I disagree to a great extent that ten thousand hours is the amount of practice necessary to be an expert in any field. I believe that the ten thousand hour rule is too narrow-minded and specific, and thus, cannot apply to everybody and every situation. Depending on the activity and the person, mastery

Furthermore, it has not been proven that ten thousand hours has any significance in becoming an expert. In some situations, it may be an accurate estimation, but it is very likely that the necessary number of hours for any given activity is higher or lower, and possibly by a great margin.
Gladwell asserts that ten thousand hours of practice is a must for every person, in every field, to achieve mastery, but the truth is that everyone is different and every activity is different, meaning that ten thousand hours cannot be the rule for every situation. One of the greatest athletes the world has ever seen is Bo Jackson, who was a football and baseball superstar in the late 1980s and early 1990s, as well as a qualifier for the United States Olympic track and field team. There is clearly no way that he could have practiced ten thousand hours for each of these three sports, as time would not have allowed it. In the 2007 Track and Field World Championships, Donald Thomas of the Bahamas won the high jump event with only eight months of training. Since writing Outliers, Gladwell has

One of the studies that Gladwell bases much of his thesis off of is the study of the students of Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. He says that the top group of violinists, with the potential to become world-class soloists, were that good because they had practiced ten thousand hours, while the second-best group had practiced eight thousand hours, and the lowest-group had practiced just over four thousand hours. Gladwell makes it sound like every violinist in the top group had achieved the ten thousand hour mark, while the creators of the experiment have further cleared up that ten thousand was simply the average time spent practicing. Anders Ericsson and Robert Pool, two conductors of the study, say, “. . . the number of ten thousand hours at age twenty for the best violinists was only an average. Half of the ten violinists in that group hadn’t actually accumulated ten thousand hours at that age”. It appears that in this study, ten thousand was not at all a “magic number,” as Gladwell refers to it. There was a degree of variation, as some violinists had more practice, and some had less to get to that level. Furthermore, they also say of the violinists, “They were very good, promising students who were likely headed to the top of their field, but they still had a long way to go