Gladwell quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin as follows:
“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.“
Bill Gates
Bill Gates is certainly brilliant, Malcolm adds in “Outliers”, but most people don’t know that he spent most of his early years in his school’s computer lab. He had extensive access to a state-of-the-art computer lab, the likes of which very few in his generation would know until years later. By the time he dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own software company, Gates had already been programming nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past 10,000 hours.
The Beatles
The Beatles, Gladwell continues, were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany in 1960 when they were still a struggling band. What was unusual about Hamburg is that they had to play all night, eight hours straight, seven days a week, for weeks on end. John Lennon, in an interview after the Beatles disbanded, talking about the band’s performances at Hamburg, said: “We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long. . . In Liverpool, we’d only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.”