Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell Analysis

The 10,000 Hour Rule: Just How True is it? On page 40 of Outliers, a novel written by pop-psych author Malcolm Gladwell, neurologist Daniel Levitin explains, “The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world class-expert--- in anything.” Gladwell takes this quote and heavily relies on it with his thesis for the next chapter, which basically says that anyone can become a master in anything with excessive amounts of practice. He claims that the greats were not necessarily incredibly gifted at the start of their lives, but with lots of practice and effort, they were able to become experts and masters in their fields. But just how true is this
He seems to assert that practice is always the only factor in determining whether or not people will succeed or fail. This is flat out not true. That is like saying that the child of two star athletes and the child of two average, uncoordinated people are not really all that different at birth. With Gladwell’s logic, the amount of practice is what will determine who becomes the better athlete. How does this make sense logically or scientifically? Logically, this should make sense right of the bat. Usually when we think of people that are successful,whether in the media or people we know personally, they are naturally talented at whatever they do. Practice doesn’t seem to make a difference. Could a numbers person, naturally born with math skills be an English teacher with the right amount of practice? Doubtful. Some people just naturally are better and one field than another. If everyone had the potential to be masters at anything, than why are there so few people in the world deemed to be “experts”? Nicos Nicolaou, Professor and the GE Capital Chair of Mid-Market Economics at Warwick Business School, was interviewed nearly a year ago on the importance on genes on success in the field of business and what he claims directly disagrees with Gladwell. He says, “Research has shown that genetic factors affect both the tendency to recognize entrepreneurial opportunities and the tendency to start businesses. Studies have used large samples of identical and fraternal twins to disentangle the role of genes and environment in entrepreneurship. Identical twins share all of their genes while fraternal twins share, on average, half of their segregating genes. As a result, greater twin concordances – the probability that a twin is an entrepreneur given that its co-twin is also an entrepreneur – for entrepreneurship between pairs of identical than between pairs of fraternal twins can only be