Antoine Flahault’s blog

Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers (we have previously referred to his book, Blink) see article in Time on line, of 13 November 2008, in English, explores the concept of success in many very different fields. He starts from the hypothesis that the basis for success is long, hard work, which he estimates at 10,000 hours: this is the minimum learning time required to reach the top in any field. He does not discount individual talent, the “genius” of the individual who rises to prominence at a particular time or in a particular discipline, but this is not enough, or rather, all the examples show that these exceptional careers are often founded on a basis of very hard work.

In the 1990s, psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and two colleagues carried out a study at the Berlin Academy of Music. With the help of the teachers, they divided violin students into three groups: the first group contained violinists of star quality with the potential of making a career as a soloist at international level, the second group was made up of good musicians and the third group comprised students who, in the teachers’ opinion, had very little chance of becoming professional violinists (they were destined rather for careers as teachers at the Conservatoire). All the violinists were asked, “How many hours have you spent playing since you started the violin?”. The results showed that each student had started at about the same age of 5 and each had spent about the same amount of time playing at that age, about 3 hours a week. The profiles started changing when the students were 8 years old. The best players practised for 6 hours a week at the age of 9, 8 hours a week at the age of 12, 16 hours a week at the age of 14 and more than 30 hours a week at the age of 20. By the time they were 20, the cream of the cream of the students at the Academy of Music had already clocked up ten thousand hours, the second group eight thousand and the third group not much more than four thousand. Ericsson and his colleagues even studied a fourth group of talented amateurs, none of whom had spent more than two thousand hours playing at the age of 20.

Even in the case of Mozart, one of the greatest musicians of all time – if not the greatest – individual talent did not explain the whole of his genius. According to psychologist Michael Howe, in Genius Explained, extracts free on line on Google.book, in English, his early works are, nowadays, not considered to be outstanding. They were probably written down by his father and are largely based on arrangements by other contemporary composers. The earliest composition that is now regarded as a masterwork (No 9, K 271) is a concerto written when he was 21, by which time he had already been composing for ten years.

In the same field, but more recently, the Beatles, a group of ordinary pop singers from Liverpool, had the extraordinary opportunity to play in Hamburg before they came to fame: they performed an amazing number of times, more than 1,200 times before 1964, when the group is considered to have really started. There is possibly no group nowadays able to perform 1,200 times before a live audience during the whole of their career.

Moving away from music, Malcolm Gladwell looks at the careers of geniuses in the computer world: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Bill Joy and many others. All clearly spent many long nights from a very early age writing programs on the first computers provided by their parents or schools. With their extraordinary talent, their dedication to their work, the support of their parents and the understanding of their teachers, these people did not rise to the top of their fields just because of their innate intelligence but nearly always after a long learning period, amounting to at least ten thousand hours in their given field.

In sport, art, computing, science and medicine there is probably no field that escapes the ten thousand hour rule for becoming an expert of international level. This does not, of course, mean that a physicist who spends 10,000 hours resolving equations will automatically become an Einstein, or that a hockey player will win the world championship once he has spent ten thousand hours on the ice, but if you look carefully, according to Daniel Levitin, neurologist at McGill (Montreal), reading these studies, you do not find any example of success at international level achieved in under ten thousand hours, as if this is the time required by the brain to master a given skill.