

Ask YC: Success innate or practice? - meterplech

Malcolm Gladwell's (author or Blink and Tipping Point) has a new book, Outliers. He makes a variety of interesting and somewhat provocative claims about why successful people are successful. Perhaps the most provocative claim is that it requires 10,000 hours of practice to become and expert in anything. The implications of this include that Bill Gates and Bill Joy were so successful because of the opportunities they had to practice programming from Middle School (for Gates) and at UMich (for Joy). Do people buy this? How much of success is brilliance and how much is this amount of practice?
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pg
From what I've seen, innate qualities (ambition, curiosity, love of a
particular domain) that cause people to work very hard at something.

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divia
What makes you think that ambition, curiosity, and love of a particular domain
are innate qualities?

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pg
I just meant that they don't come from practice. I wasn't trying to make a
call about how much they're inborn vs due to outside influences.

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apgwoz
This 10,000 hours of practice seems to line up with someone doing a PhD in 4
years on ~7 hours a day of work. I've met many people with PhDs that I would
consider morons, so I think you could argue that you can be successful with
only practice for some definitions of success.

However, I think you're unlikely to put yourself through something like 4-5
years of constant work if you don't have some other qualities. (i.e. It's
gotta be a combination of innate qualities and practice)

