Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

Success and the means to become successful is a frequently debated and controversial subject. As a class, we depicted Gladwell’s arguments in Outliers over various subjects revolving around success and what it takes to be successful. One of which was the rule Gladwell composed that it takes ten thousand hours of practice to become a world class expert—at anything. While I agree some ideas he associates with the ten thousand hours, other parts I cannot accept to be true. I believe that a ratio of deliberate practice and other factors, such as natural talent and opportunities, lead to success depending upon the field. I composed this argument by analyzing multiple texts by different authors that I will be referencing throughout this paper,

In “New Study Destroys Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule” Drake Bear explains a study that disproves Gladwell’s theory that it takes ten thousand hours to become an expert in any field, also questioning the importance of deliberate practice. A Princeton study analyzed the effect of deliberate practice on different domains, and concluded that deliberate practice accounted for just 12% difference in performance in various domains. Practice made for 26% difference in games, just 4% difference in education, and 1% difference in professions, etc. It’s interesting how much the percentage varies in different studies, and Frans Johansson in his book The Click Moment has some theories as to why. He argues the reason, deliberate practice effects domains differently is due to how stable the field is. If a field is extremely stable, deliberate practice is a predictor of success. For example, tennis or classical music, the rules never change so you can study to become the best. The opposite is also true, that in less stable fields like entrepreneurship, deliberate practice is less important as rules go out the window. The study’s lead author Brooke Macnamara states, “There is no doubt that deliberate practice is important, from both a statistical and theoretical perspective. It is just less important than has been argued.” She argues that other factors come into play when predicting success, such as natural ability and