Outliers Malcolm Gladwell Research Paper

Yadira Riera

Mrs. Goodman

English 12R

3 November 2014

Practice Doesn’t Always Make Perfect/Not Much Experience Necessary The idea that practice makes perfect has been heard through the years of a majority of individual’s life. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, he ultimately states that a specific number of hours someone needs to practice before they can become successful. Gladwell is not completely wrong; however, his strong claim and evidences for the 10,000 hour rule can be proven false. Many researchers have looked into lives of successful people and people who aren’t as successful. Among their research they have also conducted surveys giving them a chance to compare the hours of practice between individuals. Through this it is concluded

Within his book he uses results from a study that surveyed a group of violinist from a music schools. The study concluded that the violinist who practiced for 10,000 hours or more would play professionally, and the violinist who only had 5,000 hours of practice would become school music teachers. Malcolm Gladwell also uses hockey players as a source of evidence stating that the younger they start playing with the all-star teams the more practices they will gain adding up to the minimum of 10,000 hours that they need to become successful and play in professional level. To sum up his claim of 10,000 hours he states “And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder,” (39) meaning that those who are at the highest point of success are there because they have practiced harder to get there than anyone else around them. However looking back to what Sonia Alleyne wrote about Frans Johnson’s book, areas such as music and sports are areas where rules never change. Thus deliberate practice and reaching the magical number of 10,000 hours would make a violinist or hockey player successful. Along with the result of David Z. Hambrick’s study even if 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is the ideal goal of individuals trying to reach the highest point of success, consideration must be taken that there are some individuals who have innate talent and skill with the ability to reach this point of success requiring less deliberate