What does life look like when you become rich and famous? Well, for Malcolm Gladwell, author of the New York Times Bestseller Outliers: The Story of Success, among many others, it might look like being the inspiration for a Macklemore song. The song, titled Ten Thousand Hours, was part of an album that infamously won the 2014 Grammy for Rap Album of the Year [5]. So, how about that for fame?

But, beyond the rap song, Outliers, like much of pop psychology does today, opened a new door for many seeking the secret to success. Through famous case studies (including Robert Oppenheimer, Bill Gates, and the Beatles), Gladwell analyzes success stories to derive a formula that would enable the average person to achieve expert status in their field. To summarize,  the book effectively describes the fact that it takes about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to create an aura of expertise in a specific area [4]. This theory grabbed pop culture’s attention and showed to the world that expertise was not granted at birth, but instead focused on the “grind.” 

See, much of Gladwell’s work was inspired by Anders Ericsson, a world-renowned psychologist titled the “Expert of Experts.” In a 1993 paper he co-authored, entitled “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Ericsson followed the performance of several violinists and determined that their total practice time was correlated with their performance or success [2]. This conclusion is logical enough; the more that you practice, the more successful you become. Yet, the paper also explained that inherent talent likely plays a role in determining skill.

An important side note here: Ericsson disliked the idea of Gladwell’s “10,000 Hour Rule,” believing that it lent itself to an axiom that, once attained, one was automatically granted expert status. Ericsson disliked the idea so much that he wrote an open letter entitled “The Dangers of Delegating Education to Journalists,” in which he takes issue with Gladwell’s failure to explain that the “10,000 Hour Rule” was a simplification and a rough average, describing it is a “provocative generalization” [3].

All this is to say that the “10,000 Hour Rule” exists on a shaky foundation, and while practice and experience are essential factors in the development of expertise, it is also not the only factor. 

This is where David Epstein, another New York Times Bestselling author (although not Macklemore famous…yet), comes into play. Author of The Sports Gene and Range, Epstein is a proponent of alternative manners of skill development. Notably, he highlighted the importance of sampling and the role that experience in seemingly irrelevant areas (“range”) plays in skill development. 

The gist of Epstein’s thoughts goes as follows: while practice and experience can go a long way to becoming an expert, skills gained from other, unique experiences also play a significant role in developing a sense of understanding of the field. One great example is tennis legend Roger Federer, who, despite being an outstanding tennis player at a young age, credits much of his success in the sport to the skills he learned playing in other athletic events, such as badminton and basketball. The time where Federer played various sports is something Epstein calls a sampling period, where someone can experience and gain insight from a diverse set of activities. This contrasts with what Ericsson believed in; he felt that the earlier you start a sport, the better you’ll become at it. 

The sampling period gives greater insight into skills that might not develop through a single sport but could be effective all the same. The core idea behind the efficacy of the sampling period is the importance of varying perspectives (i.e. the reason consultants exist). Seemingly odd experiences may be insightful to creating new and unexpected developments in certain fields. This is effectively the case that Epstein makes in his book about the success of generalists; because generalists have views from a variety of different fields, their knowledge may prove to be useful in more specialized areas. 

In essence, Epstein focuses on the importance of varying perspectives and insights, whereas Ericsson and Gladwell focus more on the importance that time plays in developing expertise [1]. 

Ultimately, this leaves us with a bigger question: how do we develop skills on a neurological level? Well, to avoid complex science jargon, I’ll explain it in an analogy. Let’s imagine our brains as a piece of wet clay. Whenever I press on the clay and remove my finger, a fingerprint will then be left behind. Similarly, the brain, whenever it is exposed to information, a little imprint is left behind in the form of neural connections [7]. The strength of these neural connections can be improved through a variety of methods, but we’ll focus on two for this article. The first follows Ericsson’s line of thinking. Exposure therapy, or more experience with a certain event, can strengthen a specific neural connection helping to develop a skill. The more often you dribble a basketball, the better you’ll get at it simply because your brain is strengthening the connections between neurons that tell you to dribble a basketball [8]. The second follows Epstein’s line of thinking: strengthening neural connections through similar but different experiences. Imagine you get tired of dribbling Ericsson’s basketball for hours on end, and instead, you begin juggling. This activity requires significant hand-eye coordination, which is something that dribbling a basketball also uses intensively. Epstein’s thinking is that because both activities require a similar skill, your experience with one will subsequently improve the other. 

Now, let’s face it, there’s no right answer to this debate. Both sides have merit, and it is important to acknowledge the shortfalls of both theories. What is clear is that there is no shortcut to being successful. It requires a mixture of hard work, perseverance, eagerness, unique insight, and a certain willingness to learn; however, despite all of those requirements, success appears to be something that anyone can achieve. Let’s just take some advice from Macklemore and “put those hours in, and look at what you get” [5].

[1] Epstein, D. (2020, July 2). Remembering the “Father” of the 10,000-hours rule”… (p.s.) he hated that title). The Range Report. Retrieved from https://davidepstein.com/father-of-the-10000-hours-rule-passes-away/

[2] Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363

[3] Ericsson, A. (2014, November 3). The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists. Radical Scholarship. Retrieved from https://radicalscholarship.wordpress.com/2014/11/03/guest-post-the-danger-of-delegating-education-to-journalists-k-anders-ericsson/ 

[4] Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. New York: Little, Brown and Co.. 

[5] Lewis, R. (2012). Ten Thousand Hours [Recorded by Macklemore]. On The Heist [Digital]. Seattle, WA: Macklemore, LLC 

[6] Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608–1618. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535810

[7] National Research Council. (2000). Mind and Brain. How People Learn: Brain, Mind, Experience, and School: Expanded Edition. (pp. 114-128) Washington, DC: The National Academies Press. doi: 10.17226/9853.

[8] Reis, R. (n.d.). How Do People Learn. Tomorrow’s Professor Postings. Retrieved from  https://tomprof.stanford.edu/posting/1495

[9] Wong N. C. (2015). The 10 000-hour rule. Canadian Urological Association journal = Journal de l’Association des urologues du Canada, 9(9-10), 299. https://doi.org/10.5489/cuaj.3267