Outlier

The book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell investigates what’s behind great success, and why some people achieve more than others. Malcolm claims that one reason for success among athletes is when they are born during the year. He has studied hockey players for example, and in the elite teams most of the players are born the first three months of the year. The second reason he stresses is the 10 000-hour rule. This rule says that in order to become very successful you will have to practice 10 000 hours. This rule can be applied to many different areas such as music, sports and computer programming.

If you go to se Färjestad (or another elite team) play a hockey game and look in the program you can se that Gladwell is probably right, according to the first reason he gives. When you look at the birthdates of the players, many of them are born early in the year. This is probably because at a young age when children start to play the physical difference between children born in January or December is huge. At the age when they pick players to play in a “better” team this difference still remains, so children born early in the year are more likely to get more practise and at a higher level than those born later in the year.

The 10 000-hours rule is interesting. I guess that you have to do those 10 000 hours when you are quite young, and not spread out over your entire life. I know an old lady who has bees playing the piano since she was a young girl, and still plays today at the age of 80. She is not very good at it, and has probably been playing and practising at least 10 000 hours. If it is only about doing 10 000 hours many (specially women), would be world leaders in cooking, cleaning and washing clothes when they are 60. Well, maybe they are…

Another interesting thing about the 10 000 hour rule is when you think of many kids that spend hour after hour playing games on computer or videogames. Since I have been working with teenagers for many years I know how much time they spend playing those games. If you play three hours a day for ten years you reach 10 000 hours. Lots of kids spend more than three hours a day playing, year after year. Maybe this means that in the future 10 000 hours is not enough to be world champion in WOW, COD or another game…. It is probably another thing with sports, where you need time for rest and recovery so you don’t get injuries.