Essay On Outliers By Malcolm Gladwell

Hannah Choi
Instructor Cox
ENGL 1C
18 December 2014
Essay #5 At the age of five, Ingmar Lazar started playing the piano. A year later, he made his debut in Paris. He has then been in many competitions and received numerous awards for his incredible performances. Regarded as a child prodigy, Ingmar Lazar has had very advanced skills since a young age that many people are envious of. But what makes him different from everybody else? Is it due to his innate ability to play piano or is it the countless hours he spent practicing since he has started? Malcom Gladwell’s “Outliers” explores the idea of how certain people and situations came to be out of the ordinary. In one of his chapters, “the 10,000-Hour Rule,” he explains that people are not born

Essentially, Gladwell is saying that people who excel at something are successful due to their hours and hours of practice. Specifically, he argues that anybody can excel at anything once they have practiced 10,000 hours of doing that particular thing. However, how does that explain Lazar’s success? From the age five to six, there are only 8,765 hours in between. Disregarding the hours he had used to sleep and eat, there is no way he could have practiced for over 10,000 hours. Nonetheless, Lazar was considered a prodigy, a genius, and a success. Success can be achieved within 10,000 hours and failure can also happen after 10,000 hours. The 10,000-hour sounds convincing and truthful, but there is no correlation between the hours of practice one does and their ability to do a certain skill. We must look at other

Though Gladwell says that researchers have settled 10,000 hours as the magic number to achieve true expertise (40), Ericcson’s study concludes that the best players have practiced on-average 7,606 hours by age 18 (379). On average can mean a variety of things. First and foremost, that does not make 10,000 hours, let alone 7,606 hours, the absolute number of hours that someone has have to practice in order to be considered the best. Ericcson’s study shows that the best players have practiced a tremendous amount more than the ones who had more of a less-likely future as a professional violinist. However, after the average of 7,606, these players were and are considered to be the best in their generation. If the players that were shown to become teachers practiced for around 7,606, but in a longer span of time, would they also be considered an expert at playing the violin? Or is expertise achieved through completing 10,000 hours of an activity within a short span of time? Gladwell insists upon this set number, but the number can mean absolutely nothing if time is disregarded. The best playing students played on average 585 hours a year. However, if the students that have a future in teaching completed 7,606 hours but through averaging 292.5 hours a year, they would still be considered teachers. The 10,000-hour rule shows hard work and dedication towards a field, but it is only a true means of