With enough practice, can anyone become the master of anything? If a person is able to reach 10,000 hours of practice, so to say, is it possible for he or she to become an elite hockey player or a famous pianist? Research takes the side of “yes,” in accordance with the 10,000-hour rule. Some may say that you need to have a natural aptitude for something right at the start, and so the 10,000-hour rule doesn’t exist. This isn’t true, however. It helps to be naturally gifted from birth, but nevertheless, practice ends up playing a bigger role than innate talent when concerning a person’s progress. As stated in Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, there are no records of naturals (people who succeeded mostly with their talent and little work) or grinds (people who worked hard but did not succeed), therefore, talent plays a much smaller role than one would think. The 10,000-hour rule …show more content…
In a study about young violinists, all participants started playing at the same level at around the age of 5. The ones who kept a strict, rigorous practice regimen grew up to become virtuosos, provided that those who practiced for less time did not get as far. This even applies to many famous faces. Bill Gates had access to a computer terminal at a young age, which allowed him to get his 10,000 hours in and become the founder of Microsoft. Another example is Bill Joy, who, at 16 years old, became engrossed with the time-sharing system at the University of Michigan and was able to access it 24 hours a day. With all this time to practice programming, he later had the ability to write the code for most of the Internet. Ten thousand hours is a great amount of time however and is thus not available to everyone. Those who were able to reach it did so through lucky opportunities and their own hard work, such as Gates going to private school with a terminal that was rare in most colleges, or Joy finding the time-sharing system just as it was installed. Opportunity plays a