Having read Outliers, I understood the "10,000 hour rule" as a rule of thumb for what it takes to go from zero to meaningfully better than most people on pretty

Having read Outliers, I understood the "10,000 hour rule" as a rule of thumb for what it takes to go from zero to meaningfully better than most people on pretty much any given subject (aka: an expert). Subsequent to reading the book, I do notice that the rule is also widely used as a convenient way to deliberately misinterpret the book & rule and write snarky articles. Somehow people think it's clever & fair to take a single phrase out of a multi-hundred-page context and ridicule it for not inherently being encyclopedic in depth and peer-reviewed. Undiscussed is that the "outliers" the book investigates are people who started with "10,000 hours", having achieved that level of practice when most competitors (themselves forming a tiny segment of the general population) are just beginning their 10KH. Also, they tend to do so when the rest of the field is just beginning to form. Bill Gates had his 10,000 hours in before starting college - and did so just as the "personal computer" was starting to emerge. The Beatles had their 10,000 hours in before leaving high school - and were ready when mass-distribution music + rock & roll were emerging as the norm. To wit: it takes 10,000 hours practice (that's working on the hard stuff, not the familiar/easy) to become an expert; it takes having done that before that expert's peers to become an outlier.