Not incorrect, just incomplete. The incompleteness might actually be a misreading of the book. If I remember right (it's been awhile since I read it), Gladwell

Not incorrect, just incomplete. The incompleteness might actually be a misreading of the book. If I remember right (it's been awhile since I read it), Gladwell mentioned this explicitly, just not as a major point the kind of which he drills into the reader's mind: 10,000 hours are necessary, but not sufficient. Isaac Newton, Henry Ford, and Andrew Carnegie* could not have accomplished what they did without devoting themselves in outmost sincerity to their ideas. The point is that to have a truly lasting impact on improving the world for the better, you need to devote at least 10,000 hours to something great and be smart about how you devote those 10,000 hours. Galdwell's point, from my reading of his book, is the hypothesis that the vast majority of people don't achieve Greatness because they don't begin to devote that kind of time to one aspiration, not because they are somehow inherently limited in their mental capacity. In other words, the world is full of unmotivated genius, and you're very likely one of them. Study hard, work hard, and strive for the stars, etc., etc. ;) * having recently met Larry Page for the first time during an internal Q&A session, I can assure you his intelligence is quite limited by human capacity, as well. Yes, he's a lot better at answering sensitive and badly phrased questions (my own) candidly and to-the-point than anyone I've known, but he's also had more experience with it than anyone I've known, also. However, he didn't seem inherently talented in any way than the smarter of my professors (I was once told by one who knew him that neither was Einstein). In essence, there are two points we sometimes lose in overly simplified metaphors: 1) there are a lot of really intelligent people changing the world for the better that aren't famous. A lot of the time, they don't want to be famous because it would get into the way of their work. 2) there is a big difference between famous people who publicize themselves as an a means to an end (their ideas), while others publicize themselves out of ego. We're all prone to the latter (at least I am), and should make a conscious effort to "unit test" that behavior every once in awhile. [maybe this is better as a blog post...]