I think people need to take the 10,000 hour rule in the context that it was presented in. It alone was not the central part of Outliers. A good part of the boo

I think people need to take the 10,000 hour rule in the context that it was presented in. It alone was not the central part of Outliers. A good part of the book was spent dealing with natural ability. There was an entire discussion of geniuses, and a description of where they ended up. Gladwell isn't saying that anyone is capable of anything if they put 10,000 hours of work into it. What he said was that at the highest level of performance, within the subset of those that do have the prerequisites to perform at a world-class level in what they do, the factor that differentiates people is how much effort they put into it. That still holds in all of this and neither this shallow regurgitation of Epstein's work nor Epstein's work itself are at odds with that. In my opinion, all Epstein's work really shows is that the prerequisites for excelling at physical activities are more selective than those for other things, which most people would probably agree with intuitively.