On The Beatles: "By 1964, the year they burst on the international scene, The Beatles had played over 1,200 concerts together. By way of comparison, most bands today don't play 1,200 times in their entire career."
The. Bottom Line is Yes. Only by practicing tirelessly do we become great at something: "The elite don't just work harder than everybody else. At some point the elites fall in love with practice to the point where they want to do little else."
Here is an article from WisdomGroup.com
10,000 Hours of Practice
In the book Outliers, author Malcolm Gladwell says that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. How does Gladwell arrive at this conclusion? And, if the conclusion is true, how can we leverage this idea to achieve greatness in our professions?
Gladwell studied the lives of extremely successful people to find out how they achieved success. This article will review a few examples from Gladwell's research, and conclude with some thoughts for moving forward.
Violins in Berlin
In the early 1990s, a team of psychologists in Berlin, Germany studied violin students. Specifically, they studied their practice habits in childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. All of the subjects were asked this question: "Over the course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practiced?"
All of the violinists had begun playing at roughly five years of age with similar practice times. However, at age eight, practice times began to diverge. By age twenty, the elite performers averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the less able performers had only 4,000 hours of practice.
The elite had more than double the practice hours of the less capable performers.
Natural Talent: Not Important
One fascinating point of the study: No "naturally gifted" performers emerged. If natural talent had played a role, we would expect some of the "naturals" to float to the top of the elite level with fewer practice hours than everyone else. But the data showed otherwise. The psychologists found a direct statistical relationship between hours of practice and achievement. No shortcuts. No naturals.
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