OPPORTUNITIES
FOR PRACTICE
For his book, Gladwell
interviewed Microsoft cofounder Bill Gates, who
had thousands of hours of
programming practice with
his friend Paul Allen. The two
co-founders met at Lakeside,
an elite private school in Seattle
which managed to raise enough
money to purchase a computer
terminal for the school’s
computer club in 1968.
Since the eighth grade, Gates
had unique access to computers
at a time when they were not
commonplace. Gates would also
sneak out after bedtime to use
the computer at the University of
Washington near his home. By
the time Microsoft was launched
in 1975, Gates and Allen had
amassed at least 10,000 hours of
programming practice.
Similarly, before The Beatles
achieved international stardom,
the quartet played in local
clubs in Hamburg, Germany
for at least eight hours per
night, seven nights per week.
Gladwell highlights how hours
and hours of playing time forced
them to improve as musicians
and performers. And the better
they got, the more time they
were granted on stage. By the
time they gained worldwide
popularity in 1964, the Beatles
had played over 1,200 concerts
together. In comparison, most
bands today don’t even play
1,200 times throughout their
entire career.
THE DEBUNKING
More than Just Practice
However, new research has emerged
that suggests that the amount of
practice you put in isn’t always the
deciding factor between goodness and
greatness. In fact, some people really
just possess natural talent and flair.
To determine how much of rigorous
practice benefits performance,
psychology professor Zach Hambrick and
fellow researchers from Michigan State
University recently analysed 14 Y