Great short interview of Malcolm Gladwell of “Tipping Point” success.
Malcolm Gladwell, best selling author of The Tipping Point and Blink, has a new book “Outliers”. Apart from being an excellent book on success, it may give insight on Gladwell himself, since he would appear to an outlier too. In this interview, Gladwell states that in order to achieve true mastery of something, you need to spend approximately 10,000 hours at it.
Conclusion…next time you have your annual performance review with your boss, tell him/her you’ll need at least 10 years to be great at your job.
Stumble It!
The Third Place 
Can’t believe you are sucked in by this hype. Success doesn’t take 10,000 hours to arrive at. You can be master of yourself in 10 seconds, without having to read trite handbooks like this.
http://www.okathleen.wordpress.com
I’d respectfully disagree with you. Gladwell’s not talking about mastering yourself here (although I’d suggest that it takes a LOT longer than 10 seconds based on the hyper-dysfunctional people I meet in this world). He’s talking about mastering specific skills, jobs, etc. You can’t be a black belt in 1 week, You can’t be a great composer in 2 hours. Make sense?
The case he makes for 10,000 hours in the book is really convincing, and kind of comforting — working at something really does pay off. Craftsmanship and skill have value diverse fields of endeavor.
My 10 year old [obsessed with success, a strong reader, but hates to read] is now reading Outliers enthusiastically and rapidly — don’t know if that’s more a commentary on the book or the kid or just one of those weird flukes of the universe.
Totally agree Rebecca. Your son seems like a fascinating little boy and smart like his mom 🙂
The unfortunate thing is that America has totally undervalued experience and the idea of craftsmanship practiced and improved over time; there is very little respect for these qualities, compared to the rest of the world. Everything’s all about youth and the new and chasing what’s next, as if they’re the only ways to be of any value in this attention-deficit society. We do need new, refreshing things, but not at the complete dismissal of all that came before them. And so we suffer in the hopeless pursuit of novelty, rather than building on what takes time and patience to perfect and gaining wisdom. It partly helps to explain why we don’t know how to build and craft things well anymore (in art and industry alike) and why prudence fell by the wayside in the financial industry.