10,000 Hours – Lessons from Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”

As I posted last week I read a very interesting book that is by now a very important book in the Web 2.0 community. This book is called ”Outliers: The story of Success“ written by Malcolm Gladwell.

One of the themes in this book is that the most successful people in terms of business and careers are the people that engage in ”meaningful work“. I posted about “meaningful work” last week, check it out.

This week I wanted to explore another important theme of Outliers.

The 10,000 hour rule.

This rule is pretty simple; If you practice something for 10,000 hours you become proficient enough to be called a master. 

Gladwell explains that this 10,000 hours of work coupled with a little case of being in the right places at the right time, explain why most highly successful people are successful.

Although this does seem to be a bit of a reach for some people, and for me it make sense. But it sounds like luck has a lot more to do with the uber successes of his examples (Bill Joy, Bill Gates et al).

They had control over the amount of practice they put in. Gladwell estimates that they had at least 10,000 hours of practice, however they couldn’t control the fact that they were the right age to catch the very beginning of computing, and in the right places to be able to take advantage of the College and High Schools that allowed them to practice programming. 

The question people ask is; “Does the 10,000 hour rule guarantee success?”

I don’t think it guarantees success, but it does help. Gladwell’s examples succeeded because they worked hard, and they were in the right place at the right time. 

I do think however that the 10,000 hour rule does apply to people in everyday jobs. 

In three sales roles I have had, the companies have had someone who would have accumulated at least 10,000 hours of work, and they were at the top of any statistics they were produced for the top sales/account managers.

Their sucess was built around three factors;

• Their product knowledge
• Their contacts and networks
• The size/potential of their clients and the size of their client base,

In every case their product knowledge was second to none. As each of these roles were in the finance industry this is reasonably easy to attain, the core products are relatively stable, their ability to learn new products as they were introduced was easy because they act like building blocks, each new product generally fits on top of an old one. But they were wiling to learn and use the new products, they did not rely on the “but this is how we have always done it” philosophy.

As they had been around a long time their contact’s and networks are well established. In two out of the three cases the individuals in question had been in their roles for over 15 years, the other worked in an industry sector that was reasonably small and had worked for all the major players, he has been in the industry for over 10 years.

As their networks are well established, new business flows from it organically. They very rarely need to actively seek leads. These high performers have so many leads they need to spend their time chasing these up rather that seeking new business.

When it comes to the size of their client base it is not the size that counts, but the quality of client. These high performers are able to cull the low performing clients of their client bases and pass them on to the newer colleagues. Because they are able to concentrate on higher yielding clients they are able to generate more business from their small pool of customers. This allows them to react to leads that come from their networks with a greater intensity. By doing this they are able to bring in new business with greater ease, and continue to top the charts.

However there are only one or two of these people in each organisation, what happens with the people who started at the same time as these top performers?

I believe that they made a decision – either consciously or unconsciously to stop learning. To sit on their heels and think that they know it all. My next post in this Outliers series will discuss this phenomena

I think that if you complete 10,000 hours of practice you will be well on your way to succeeding.