<p>I also read Outliers. The 10,000 hours of practice holds true when you start analyzing specific things. Music for one - they studied musicians and not surprisingly, those who practice most become performers, regardless of their innate ability.</p>
<p>Even in gymnastics - the way the “system” works is predicated that by a time a gymnast reaches the “elite” level, they have practiced 10,000 hours. </p>
<p>For some things you do need the basic talent, or brains, but at a certain point you only get there by practice/study.</p>
<p>It makes sense that only those with talent would get to the 10,000 hours of practice. Those that gain success or positive feedback will be the ones to continue on. </p>
<p>The problem with the initial article is that it does not provide any reference to the study it is referring to and so it is not possible to see if the study actually states what the Times op-ed thinks it does. As most of us know, reporters do not always accurately reflect the results and limitations of scientific papers. </p>
<p>As to Gladwell, he also does not often back up his findings with good data.</p>
<p>"The article doesn’t tell us what percentage of those who to go on to earn a doctorate, secure a patent, publish an article in a scientific journal or publish a literary work, are in the top 1% "</p>
<p>I think the article referes to kids who have scored in the top 1% of the SAT while 13-years-old. That is a much, much smaller subgroup that the top 1% of the SAT takers.</p>
<p>I’m with Planestate. Those are the two best studies he can come up with to demonstrate that talent trumps hard work? That the truly extraordinary scorers on standardized tests achieve certain academic accomplishments at a higher rate than the merely exceptional? How relevant is an examination of the 99.9% relative to the 99.1% to the broader question of hard work vs talent? Seems pretty darn narrow. The piano sight reading study was even less compelling. Pretty weak tea overall, if you ask me.</p>
<p>My personal opinion, like many on this board, is that innate ability helps a lot, but it’s when you combine it with drive and hard work that you achieve the highest levels of success. Not exactly a revolutionary conclusion, but there it is.</p>
<p>Who says that IQ is a fixed number? It isn’t. That is one of the basic problems of this stupid article. The other is who says that those talent search kids were lazy and didn’t have a good work ethic? Maybe they were highly intelligent and did have a good work ethic too.</p>
<p>I can say that at least in the fields that I am familiar with (physics and criminology), you can’t get a PhD without a fairly good work ethic.</p>
<p>I think a propensity to work hard is also hard wired and has a genetic component. How else to explain the pre-schoolers I’ve seen who work very hard until a task is accomplished without any encouragement or promise of a reward. These kids are too young to have learned this behavior.</p>
<p>For a lot of these fields, like being a concert violinist, or even a successful businessperson, you’d also have to factor in a person’s physical appearance. Of course, that’s also part nature and part nurture.</p>
<p>if all 3 are working together one can do great things</p>
<p>the false dichotomoy (is it nature or nurture? is it talent or practice?) is over-simplification</p>
<p>P.S. The study was biased by it looking at those who barely made the top 1% vs the top 0.1% . . . now I know that such a study fits well with our own inflated self-regard here on CC, but a population study it ain’t</p>
<p>Could barely get through Outliers. So much cherrypicked evidence, bad logic, and self-contradiction. Unfortunately I had to use it in a freshman comp course; it’s useful in teaching about logical fallacies, or about no one cares if you use them when you make millions doing so.</p>
<p>I think the biggest howler was the idea that the Beatles were possibly the best rock band ever because they played a lot in Hamburg.</p>
<p>something magical DID happen to the Beatles while in Hamburg that had much to do with them working so hard on their music . . perhaps we read a different book, but my take home from the Beatles part of Outliers was that their “10,000 hours of practice” (a useful metaphor for hard work) was key to their quantum shift from interesting and energetic bar band to something else quite wonderful</p>
<p>I know that’s what he said, but I’m not buying it. They’re not the Beatles because they play their instruments well; they’re the Beatles because Lennon and McCartney are effin geniouses. Loads of other bands have played Hamburg, and other places where they got lots of experience. They did not become the Beatles. </p>
<p>I mean, I like Gerry and the Pacemakers as much as the next guy, but I don’t think they would have become Beatle-like by joining their fellow Liverpudlians in Hamburg.</p>
<p>If “intelligence overrides work ethic”, then there is no reason for school. I would like to see who wants to be treated by doctor who did not go to school, he was just smart and learned everything without any efforts. Do we want to construct buildings in the same fasshion? Well, it is possible, ancient people did not have colleges, why not? How about cars?</p>
<p>This thread is mis-named. Nothing in the article suggests that intelligence overrides hard work. Hard work as a factor in achievement is not addressed at all. It should be re-titled: “Top SAT scoring 8th graders more likely to pursue academic success.”</p>
<p>I thought Gladwell was really onto something with the 10,000 hours of practice, and I still do. I really couldn’t understand, though, why he couldn’t seem to see that it was the practice plus talent that resulted in the greatest success–something that seemed pretty obvious to me even in his examples.</p>
<p>I agree that Gerry and the Pacemakers were never going to be the Beatles, no matter how much they practiced. But there may be another band that could have been as good as the Beatles, if they had practiced a lot more. But we’ve never even heard of them.</p>
<p>Gladwell over-interpreted almost all of the research he based almost all of his conclusions on in Outliers. It really felt like he came to the conclusions first and then picked and chose anecdotes (the plural of which is not data), and shoved various studies around to support his arguments, not the other way around. </p>
<p>The NYT article was interesting because it referenced the underlying study on 10,000 hours, NOT Gladwell. I thought that showed some credibility.</p>
<p>One issue with the TIP study cited in the article is that by definition, Talent Search kids are self-selected, so in addition to measuring ability on the SAT (and what that actually measures is a matter of debate – there may indeed be some measurement of effort, not just talent there, but I don’t think it matters so much for these purposes) it also uses a self-selected population of people who actually know about Talent Search and think it valuable enough to pay for.</p>
<p>That’s a good point, IJustDrive. A kid who is in TalentSearch or takes the SAT in middle school has a certain kind of parent. There are plenty of equally intelligent kids out there whose parents are not–shall I say it—CC type parents. That alone would have influenced the outcomes.</p>
<p>There were lots of kids in my son’s gifted classes who did not achieve as much as my son because (for one reason) their parents did not offer them the same kinds of structured opportunities as I did.</p>