Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers” popularized the “10,000 hour rule,” which suggests that many people who have reached the top of their fields got there, in large part, due to practicing for 10,000 hours.
In the new paper, published in Intelligence, the authors conclude that practice can only explain one-third of the variation in sucess in chess and music, and probably other fields as well. One player in a 2007 study, for example, “took 26 years of serious involvement in chess to reach a master level, while another player took less than 2 years to reach this level.”
They suggest that other factors together explain the lion’s share of success, such as intelligence, starting age, personality, and other genetic factors.
Source: Popular Science