Posted by To the Chinese, 10,000 is an important number as our counting system is based on 10,000 increments, not 1,000 like most other human civilisations. one 一, ten 十, hundred 百, thousand 千, ten thousand 萬. In english, the next unit after 1,000 is (1,000 x 1,000) or one million then would come one thousand millions or one billion. For the Chinese, the next unit would be 10,000 x 10,000 or 100 million which is one yi 億. This creates huge problems in finance as you would not believe how many times I have seen the number one billion and one 億 incorrectly translated. There is a huge difference between a profit of $100,000,000 (one hundred million) and $1,000,000,000 (one billion). The Great Wall of China is known in Chinese as the 萬里長城 which literally translates as Ten-Thousand Mile (Chinese Li) Long Wall with one Chinese Mile (li 里) being about half a kilometer or 500m. It is also why in mahjong sets, the only numerical tile with chinese characters uses the base of 10,000 (wan 萬).
In the West, the number 10,000 didn’t have a particularly significance until recently when pop-social scientist (focused on economics, sociology and psychologist) Malcolm Gladwell released his third book, Outliers: The Story of Success, in 2008. I really like Gladwell’s books; they are interesting and thought provoking if not always entirely accurate. I wrote about one of his other theories from The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference where he espoused the “broken window” theory of crime in my article about the Chicago Crime Wave. To summarise the running theme of Outliers, is the concept of the rule of 10,000 which is the theory that there is no such thing as god-given talent and that the “key to achieving world-class expertise in any skill, is, to a large extent, a matter of practising the correct way, for a total of around 10,000 hours.” He goes on to cite a large number of pretty convincing anecdotes ranging from the Beatles to Bill Gates of Microsoft to prove this. This 10,000 rule has been adopted readily in popular culture and I have seen many articles and social media posts referencing this concept. This is not terribly surprising as it is an extremely seductive philosophy; that biology is not destiny and all of us have greatness within us.
This dovetails nicely with liberal thinking that everyone is created equal and that the difference between an amateur and an expert is only a matter of practice. Gladwell must be extremely liberal having been a journalist at the Washington Post and The New Yorker Magazine; but he is a smart and clever thinking one. His other main message is, “the biggest misconception about success is that we do it solely on our smarts, ambition, hustle and hard work… [we need to] move away from the notion that everything that happens to a person is up to that person… No one—not rock stars, not professional athletes, not software billionaires, and not even geniuses—ever makes it alone.” I’m still not sure how he squares that with his previous assertion that anyone can be great as long as they spend 10,000 hours at it. Perhaps it is because certain people are lucky in their birth and environment to have the opportunity to spend 10,000 hours to achieve greatness. Gladwell did try to clarify his position on Reddit with this post:
There is a lot of confusion about the 10,000 rule that I talk about in Outliers. It doesn’t apply to sports. And practice isn’t a SUFFICIENT condition for success. I could play chess for 100 years and I’ll never be a grandmaster. The point is simply that natural ability requires a huge investment of time in order to be made manifest. Unfortunately, sometimes complex ideas get oversimplified in translation.
Then comes a new study that destroys Malcolm Gladwell’s 10,000 hours rule that shows that practice, depending on the field, is only a small to virtually non-existent. “We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.”
The problem with Western thinking is, in my opinion, that it focuses too much on dichotomies. Right versus wrong. Good versus evil. Left versus right. My own experience tell me that most things in life are a complex function of grey areas running along a very long continuum. That’s why I am much more comfortable with Chinese culture and values because we inherently know that there are differences and life is just a long struggle to find balance between the yin and the yang rather than a life-and-death conflict between the black and white. While I was in University, the debate over IQ was nature versus nurture. In other words, is intelligence hereditary or is it a learned skill? Why in the world can’t it be both? The real debate should really be how much is nature versus nurture or from a social policy point of view, how much can education help to reduce the innate gap that occurs at birth. I was never a big fan of the 10,000 hour rule because no matter how many hours I put into my golf game, I’m never going to achieve a world-class level of proficiency no matter how much I love playing.
Put it this way, I think the true secret to success in anything is being born with innate skills and ability; having the opportunities to develop those skills; spending time (10,000 hours if you like) to hone, practice and master those skills; having the courage to pursue your goals and dreams; and then just being lucky.
Innate skill + opportunity + practice + guts + luck = success
Out of these five factors, despite the old saying “you make your own luck”, I would say that luck is by far the most important. You can have the intelligence, skills, ability, opportunity and perseverance but if you happen to be in the wrong place at the wrong time – that’s all she wrote. That doesn’t absolve one from working hard and training as those are just about the only factors within an individual’s control. Keep in mind that these are also strong preconditions to success as well. You cannot change what you were born with and your social circumstances has a great impact on the opportunities available to you. Now all you need is a little bit of serendipity. Bonne chance.