Strive

3Practice and Opportunity

There is no short cut to achievement.

—George Washington Carver, American inventor

“Practice makes perfect.” “Life is unfair.” It seems that our parents were right, doesn't it? The longer we live, the more we find that practice is necessary and opportunities are not distributed equally. However, just how much practice is really needed for success? If you are born into a terrible situation, is there no hope? Your success hinges on more than how long you sit at a keyboard or how others treat you—but first you must see a new future, one that you have control over. Let's take a look at how issues of practice and opportunity really affect your success.

The Practice of Practice

Ten thousand hours. It has become one of the most closely associated values with success other than perhaps “millions” or “billions.” The 10,000 hours of practice was first identified in a 1993 study of young musicians by Anders Ericsson and his team; the authors noted that Berlin music students put in this amount of practice time by their 20th birthday. The key finding of the study was popularized in Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers as one of the reasons certain people were able to achieve a high level of skill (and success). But the study's principal author, Anders Ericsson, and another researcher went on record as saying that there may be something more to the understanding of practice than meets the eye—and 10,000 hours may not be a hard and fast solution.

The 10,000‐hour rule may ...