The 10,000-hour rule is wrong and perpetuates a cruel myth

We live at a strange time where capitalism lets us try our hands at almost anything. Want to be x, then go to school for it and try to get a job at it or start a company with those skills. Or get a job and practice x in your spare time. There's no local communist officials who say 'put this person to work here doing this.' If there's a finance path to doing x work, then you're good. In other words, we more or less choose our destinies, within reason.

But we are have a lot of cargo-cult science and pop-social sentiment of being able to excel at all things via a strnge protestant work ethic argument of 'just trying harder.' We skirt around determinism of the brain, personality types, what we call natural talent, focus endurance, whether we're primarily fast or slow thinkers, etc. Schools also don't do a good job assessing what a student would excel in and I imagine some parents don't want to hear their kid won't be a math genius or creative superstar, so they're dis-incentivized to perform this kind of testing.

So we live in this weird middle ground and feed each other little myths that are actually untrue, but emotionally pleasing. We remind each other Bill Gates dropped out of college, thus the college drop out could be the next Bill Gates, but we forget that he did only because running MS made a lot more sense than staying in school. We play up Steve Jobs as this wonderful grown-up hippie-type personality shepherding us into the future, but he was cruel and hated man who left behind a string of failures as much as success. Or that if we only could get those 10,000 hours then we'd be great too.

No one wants to admit they are mediocre talent or have no talent in some field they desire to be successful at. It took me a long time to realize how mediocre I am in general and only have the possibility of excelling at certain things. I think this is a classic case of ego vs reality. Our egos want to believe we're these universal machines that can excel at anything if needed. Reality suggests otherwise.

In other words, there are so many more tasks and abilities in the world than just those we hear about, and paths expand into a lot more skills than you could possibly consider to exist. Everyone could be a specialist in a very niche area (or many), but they need to know those exist in the first place.

So, try things. As many as you can, because you'll never know where that will lead you.

http://freakonomics.com/podcast/peak/

Here are two:

The way to excel in physics, according to Feynman, was to have several unsolved problems in the back of your mind, waiting for new information to spark an insight.

Feynman reports that fraternity kids at the university he attended would be taught slick answers to classic questions like "why does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down" -- a kind of repertoire of responses that was part of their initiation.

Creativity doesn't come out of nowhere, it's a cumulative thing.