Is the 10,000 hours-rule can define success for people to spend their hours on their interest? This is my response to the 10,000 hours rule. Society believes that success is a basis for everyone in the world. People born for a different purpose to live and work successfully on this earth to fulfill their destiny from God assigned them to complete. Some people work as a doctor, some people work syenites, some people work for a ministry to preach the gospel, some people work as a teacher in the school, and etc. When they complete their tasks each day, then they can think of success could happen every day to them.
Therefore, everyone is a success in general although we as a society have a different opinion to define the meaning of success according to the level of the economy whether high level or low level. Gladwell’s opinion about success is matching 10,000 hours by ten years for people to become experts when they start to spend their hours in particular areas through their hunger. People are willing to invest their hours on things through more practice and experimentation to discover a lot of new things because they want to change their circumstances and to feel freedom in life. They love to use their life in particular areas to be better. The same as societies have a different definition of success based on their opinion, knowledge, and experience.
I thought the success was just simply for a final accomplishment to their effort from a long period of time. For instance, when I saw people graduate from college or university, then they got a good high paying job, they had achieved success in their life even though those were proof from their sacrifice while they were studying at school. When I was around 6 –16 years old, I was in an elementary and vocational school. At that moment, I was not sure what real success really meant to me because I did not have enough experience and knowledge to define the meaning of success. Therefore, I thought success is about wealth, power and position just by visualizing without thinking deeply about it.
Society believes that success is an everyday basis by completing the task each day. When they have a project to work on, they make a plan of how the project or task could be done based on their schedule. After they finish it, they feel relief from their work on a project. For instance, we as students have so many assignments to complete every week, so before those assignments are due dates, we have to finish them in order to get a good grade on assignment. While we are still doing our assignment, we feel stressed.
We do not have enough time to sleep and hangout with friends or family. We do not have enough time to nurse ourselves for health sometimes, but after we finish the tasks, we complete the entire semester. Then, we feel relaxed without thinking about the assignment. It means when people finish their job successfully with the result, they can think of it as successful in a job. Therefore, success is finishing our job with a faithful heart each day whether we like the result or not.
Malcolm Gladwell’s idea about success is matching the categories by date of birth from the famous people’s birthday to identify whether they are perfect matches from the same date and month. He believes that people can be successful when they spend 10 hours every day practicing only one thing to be an expert on it. For instance, in the article, “The 10,000 Hours Rules” Gladwell wrote that “an amateur musician can spend only two or three hours a day for practice, but for excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice again and again in the study of expertise.” (Gladwell 2). What he means about the 10,000 hours rules is to people who spend their hours in practice to be experts in a particular area. When people are good at music, there are two types of musicians. Some people are very skillful, they are world influencers through their talents because they spend many hours practicing. Other people are good at music, and they know how to play it but they are not an expert on the music because they do not spend a lot of hours practicing. Therefore, he thinks about success based on his knowledge by studying the research. People can achieve success in their life when they spend a lot of hours practicing, then after they spend ten to eleven years later. They can become more expert on something.
These are the sobering conclusions of Gladwell’s Outliers. It’s true that no matter how much people try to pursue something; bad luck and lack of opportunities can always keep them down. For example, learning about nutrition, eating healthy, and exercising all of which happen to be within our control pales in comparison to having been unlucky enough to spend 20 years growing up in a severely industrially-polluted area in a house adjacent to a cell phone tower, which has doomed the people in the surrounding area to an irreversible life of poor health. People as individuals who grew up in a poverty-stricken area with a horribly lacking educational system will have a much harder time preparing themselves academically for college. The power of success is depending on how good or bad they want it to buy hard work without comparing with each other. Amidst the case studies of how powerful luck and upbringing can be, Gladwell gives us the 10,000-hour rule, in which he argues that it takes 10,000 hours of sheer practice to truly master something. He cites the stories of the Beatles and Bill Gates to support this rule. This is the individual merit portion of the book. In other words, if society’s luck and upbringing allow them the time and means to acquire 10,000 hours of practice; you have the opportunity to become very successful (an “outlier”).
Society has many different opinions to define personal success. They think success is a final accomplishment of something. They think success is to work hard on something each day to achieve a massive result. Other people believe that success is wealth and financial freedom. For example, when people have a good economy and they have more income in their household, they could think it is a success. Even though Gladwell knows success is the process by hard work to practice every day and spend more hours on one thing to be expert on it. When we compare his idea about success with society’s opinions are different. Therefore, society misses the opportunity to redeem their time wisely for real success which is expertise.
People can be successful when they follow 10,000 hours-rules by matching the date of their birth and when they start to practice in their 10,000 hours, but his idea does not make sense generally because most people have a different belief about the rules and way of success. Some people think that success is at the end of accomplishing something. Some people think that success is an experiment by doing things differently to get a better result. The others believe that success is about spending time on one particular area to put more practice until they become an expert on doing things after they learn from their practicing. Society believes that success is not the straight line to accomplish, so if people want to achieve anything better, they have to commit to taking a narrow route and it can allow them to have more sacrifice in the process even, it can take longer to complete the real successfully in their life.
The 10,000 Hours Rule article is a reflection by definition of success-based on people’s opinion, knowledge, and experience. People’s opinion about success is a final accomplishment through wealth, financial freedom, happy family, and college graduation without thinking about the process of how they achieve all these kinds of greatness. Some people define success by matching other successful people’s experiences and personal databases when they study the research because they are well educated.
They have to quote ideas from outside sources because they are very careful to redefine the idea of success. Other people can define success based on their experience of doing and achieving something. People should believe success is the definition from other people’s experiences because their experience can define the true story, but the definition from people’s opinions and success definition based on their knowledge from the research can be difficult to believe when their ideas cannot be original. Society has a different assumption for the definition of success by visually seeing and defined by their own idea because they are limited in the knowledge to define a real definition of success. Therefore, success can be determined by putting enough hours on a particular subject to be the best and master the area of your investment.
Work Cited
Malcolm Gladwell, “The 10,000 Hours-Rule” 2008. Access in 2019.
