Analysis Of What It Takes To Be Great By Jay Colvin

After reading The Sports Gene and Outliers, it is determined that people become “talented” with practice and there is no such thing as innate “talent”. In Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, in chapter 2 it is said, “...10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert-in anything.” This supports the idea that people become “talented” with practice. The quote supports the claim because if it is being said that it takes 10,000 hours to master anything, it can be assumed that people do not have innate “talent”, but rather have a level of mastery over many hours of practice. It could be said on the opposite side of the argument that if it takes 10,000 hours to master anything, “ Why is there

Understanding and using intelligence is in all of us. The intelligence determines a person who uses it for their purposes that results that there are different categories of work that people work in. The different categories are different skill-sets consider the type of person in a group of people that coexists with the other people. This results that a person is to themselves based on what they can or cannot act according to their intellect. All people are not a welder or a doctor, nevertheless at least one person is one of them with the skills they gain from the intelligence or experience that they have. Understanding intelligence difference and its subjectivity are one view of understanding Mike Rose article "Blue-Collar Brilliance"

A man most people know for his incredible but challenging basketball career, Michael Jordan, once said when giving tips on how to be successful like himself, “You can practice shooting eight hours a day, but if your technique is wrong, then all you become is very good at shooting the wrong way. Get the fundamentals down and the levels of everything you do will rise. I’m not out there sweating for three hours every day just to find out what it feels like to sweat.” Although some may disagree and say that quality practices do not go hand in hand with quantity practice for successful people, I disagree. Successful people practice with a purpose: to be successful. Bill Gates had intentions of becoming successful when spending endless hours in the computer lab. The Beatles always had it in their plans to become better each performance when they would play eight hours a day in Germany. Based on evidence, it seems to be a pattern that a successful individual does have both a practice of quality and quantity in their vocabulary to mean the same thing. These individuals have therefore taught themselves hard work, because this idea of 10,000 hours of practice has allowed them to learn how to work for what they

Have you ever looked down upon a Blue-collar worker? Well, no need to anymore. Author Mike Rose, a professor at UCLA, wrote "Blue-Collar Brilliance," published in a reputable magazine in 2009 in the American Scholar. Rose argues that Blue-Collar workers are often overlooked. Additionally, Rose brings an overwhelming measure of thankfulness and support as this article assertively endeavored to persuade white-collar workers who before it demonstrated almost no appreciation for blue collar workers. He claims that in effect, intelligence cannot be determined only by the knowledge we collect in school but also through how we learn skills in our daily lives. Rose effectively argues his claim by using pathos, ethos, and logos through personal stories, and comprehensive counterarguments.

Think of something you are passionate about. Is it a skill that you are able to push yourself in? People are always told that with enough hard work you could become a master of that skill. Even without natural talent, enough hard work at a skill will eventually build up the ability. By constantly pushing oneself past their limits during practice, they can improve quicker than someone who has the natural ability and doesn’t try. However, skill doesn’t always equal success. As Malcolm Gladwell states in his book The Outliers, luck plays a large role in the ability to obtain the 10,000 hours required to become an expert in a subject. However, many studies and even the researchers of the 10,000 hour study have rejected the rule outright. I disagree with Gladwell that 10,000 hours is required to become a master, and that luck plays a much larger role than he states.

Being great at something doesn’t guarantee success, and Gladwell states it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. That’s why it is imperative to choose something that can make one successful to ripen into an expert in. An example would be a person becoming an expert at folding clothes. Just because that person became an expert they are more than likely not going to become successful from that particular skill. An example Gladwell gave was the Beatles whom spent an extensive amount of hours practising at Hamburg. Their talents were undefined and crude before they would go on to play for many consecutive hours at Hamburg. After they received 10,000 hours of practice they initiated a long and successful journey that led to their

Building upon the previous chapter, we begin to understand how all the right ingredients for achievement and success can be present, and yet they may never happen without a stroke of luck. Becoming an expert at some skill is earned by putting in hard work across several hours, approximately 10,000 hours. Being born in the right year, or time

Early specialization is characterized by year-round training in a single activity, beginning at a young age, apart from other activities with the goal of developing expertise (Ericsson et al., 1993). Ericsson and his colleagues studied pianists and violinists of varying skill levels and discovered that the expert musicians typically began training between ages four and five while the non-experts started training later in life. Moreover, a pattern emerged indicating that the level of performance attained related to the amount of deliberate practice. By age 20 the best performers had spent over 10,000 hours, an intermediate group had put in 8,000 hours, and the least accomplished group only 5,000 hours. In their theory of deliberate practice, Ericsson et al. (1993) suggest that talent plays no role in the development of expertise, rather it is an effortful activity motivated by the goal of improving performance. Typically, deliberate practice requires a high amount of concentration and must be carried out over time. The obligation to significant amounts of deliberate practice in one sport from a young age has been demonstrated as one approach to developing elite athletes (Helsen et al., 1998).

Some people are born with natural god given skills and ability while others who are not that lucky and have to work twice as hard just to get the same result. And then there are those rare individual who even though they are born with the talent, they still work just as hard and sometimes even harder to keep improving. It is called determination and that is a trait that all the great athletes share and it is what separates the great ones from the just good ones. This is perfect way to describe Peyton Williams Manning, who is considered to be one of the most prolific passers in NFL history.

Athletes such as Tiger Woods, Michael Jordan, Gary Kasporov and intellectuals such as Albert Einstein seem to posses exceptional abilities beyond human understanding. Their lives resemble those of individuals who have retained special attributes beyond common knowledge. But as that, there is no limitation of how their talents have been expressed to the whole world. Tiger Woods is an ultimate golfer of the century and Michael Jordan remains one of the best basketball players of the American National Basket ball Associations. The list of talents is endless in terms of Albert Einstein and Gary Kasporov.

A trainer for the Team USA basketball program once described how Kobe Bryant practiced deliberately until he made 800 shots in the morning. Although his other teammates were practicing as well, Kobe practiced more hours on specific skills to become an elite player. Similarly, Malcolm Gladwell, who is the founder of the 10,000 hour rule, believes that to be an expert on something, it requires 10,000 hours. This suggests that Kobe practiced to be the best basketball player in the world. If I were to be a NBA player like Kobe, I would need to practice playing basketball for 10,000 hours along with developing teamwork and fundamental skills.

“A theory of general psychology that states the differences between expert performers and normal adults reflect a life-long period of deliberate effort to improve performance in a specific domain. (Ericsson, K. A).”

Perfecting a certain skill can take a very long time and a lot of hard work.

Cote et al. (2007) points out the principle of the power law of practice, where great improvements are seen in the initial stages of practice, but the improvements level-off as one becomes an expert. This power relationship seems to be converted into a more linear relationship with increased deliberate practice. Violinists were studied, and time spent in deliberate practice was examined. By 18 years of age, experts accumulated 7,400 hours of practice, whereas intermediate-level performers had 5,300 hours, and lower-level performers only completed 3,400 hours. This linear law of practice seems to be generalizable to other domains, namely sport and chess (Cote et al., 2007, pp. 185). Although deliberate practice is very important, it is not the sole predictor of elite-level

If I were to write a book entitled, “How to Be Amazing at Anything”, it would only contain a single page with one word on it: “Practice!”  Because that’s all it takes to be amazing.