Updated throughout the day with quick takes from staff.
Over the past few years, you've probably read about the "10,000 hour rule", first developed by a Florida State psychologist, and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell's best-selling Outliers.
The "rule" suggests that regardless of your vocation, it takes 10,000 hours for anyone to truly master their craft, and over at The Frontal Cortex, Jonah Lehrer cites Tiger Woods as the initial case study:
The lesson of Tiger Woods is that the best way to become a superstar is to start young and get in those 10,000 hours as quickly as possible. That’s why Earl put a club in the hands of a toddler, and why Mozart was composing music before most of us can do arithmetic.
According to the study, part of it stems from a person's surrounding environment. And the conclusions they reached are somewhat counter-intuitive. While 52% of the United States population resides in cities of more than 500,000 people, a survey of more than 2,000 professional athletes revealed that just 13% of NHL players, 15% of baseball players, and 29% of NBA players hail from those dense population areas.
In other words, if you're a budding athlete, the statistics would suggest it's better to be from a town of 500 than 500,000. But why? A Chicago psychiatrist offers one theory:
Findings like the birthplace effect suggest that we need to rethink the idea that kids should receive year-round training in one sport early on. Although this early specialization certainly worked for Woods, for most kids, less sport-specific training seems to be the key to athletic success. Of course, this doesn’t mean limiting practice overall. Indeed, smaller cities offer more opportunities for unstructured play than larger cities, which results in more opportunities to hone general coordination, power, and athletic skills. These longer hours of play also allow kids to experience successes (and failures) in different settings, which likely toughens their attitudes in general.
And Lehrer seems to confirm this interpretation, saying "the most important skills for success ... are more likely to emerge when we pursue a variety of athletic activities at a young age, which tends to happen in smaller communities. We won’t be good at all of these sports, but that’s probably a good thing. The struggle will make us stronger."
In other words, it may take 10,000 hours of practice to be great at anything, but you've got a better chance at greatness—and learning the value of practice—if you try a variety of other sports first. And that part makes sense.
But are cities really that much worse for prospective superstars? Let's think about this.
Adrian Peterson grew up in Palestine, Texas, a town of 17,000, while Chris Johnson hails from Orlando, Florida (population: 2,000,000). LeBron James is from Akron (217,000), but Dwight Howard is from Atlanta (5,500,000). Justin Morneau was born in New Westminster, British Columbia (58,000), but then, Ryan Howard and Joe Mauer are from St. Louis (2,800,000) and St. Paul (3,500,000), respectively. Derek Jeter was raised in Kalamazoo, Michigan (323,000), but Alex Rodriguez grew up in Miami (5,000,000).
My conclusion? The above theories may tell us something interesting about what makes a professional athlete, but if we're talking about the 10,000 hour rule and people that have "mastered their craft," then we need to take a step back. Making the Big Leagues in any sport requires some level of mastery, but the average pro athlete pales in comparison to the names listed in the previous paragraph.
It all comes down to how we define "greatness" and "superstars", then.
The 10,000 hour rule, I think, is meant to describe people like Tiger Woods—real, indelible greatness. And the study about cities is meant, at least in some sense, to detract from the notion that specialization begets greatness.
But the truth is, when you really take a look at the people we consider "great" at anything, the distribution is completely random. Tim Tebow was home schooled in Jacksonville, Vince Young went to public school in a bad area of Houston; both were transcendent college quarterbacks that we'll remember for the next 50 years.
What makes a successful athlete? It seems like 10,000 hours of practice is a necessity, and it probably helps if he or she grows up in a small town, playing different sports in early childhood.
How does one become a great athlete? Well, how does one become a great anything?
It just sort of happens. Everybody works hard, but only a select few turn that into something that the world remembers. It's a process that defies our understanding, and really can't be confined to statistics or theorems. And isn't that part of the charm?
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