Most pilots like to think they do pretty well at the whole flying thing. In fact, surveys show that overall most people rate themselves as above average in performance. This is obviously impossible, as half of all pilots would have their performance rated as less than average. In his new book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell looks at the top end of the performance scale to determine what makes someone an expert, the very top of their field. He found that experts obviously had a lot of innate talent. They also had typically received many “lucky breaks” of being in the right place at the right time. However, there were many very talented people who never rose to the level of being considered an expert. The final deciding factor was experience. From musicians to athletes to economists to chess players, those at the very top of their fields typically hit their prime after achieving at least 10,000 hours of practice and experience.
Since the average person works about 2,000 hours in one year, it would take five years of dedicated eight hours a day, five days a week effort to reach 10,000 hours. Many of the experts Gladwell looks at achieved much more experience in a much shorter time. Mozart’s father made him practice relentlessly from the time he was a young child. Gladwell says that by the time Mozart composed his first masterpiece at the age of 21, he had been composing concertos for 10 years. Early in their career, the Beatles got a job playing eight hours a night, seven nights a week, in Hamburg, Germany. By the time they achieved their first success, they had performed over 1,200 times. Gladwell points out that many bands don’t perform that many times in their entire career. By the time Bill Gates dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft, he had been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years, and had much more than 10,000 hours experience.
