Why outliers is wrong

To learn more or opt-out, read our Cookie Policy. Improvement is exhausting. This week, the journal Royal Society Open Science published a replication of an influential study on violin players at a music school in the journal Psychological Review. The original finding was simple, and compelling: The very best, expert players — those who were considered elite — were the ones who had practiced the most.

The conclusions implied that deliberate practice was the most important ingredient needed to achieve elite status, more important than inborn characteristics like genetics, or personality. The idea was then popularized in the book Outliers by journalist Malcolm Gladwell. The replication — conducted by Brooke Macnamara and Megha Maitra of Case Western Reserve University — included a somewhat larger sample size and tighter study controls, and was preregistered meaning that the scientists locked their methods and analysis plans in place before they collected any data, preventing them from retroactively changing their premise to fit their findings.

It finds that practice does matter for performance, but not nearly as much as the original article claimed, and surprisingly, it works differently for elite performers. Practice still mattered: It accounted for 26 percent of the difference between good violinists and the less accomplished students.

But the original study claimed that practice accounted for 48 percent of the difference. See Slate for a write-up of some of these studies. More precisely, the analysis found, practice can account for 18 percent of the difference in athletic success. But it also means that a great many other factors — like genetics, personality, life history, etc. Practice matters, yes. Which is why I find these debunkings of the 10,hour rule to be a complete relief.

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Mail will not be published required. By revealing the otherwise hidden patterns behind outstanding achievements Gladwell certainly adds something to our received wisdom about why people succeed. His critics, though, are on to something. The book, ultimately, disappoints. What Gladwell does undoubtedly do is present a series of interesting facts. He shows that how "good" you are at sports can depend hugely on which month you were born, as school leagues favour the bigger, ie older, children in each year.

The success of corporate lawyers in New York is a tale of immigration, forefathers in the garment trade and anti-semitism. Even the uber success of Bill Gates and the Beatles is down more to chance and time of birth than raw talent, though, of course, Gladwell credits that, too, along with hard work and personality. In Gates's case, says Gladwell, he happened to be born at the dawn of the PC age, in a place where he had easy access to usually prohibitively expensive mainframe computers.

And the Beatles were booked to play hundreds of incredibly long gigs in Hamburg. As John Lennon said later, "We got better and got more confidence, we couldn't help it with all the experience playing all night long".

This idea, that the crucial factor in achieving the extraordinary is to be in circumstances that allow sustained development of innate talent - "a kind of accidental 'hot-housing'" provides the book with its best soundbite.

Exceptional success, Gladwell suggests, comes with the 10,hour rule, which seems to be the common amount of practice required by all sorts of high achievers before they become real outliers. Much of Gladwell's work, of course, is not original. He draws on little-known studies and academic sources, and this provides ammunition for his critics. One Nobel prize winner has admonished him for not sufficiently crediting the scientific work he draws upon.