Ten thousand hours

It doesn't always apply

• Pop stars don't need to do ten thousand hours.

Even where it does

• You have to be talented
• It has to be valuable practice
• You have to be lucky
  • In the right place:
  • At the right time: It's no good inventing the internet when someone's already invented it,

• Ten thousand hours won’t guarantee you world leadership. You might not even be very good.
• Almost every example of outstanding success has a significant element of being in the right place at the right time. You might have been the greatest flanker in the history of rugby union, but if you were three years younger than Richard Hugh McCaw, you would never know it.
• So much of outsized success has nothing at all to do with pure talent. See: the sex pistols. See: Fund managers - whose success may be as likely to be a product of random chance as deliberate strategy to beat the market.