Practice 10,000 hours to be the best: the innate talent

We all associate a person's success with a mixture of hard work and a special gift. For example, Mozart is certainly a gifted child and composed such beautiful music. Bill Gates was also supposed to be a kind of computer geek.
However, what if, in fact, the innate talent does not matter so much when it comes to excel in some activity? And if that is true of any job is 1% talent or luck and 99% perspiration?

It is evident that innate talent exists. Not all people are born with the same natural dispositions and abilities. However, more and more psychological experiments confirm that it matters less than what innate talent thinks than the level of readiness.

Do you like rock stars? Great writers? It's easier than it looks.

One of the most famous studies in this respect is the one that was carried out at the beginning of 1990 the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and two of his children in the elitist Academy of Music of Berlin.

There he divided the violinists into three groups.

Group 1: the stars, which have more potential for musicians of stature.

Group 2: those who were judged by their teachers as simply good.

Group 3: students who had little chance to end up dedicating themselves professionally to music.

All students were asked how many hours they had practiced with their violin from the first time they took one. In all three groups the response was similar: they all started playing around age 5, and everyone practiced about 2 or 3 hours a week.

However, when students evoked their practices from the age of 8, differences began to emerge. The students in Group 1 responded that at that age they doubled the hours of practice. At 16, they already practiced 14 hours a week. At the age of 20 it was possible for some to practice about 30 hours a week.
All the students who have practiced that large number of hours (about 10,000) belonged to Group 1, to the group of stars. No one who practiced less effort to sneak there, and vice versa. The members of group 2 added a maximum of 8,000 hours. Group 3, only 4,000 hours.

Those results were too accurate to be true. Does it all depend on the hours that the students have invested? Was it all a matter of callus?

To make sure you have not attended a sort of accident, repeat the same type of experiment with a class of pianists. Do you know what the result was? Exactly the same. The pattern was identical. The most outstanding pianists have always added less than 10,000 hours of practice in their entire lives.

This result was the whole exercise: Ericsson found no born musicians, that kind of musicians who seem to be born with the gift of playing brilliantly, as if they were written in the genes. Like Mozart. What is the case of Mozart was not exactly like that?

In the next installment of this article on the innate talent we will reveal that Mozart, in fact, belonged to Group 1. Like most of the great talents in other artistic branches