FlashFiction.Net

A common theme that appears throughout Outliers is the "10,000-Hour Rule". Gladwell claims that greatness requires enormous time, using the source of The Beatles' musical talents and Gates' computer savvy as examples. The Beatles performed live in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time, therefore meeting the 10,000-Hour Rule. Gladwell asserts that all of the time The Beatles spent performing shaped their talent, "so by the time they returned to England from Hamburg, Germany, 'they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them.'" Gates met the 10,000-Hour Rule when he gained access to a high school computer in 1968 at the age of 13, and spent 10,000 hours programming on it. In Outliers, Gladwell interviews Gates, who says that unique access to a computer at a time when they were not commonplace helped him succeed. Without that access, Gladwell states that Gates would still be "a highly intelligent, driven, charming person and a successful professional", but that he might not be worth US$50 billion.[3] Gladwell explains that reaching the 10,000-Hour Rule, which he considers the key to success in any field, is simply a matter of practicing a specific task that can be accomplished with 20 hours of work a week for 10 years. He also notes that he himself took exactly 10 years to meet the 10,000-Hour Rule, during his brief tenure at The American Spectator and his more recent job at The Washington Post.

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Perhaps the element of craft most overlooked is that of writing, that talent some writers have that allows them to write more than the rest of us, to put in the time needed to get good, better, and (possibly) great. In the Grail myth, the best knights of the land get a vision of the Grail, a cure for a wasted land, so they all travel elsewhere, leaving their homes behind. A possible interpretation of this myth is that the Grail vision itself creates the waste of the land, driving the best knights away. So might that be, at times, with everything associated with writing that is not-writing, all those things—conferences, classes, workshops, readings, craft articles, blogs—that take the writer away from writing.

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So, for 2010, I resolve to work on a craft element I've been neglecting, the one that might be the difference between good and great, between a tiny flash and brilliance. I'm going to put in my hours this year, not running away from it, but facing it, hour after hour.

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