Muscle for Life

Why can some people do things so much better than others? What makes one person good at something, another bad, and yet another so great that we can’t wrap our heads around it? Is it mostly just hard work? Talent? A bit of both? Some other X factor or factors? Today’s guest, Dr. Anders Ericsson, has spent most of his professional life researching these questions. In fact, it was his seminal research on talent that gave us the now famous--and generally misunderstood--“10,000 hour rule,” that was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers. In case you haven’t heard of it, the 10,000 hour rule states that if you want to be great at something, you need to put in at least 10,000 hours of focused, structured, productive practice. To put that in perspective, that’s about 5 hours of “deliberate practice,” as Dr. Ericsson calls it, per day for about 4 years. That’s the idea at least. As you’ll learn in this podcast, the 10,000 hour rule is more fiction than fact. The reality is far more nuanced, and encourag