The 10,000-hour rule is wrong and perpetuates a cruel myth
businessinsider.com
businessinsider.com
I think the amended version of '10,000 hours' is closer to being correct, and probably not the one the public wants to hear.
Ericsson's research isn't much better either though. His sample size was very small and his research was never replicated. As the 'how I taught myself physics in one year' thread showed, it's pretty obvious innate talent exists and can allow people to attain mastery of very complicated concepts in far less than 10,000 hours.
Not sure it is a cruel myth...more like wishful thinking that can have unintended consequences by mismanaging resources (such as having low-IQ kids in prestigious schools, in the hope that environment will overcome a cognitive deficit)...if it were so cruel, it would not have taken the world by storm...'10,000 hours' succeeds as a meme because it tells people what they want to believe, that with enough practice, anyone can covet the skills of genius. It's not so much that people want to become world-class musicians or top physicists, but rather that they have the potential to become those things if they want to, by practicing enough.
What Ericsson says is that what creates peak performance is studying just beyond the edge of your comfort zone with (as much) personal feedback (as possible) from an experienced mentor; so not just playing around a bit by yourself.
For quite a few fields 'expert' levels happen to come down to about 10k hours of such practice, which is where the number comes from, but he also warns that you will need increasingly more than that to rise to the top as more people put in more hours.
https://www.salon.com/2016/04/10/malcolm_gladwell_got_us_wro...
The caveat is that you will not be the best. You might not even be world class. Or even national class. But you are going to be better than somebody who practiced only 1,000 hours no matter how talented they are.
What people forget is that at the very high levels of achievement in any field, 20,000 hours is just the price of entry. Everyone who's playing has practiced for 20,000 hours. Difference between 1st, 2nd, and 10th comes down to talent and a bit of luck.
Or maybe a lot of luck.
How many times have you struggled with a problem, but then someone gives you an explanation from a different point of view, or you think of something that makes you think of the problem in a different way? Then everything clicks and after that it's all easy?
In a sufficiently competitive field, the difference between 1st and 10,000th comes down to talent and luck.
Chess is incredibly instructive in this respect. Some players soar through the rankings in their teens with remarkably little effort; some battle on for years with little to show for it. Some very promising players just run out of talent and hit a hard ceiling on their rank, while others keep finding room for improvement.
I agree with the broad thrust of the linked article - there's a real cruelty to the 10,000 hour rule.
i like riding motorcycle, been riding for 10+ years. but i don't have the talent, the motor skills to really let if fly. but i know a guy who just has it, put him into/on any vehicle and he is fast.
talent is the best example of how unfair life is :)
I disagree. You'll probably be better than the average 1000-hour practicee but not necessarily any particular one. Some people really do have a knack [innate talent] for certain things.
There's a lot of counter-examples that contradict that statement, at least in areas like sports, chess, probably music as well, were a very "talented" individual achieved in one year what other people haven't in ten.
"Talent is a pursued interest. Anything that you're willing to practice, you can do." - Bob Ross
But it doesn't mean that anybody can achieve anything. Just that one can become a master in a field in which he's happy to put these 10K hours.
I'm yet to meet a great coder who wouldn't enjoy coding.
Maybe great coders like it so much because they are good at it. It would be reasonable from an evolutionary point of view to focus on what we are better than others at. At university I have seen people get into a field on the basis of an unexpected excellent grade and conclude they love it, and reject whole fields as stupid and uninteresting after failing - where the directly of causality is clearly result first and love/hate second.
I think there's more to it than that. When I first started writing code it was pretty clear that I was not very good at it (at the time), but absolutely loved it anyway. Man, the rush of power when you realize you can get the computer to obey you... that's what got me hooked.
This feeds into the myth of passion equating talent/skill, which has been incorrect in my (admittedly short) experience. I can think of more than a few athletes who had no passion for the game but were phenomenal players.
that said, it's also very possible that I'm not a great coder
We live at a strange time where capitalism lets us try our hands at almost anything. Want to be x, then go to school for it and try to get a job at it or start a company with those skills. Or get a job and practice x in your spare time. There's no local communist officials who say 'put this person to work here doing this.' If there's a finance path to doing x work, then you're good. In other words, we more or less choose our destinies, within reason.
But we are have a lot of cargo-cult science and pop-social sentiment of being able to excel at all things via a strnge protestant work ethic argument of 'just trying harder.' We skirt around determinism of the brain, personality types, what we call natural talent, focus endurance, whether we're primarily fast or slow thinkers, etc. Schools also don't do a good job assessing what a student would excel in and I imagine some parents don't want to hear their kid won't be a math genius or creative superstar, so they're dis-incentivized to perform this kind of testing.
So we live in this weird middle ground and feed each other little myths that are actually untrue, but emotionally pleasing. We remind each other Bill Gates dropped out of college, thus the college drop out could be the next Bill Gates, but we forget that he did only because running MS made a lot more sense than staying in school. We play up Steve Jobs as this wonderful grown-up hippie-type personality shepherding us into the future, but he was cruel and hated man who left behind a string of failures as much as success. Or that if we only could get those 10,000 hours then we'd be great too.
No one wants to admit they are mediocre talent or have no talent in some field they desire to be successful at. It took me a long time to realize how mediocre I am in general and only have the possibility of excelling at certain things. I think this is a classic case of ego vs reality. Our egos want to believe we're these universal machines that can excel at anything if needed. Reality suggests otherwise.
https://www.salon.com/2016/04/10/malcolm_gladwell_got_us_wro...
Mindset and approach can be incredibly influential. And sometimes people want to be/do things they just can't handle. It's a range, not black and white.
Edit: I say this as someone who learned software development on his own, and has no formal higher education. That said, I spend 5-10 hours a week learning and expanding my knowledge and have for nearly two decades now.
Of those I have worked with, individual drive has been the leading differentiator in terms of quality that I've seen. Even if they no longer dedicate any of their own time anymore.
Unfortunately, I fact checked him. He's an entertainment writer at best, an intentional distributor of misinformation packaged as research at worst.
Examples:
Blink featured John Gottman's research into relationships. He could predict relationship outcomes with 91% accuracy. Unfortunately he never split out a test dataset and the model was overfit; real world accuracy is no better than existing techniques. This was known at publish time.
Tipping Point drove companies to seek out Mavens and Connectors, only to find that they don't really exist. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Tipping_Point#Scientific
For an actual evidence-based review of many Malcolm concepts, I recommend "Everything Is Obvious: Once You Know the Answer".
https://pando.com/2015/07/07/shillers-killers/b3741e29bc9adb...
Gladwell denies this.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2015/07/08/malcolm-gladwell-sm...
Just because marketing the top 1% is easier doesn't mean the rest is crap. Just because you won't be the next Bill Gates doesn't mean you shouldn't start (and enjoy building) your own software company.
Even the 10k hours theory doesn't explain why some people can practice for so long but others can't. So, clearly, we all start at different positions in life.
As an example: I am a good guitar player. I've put in probably close to 10000 hours. But lots of guitar players can play and come up with things I never could. And lots of guitar players can't play or come up with some of the things I can.
There simply isn't one sort of top guitar player, or composer, or inventor. There are lots of ideas, shades and colours, different solutions to all sorts of problems. It helps to know your area of expertise, but a truckload of Bill Gates / Bach / Rembrandt clones wouldn't be able to come up with all the novel ideas and creative solutions a more diverse set of people with their own individual quirks could.
Individuals bring things to the table that can't be put that easily into a quantifiable number; most real life problems are more complex in nature than an Olympic race where there's a clear winner and way to win. I think it's at least as important in life to find out in which ways you are unique and can make (some modicum of) a difference.
Which is not to say that his one extra trick was particularly powerful, or widely applicable, but it was unusual, and it produced a difference in ability. Maybe Feynman couldn't solve more integrals than his colleagues, but he could integrate different ones, which made him useful and "smart".
Which in turn brings up the nature/nurture question of genius: to what extent is genius a matter of "innate" skill (in this case, that arises either from the circumstances of your birth or life) and how much of it is a quirk of your education, the one extra trick you learned (or didn't) that make you approach problems in a way different than your peers?
Here are two:
The way to excel in physics, according to Feynman, was to have several unsolved problems in the back of your mind, waiting for new information to spark an insight.
Feynman reports that fraternity kids at the university he attended would be taught slick answers to classic questions like "why does a mirror reverse left and right but not up and down" -- a kind of repertoire of responses that was part of their initiation.
Creativity doesn't come out of nowhere, it's a cumulative thing.
That said, there are times when I've given up and felt like it was the right thing to do. I went to a pretty good school for Physics because I was sure that was what I wanted to do with my life. After 2-3 years, through no lack of effort on my part, it was just super clear I wasn't going to make the cut--I just didn't have it. I worked hard and got okay grades, but as the material got harder, it was just plain to see who was separating from the pack and those kids just had something I never would, and hard work wasn't going to do it. If I didn't put in 10k hours, I came damned close.
I dropped Physics as a major, switched to Math, dropped the idea of academia as a career and have never looked back. An honest look at one's talents relative to peers and competitors is still important.
In other words, there are so many more tasks and abilities in the world than just those we hear about, and paths expand into a lot more skills than you could possibly consider to exist. Everyone could be a specialist in a very niche area (or many), but they need to know those exist in the first place.
So, try things. As many as you can, because you'll never know where that will lead you.
To quote G.K. Chesterton: Anything worth doing is worth doing poorly.
Do I consider myself one of the best at my profession?? Not even close. Probably wouldn't even rate myself in the top 1/3rd of the worlds programmers. I've met guys who have been alive less time than I have been programming who can run rings around me, code wise.
I also play guitar, been doing so for longer than I have been programming, but I am a very stop/start type of player. Sometimes I will play guitar for 1 to 2 hours per day for a month or two straight, then I will put the instrument away for a year or more and not touch it because of things like a new baby arriving in our family, or work commitments etc.
When I don't touch the guitar for a while and come back to it after a long break, I am like a beginner again. I cannot remember any of the melodies that I had studied so hard even a few months before, and I feel like I am a newbie learning again. After a long spell of consistent, deliberate practice (as Gladwell expounds), I feel as if I am playing at a normal level again. [0]
Is that really what the 10K hours are about? Simply keeping the muscle and neural memory current, flexible and able to translate intentions quicker? It makes sense that constant practice keeps the fingers deft, and ensures your brain synapses are focused on the task of playing, rather than getting distracted with a million other things.
A large factor in this situation is that I regularly jump between several different languages, but nevertheless, it is frustrating to have to pause my flow and look up things so regularly.
Perhaps it is a patience thing with my older age, but I find nowadays the biggest thing putting me off starting new projects is just all the sheer mundaneness of setting up repositories and working folders, getting third party assets together, configuring project management tools etc.
You would think that familiarity and practice would make these sorts of things automatic and fluid over time, but the opposite seems to be true.
1. Not switching languages that often anymore. Fullstack? Yeah i could hack around in JS, PHP and whatever but i'm trying to stay in my field java to become really good in it.
2. Not using code comletion much/often. I write often a class file from scratch just to exercise it. I write Classnames out, i sometimes write my own imports.
3. Repeat it: When i forget how to write a for each loop, i do it once, and delete the code the next second and just write it again, than a third time.
No one cares when i need 30 seconds longer to write that one loop and the next time it sits again or much etter than before.
But unlike human languages, computer languages have no conventions and they're misleadingly similar-but-different. So it's quite usual to forget Python syntax if you've been using PHP for a while, and vice versa. It's a very common problem.
It's not unlike trying to learn French and German but only practicing one for a few months at a time while ignoring the other.
Repetition and spaced reinforcement are essential for learning. Learning takes consistent, applied, reliable effort, preferably within a timed strategy. Start/stop practice won't do it.
I think Gladwell is an absolutely terrible science writer. He's good at writing books that sell, and good at creating the illusion of psychological insight. But if you want psychological tips that really work, don't go anywhere near his books.
Just curious, what would you recommend in terms of psychological tips/books that do work?
Have you ever tried to deliberately memorize the syntax? Just repeating the same action for 10k hours doesn't make you an expert.
It's like how sportsman don't improve by competing constantly. They improve through deliberate practice. Work is like competing, you aren't trying to improve, you are trying to get stuff done.
Another sentiment you touched on about "guys who have been alive less time than [you] have been programming who can run rings around [you]": you are that guy for some other people. At the minimum, you might as well be a wizard compared to people on the other side of the threshold (and IMO that's one reason why pop-culture representation of "hacking" looks so ridiculous). In Go (as in AlphaGo, not golang) I was encouraged to play against opponents that's slightly weaker, at my level, and stronger. I forgot the proportions, but the idea is that if you only play against weaker opponents you would never improve; only against even opponents you wouldn't improve as quickly; only against stronger opponents you would lose confidence and quit.
To close off with a Naruto analogy (b/c why not, I've already rambled for this long): you're like Rock Lee: he's clearly outclassed compared against the likes of Naruto, Sasuke, etc., but he's still one of the strongest jounin in Konoha, arguably the strongest hidden villages. I'm probably Shikamaru...
"What you are doing is playing, not practice. When you play through a piece like that, you spend most of your time on the bits you already know, and just a little time on the parts you find difficult, and you end up not repeating the hard parts very often. To practice, you should stop when you find something difficult, and repeat that part until you can do it well, and then move on to the next."
You will improve through simple repetition (edit: of a whole piece, or anything else where you know large parts of it well), but you will waste a lot of that time cementing things you already know very well.
And this is what marks the difference between time spent "executing" work in an area and practice in an area. Reaching the top in most areas will for most people mean shifting the balance between amount of time worked in that area and the amount of time spent on deliberate practice towards more deliberate practice and less towards performing.
I realised this first when learning to snowboard, I found I progressed the best when I did the hard runs. An easy day going down some green runs didn't really help me progress. It was when I pushed myself to try the harder runs that I seemed to progress the quickest.
The worst is when people give themselves excuses and say, "I don't have natural talent, I can't learn math." Well sure, if you don't have natural talent you might not be Paul Erdős, but you can still get through calculus.
Gladwell misquoted Ericsson. Read Ericsson's book, Peak. Get your facts right.
https://www.salon.com/2016/04/10/malcolm_gladwell_got_us_wro...
You're not a heart surgeon? That's your fault for not working hard enough in school! You didn't make it as a concert pianist? You must not have wanted it that badly.
But the problem is, telling someone who aspires to be doctor or some other high-IQ profession that they shouldn't try, because they aren't smart enough, may also seem cruel, so we settle on what we perceive to be lesser of two cruelties.
I mean, you're likely in top 6-7% of football players just by being on your high school's team. (1mil football players in HS, 15mil students; random Google numbers)
I would guess with effort, and I mean a lot of effort, pretty much anyone could make top 20% of a high school team. That puts you in 1% land.
The NFL has an average career length between 3 and 6 years, and has under 2000 players. So it's only 0.2% of high school players, or 0.01% of the population. (I just pretended average career length was 4 years, so it lines up with a translated HS cohort.)
This sort of makes sense: you can make 5% relatively easily, and 1% with serious effort. But top of the top professionals are 1 in 10,000, and to be that good you have to make it your life's work (plus it helps to be genetically predisposed).
Ed: Just wanted to add, to be top 1% of the NFL means, literally, you're one-in-a-million.
Not being from the US, I thought you were talking about soccer for a second, and your number did not make any sense at all. But that only confirms your point, in a way: if everyone does something, being part of the top would be much more difficult.
That includes schools, street football, and occasional players. If you drop the occasional part? About 2% of global population. That's still including schools and street games, corporate teams, etc.
So, just playing with any seriousness puts you in the top 2% of global population for soccer.
If you're a registered player, it cuts the number down to 1 in 4. So about 0.5% of global population. Im not sure registered players are, as a rule, better, but someone who is a serious player and registered stands a good chance of being top 1% globally -- something I think anyone with effort could do.
Being a professional soccer player puts you at about 1 in 100,000 globally, and 1 in 1,000 of people who play more than occasionally. (And 1 in 2,000 of people who play at all.)
I suspect that this is because I only looked at the NFL, which would be more like only top-tier teams, not all professionals.
The point being: the numbers actually are pretty darn close, and soccer seems to confirm my point about top 5% being relatively doable and top 1% being just effort.
Whether it's Myer's Briggs, or 10,000 hour rule, or some other self-help book with a reasonable premise -- I feel like most of the time it's just some reasonable premise taken to an extreme.
Yes, if you want to be good at something, you'll have to practice a lot. Yes, practicing mindfully is better than just putting in hours. Yes, there are different kinds of people and you can (sometimes) broadly characterize them. I find it hard to respect people that read points like those, take them to the extreme, and then it becomes their sole mindset for 6/12 months until the next thing comes along.
All joking aside, even if they are placebos (and Myer's Briggs certainly is), whatever it takes to motivate people towards excellence to me would be a positive.
He puts skill at any activity, from 100m sprinting to fine arts, down purely to practice and does some amazing logical fallacies to get there.
How does he deal with the fact that certain body types are more conducive to sprinting? Or does he just ignore that altogether?
Subsequent to reading the book, I do notice that the rule is also widely used as a convenient way to deliberately misinterpret the book & rule and write snarky articles. Somehow people think it's clever & fair to take a single phrase out of a multi-hundred-page context and ridicule it for not inherently being encyclopedic in depth and peer-reviewed.
Undiscussed is that the "outliers" the book investigates are people who started with "10,000 hours", having achieved that level of practice when most competitors (themselves forming a tiny segment of the general population) are just beginning their 10KH. Also, they tend to do so when the rest of the field is just beginning to form. Bill Gates had his 10,000 hours in before starting college - and did so just as the "personal computer" was starting to emerge. The Beatles had their 10,000 hours in before leaving high school - and were ready when mass-distribution music + rock & roll were emerging as the norm. To wit: it takes 10,000 hours practice (that's working on the hard stuff, not the familiar/easy) to become an expert; it takes having done that before that expert's peers to become an outlier.
It's ALSO not your "fault" that you do not excel at something. Your experiences ever since you were a baby shaped you, your tastes and pretty much determined your whole life.
Still, there is no talent, ask any great programmer, musician, illustrator or whatever, every single one of them will say he/she was shitty, but loved it, so kept doing it. This doesn't completely discards the possibility of genetic disposition to liking something, but undeniably everyone starts on even ground.
Obviously, being complex areas they are affected by many indirect skills, and the more something is loved, the safer it is to assume the indirect skills involved are also loved or at least liked, indirect skills matter. Clearly fiddling with computers and watching movies that involve technology is not programming, but will make you better at it.
In the end, the best explanation so far is that your tastes are the defining factor. And yes, it can be argued that tastes are genetic, but currently there's not nearly enough data to debunk the standing theory, we need more studies and we need better studies, taking all variables into account and actually monitoring the subjects throughout their lives.
Maybe in 50 years we'll find out where our tastes come from. Not that it actually matters since it's out of our control anyways.
But my point is not that everyone faces the same hardships, is just that those hardships or lack thereof are not genetic but acquired, probably mostly during early childhood but I'm not a psychologist so I don't know.
I just think we shouldn't dismiss achievements as a result of just talent (or luck). Luck actually plays a role, as well as many other things (As I said, economic and social situations and a lot more).
We just need to be sceptical of linking stuff to genes, humans are not so simple. There are many other factors at play, and even if we can't change ourselves, we may be able to raise our kids better by considering these subtleties and their possible impact.
Plus those "geniuses" love when people acknowledge their hard work, try talking to them about it. I find the amount of effort some people put into their craft to be staggering.
Yes, technically, no one is born knowing trig or calculus, but the people with genetic gifts make the transition from 'shitty' to 'good' much faster than those without such endowments, all else being equal. An elementary school environment where all children come from similar backgrounds and are young enough that 1000's of hours of practice is impossible, teachers can readily identify the gifted from the average--the gifted tend to know so much more and learn so much faster than everyone else (in the classroom environment, where parenting cannot be a factor), and it cannot possibly be explained by parenting or practice, because these children are so young and otherwise are very homogeneous. This is because gifted children learn with fewer repetitions (due to superior working memory and or other factors), which is key.
I disagree; parenting during the earliest years makes a huge difference. By the time they get to elementary school, some parents have been reading to their kids and some haven't, some parents gave their kids more educationally incline toys and some didn't, and some kids, whether by parental choice or by chance, have been watching more educational programs on television or less.
Early brain development is fast enough that even a few years of environmental factors can absolutely make a difference.
No everyone doesn't. Some people are born sick, some have better cardio, some take more weight easily, some people are born twice as big, some grow very little...
And it's the same with mind abilities. Your mind have various qualities, and you are not born equals to others. Some can concentrate better, some can abstract less, some more creative, some are shy.
Add all the differences, and yes, you have people that will have an easier time than others. Bolt and Tyson have been trained, but they started with a nice base to work on.
And obviously some people have easier or harder times. I am simply more aligned with modern humanist psychology, believing environment is way more relevant than genetics.
This doesn't mean you're at fault for sometimes having a hard time keeping up, this just means that it's most likely not in your genes.
The importance of right genes is pretty clear when you look at sports. Different sports favor different body types and if you don't have one, you won't suceed.
I know a couple musicians that have it, one of them lost it in an accident, both studied a lot, and most musicians I know, including some of the most successful ones, don't have this.
It's a good point, but empirically not verifiable, musicians train to identify intervals (Even the ones with perfect hearing), and in a similar discussion in class when I studied for a music degree, the only things the class disagreed were the impact of perfect hearing in the likelihood of becoming a musician, and that there may be some innate ability to maintain rhythm. On everything else we were unanimous in believing there is no such thing as talent.
Now you're free to believe differently, still, people that you think have "talent" will mostly be offended and feel that their hard work is not being recognized. Phelps isn't amazing BECAUSE of his body. His body is just a very small part of what makes him awesome, and though maybe a bit less awesome, he could still be awesome with a different body.
"For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach "master" status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours. This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master."
Maybe those 728 hours were more efficient and effective deliberate practice than the 16,120 hours.
Edit: the book is called "A Mind for Numbers", not "A Mind for Math"
It sort of shows through all the complaints about interviews, most programming work is just not difficult enough to separate people, so anything that does needs to be scorned.
Which seems to make it easier to understand why kids who start really early can become successful: they don't have to worry about all the things adults have to. Conversely, it explains a little bit why being an adult makes it harder to become world-class at something.
If the rule stands, it means it's my fault: I'm not motivated enough, not passionate enough, not smart enough to organize my practice routine. It's what I'm thinking today and what hurts my self-esteem. If the rule's wrong that would be a relief, as it means it's not completely my fault.
Sounds like Harrison Bergeron to me: why not invest those resources into the best minds, who can increase the standard of living for all mankind, rather than investing them only to raise folks to average?
Of course, in reality one would invest a little here and a little there, but it is a zero-sum game: every resource used to help the unintelligent succeed is a resource not expended to help the intelligent exceed.
"Exactly! 10,000 hours is far too few! More like 30,000 if you really want to start covering all the different styles and techniques with competence!"
It's not always "What" a person practices, but also "How" a person does so. Attention to detail, trying new things, learning from mistakes, reflection when away from the hobby/interest. Far too many variables for any one-size-fits-all perspective on Talent and Achievement, but in looking for correlatives and "causation approximate" techniques, Practice certainly shows up time and again.
This is a problem with science writing in general, but Gladwell is especially pernicious because he has a good writing style and good marketing.
So, keep on hustlin!
I just guesstimated that I spent maybe 7,500 hours (over 3.5 years) driving around in a taxi. Towards the end of that period I started to notice things that the other cars on the road would likely do, and point this out to my passengers. "See that car? it's going to change lanes and that other guy is going to have to slam on his brakes..."
Just the other day I was driving with my mother. Our light turned green, but I saw that the car in the cross traffic couldn't see that his light had turned red (on account of the sunset). I waited, and watched as he slammed on his brakes. (Not especially impressive, just recent.)
There's something to putting in time on any activity. With regards to this article postulating that "10,000 hours rule" doesn't matter... I think the relevant saying is not "practice makes perfect", but "perfect practice makes perfect". If you spend 10,000 practicing something wrong it won't be as helpful as 1,000 hours practicing it right.
Bruce Lee said, "I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who has practiced one kick 10,000 times."
"The amazing thing is we did so well while being so stupid. That’s why you’re all here: you think that there’s hope for you. Go where there’s dumb competition" - Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett's business partner.
So this doesn't make sense - otherwise, why practice at all?
And indeed the article goes on to explain that the "music ability test" only tested some things, like ability to read notes.
Maybe the scientists need to work on improving their measurement devices first, before making sweeping claims about talent and practice...
Out of curiosity, has anyone replicated this kind of genetic study for professional musicians? It would be interesting to know how many just really don't have the talent.
http://expertenough.com/1423/deliberate-practice
However in Ericsson's book he puts more emphasis on guidance by an expert teacher (who can help identify specific challenges appropriate to the learner).
I don't know what talent is. And just being good at something isn't it. If you have the opportunity to sit and watch a lot of different folks "get something", absolutely do it. Then talk to them about what just occurred. I have this hunch that talent is having the mental model and the physical world be sync such that any error in the mental model is instantly repaired. That the person undergoing talent, is literally doing multiple experiments in the moment with result times on the order of subsecond to minutes. They aren't pushing skills in as much as playing. Skills build on skills, dancers, athletes, musicians. We have all seen someone good in one thing instantly pickup another and decry, "oh they are so talented!" They applied 100% of what they already knew and added 1%. What they needed was already in their skill-dna.
I will guess that the 'cruel myth' is that anyone can spent the requisite time and do anything. (Some people just don't get / can't get X, even if they want to and try really hard.)
[0]: http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/201...
I didn't enable the scripts, I removed the display: none myself.