10,000 hours vs genetics

After I read Outliers, I actually believed 10,000 hours myth for sometime until I realized Gladwell is journalist who can convince you with any argument with series of anecdotes as opposed to scientist who gathers data and calculates stats. The turning point for me was mountaineering training which IMO is one of the most demanding "sport". It was very quickly apparent to me that for same amount of conditioning efforts I was no where close in performance to people who were "born with it". As I read more books on mountaineering it was clear that elite or even moderately competent people in this field has significantly larger lung size, fast lactic acid clearance and extremely efficient slow burn metabolism. Most of these comes from genes and with practice you can improve things to some degree and get much better with it but you simply can't climb 8000m without Oxygen like Ed Viester did or do North Face under 2.5 hours like Ueli Steck or speed climb 3 major Yosemite walls in 24 hours like Dean Potter does.

All nature vs nurture debates end in one simple conclusion: It's not neither nor or either or, it's both.

>Consider this: height is a pretty straightforward characteristic, and it's known to be highly heritable (tall parents = tall children). In fact, 80% of the variance in height is known to be genetic

The genetics of human height is much more complicated than he summarises here. In short, environment has a lot to do with height, and there's regression towards the mean too, which leads to children of tall parents being smaller (but still relatively tall). Wikipedia has a good article on it (citing 60-80% heritability): https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Human_height