The actual rule is badly misinterpreted. It's not 10,000 hours of practice: it's 10,000 hours of practice at the appropriate level of difficulty -> You need to be taking on tasks that are just slightly beyond what you can do now for most of this time to achieve success. I also think genetics are not nearly as big a factor as the author makes out to be: there can be plenty of barriers that make it impossible for you to do something, but most of those barriers make it impossible to put 10,000 hours of practice in as well. There is also a self-fulfilling prophecy in the works here though: 10,000 hours is inevitable if you succeed at something, but most of those who don't succeed will drop the hours (searching for fallback careers, getting jobs, etc..) they dedicate to something along the way and are quite unlikely to reach the number.