Page 202 - The Presentation Secrets of Steve Jobs How to Be Insanely Great in Front of Any Audience by Carmine Gallo

MAKE IT LOOK EFFORTLESS 183

That’s it. And what’s more, the people at the very top don’t work
just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work
9
much, much harder.” Although the observation Gladwell makes
in Outliers applies specifically to musicians, the vast amount of
research on the subject of peak performance shows that practice
is the common thread among all individuals who excel at a par-
ticular task. Neuroscientist and musician Daniel Levitin believes
that the magic number is ten thousand.
“The emerging picture of such studies is that ten thousand
hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery
associated with being a world-class expert—in anything . . . In
study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writ-
ers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,
and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Of
course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get
anywhere when they practice, and why some people seem to get
more out of their practice sessions than others, but no one has
yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accom-
plished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to
assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.” 10
The ten-thousand-hours theory is consistent with what we
know about how the brain learns, according to Levitin and
Gladwell. They say that learning requires consolidation in neu-
ral tissue; the more experiences we have with a particular action,
the stronger those connections become.
Now let’s do the math. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to
roughly three hours a day, or twenty hours a week, over a period
of ten years. To substantiate this theory, Gladwell tells the story
of the Beatles, who performed together in Hamburg over a long
period before they hit it big. According to Gladwell, before the
Beatles enjoyed their first success in 1964, they had performed
live together some twelve hundred times, sometimes for eight
hours at a stretch. This is an extraordinary feat, because most
groups don’t perform that often in their entire careers. The
band members became better and more confident the longer
they played together. “Incidentally,” writes Gladwell, “the time
that elapsed between their founding and their arguably greatest