The 10,000 Hour Rule

February 15, 2010 by Jerry

outliers

In the previous blog, you read about how the skill of Marques Colston, the New Orleans Saints leading wide receiver, resonates with the listening aspect of responding to questions in Q and A sessions. Now let’s look at another factor that contributed to the Saints’ Super Bowl victory: preparation.

A Wall Street Journal article about the run-up to the big event reported that the New Orleans Saints and their opponents, the Indianapolis Colts, combined, spent 514,000 hours of labor per team. The article, based on a study prepared for Journal by the Boston Consulting Group, explained:

With 53 players per team divided into three distinct units—each with their own intricate
playbooks—a professional football team is a complex organism.

Add a dozen coaches who study film late into the night, hundreds of grueling practice sessions,
an annual college draft and the number of hours the players spend in the gym throughout the
year, and the two teams that make it to the Super Bowl each season put in more hours of work
than any team in any other sport…That’s about eight times the effort it took to conceptualize,
build and market Apple’s iPod, according to BCG, and enough time to build 25 America’s Cup
yachts. If both Super Bowl teams dedicated themselves to construction rather than football,
their members could have built the Empire State Building in seven seasons.

The article went on to note that Tom Benson, the 83-year-old Saints owner, works as hard as his players and coaches.

During his long days, he says he meets frequently with [his] executives—but that the grind
doesn’t seem to get to him.

“I can’t hardly wait to get to the office,” he says.

Malcolm Gladwell, the author of the bestselling Tipping Point and Blink, has a new bestseller with Outliers: The Story of Success, in which he describes other examples of preparation of epic proportions. In a chapter called “The 10,000 Hour Rule,” Mr. Gladwell describes the early days of the careers of Bill Gates and The Beatles, and how they developed their talents with marathon hours of practice.

This is not to say that you should spend five- or six-digit hours of practice for your important presentation, but it is to urge you not to relegate your preparation to cramming the night before—a practice all-too-common in business today. Remember the results of cramming in school? In educational circles cramming is known as massed learning; its opposite is distributed or spaced learning, a subject discussed in detail here and here. Start your preparation well in advance of your D-Day, and practice often.

You may not be preparing for the Super Bowl, but the success of your business proposal depends on your presentation.

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