I think the “10,000 hours of practice” meme (I won’t dignify it by calling it a theory) caught fire because it has a self-help flavor and plays into a lot of narratives we use to motivate ourselves. It makes hard goals seem closer in reach (after all, you just need to get off the couch and put in the hours), and it reinforces our innate feeling that success is deserved (so we can safely look up to those people that are distinguished in some endeavor).

I also find it odd that Gladwell presented this idea in a book titled “Outliers”, because it’s the outliers — with their perfect match of genetic gifts and practice — that seem to quickly disprove the idea. (Not to mention the fact that the presence of 10,000 hours of practice certainly shouldn’t make us assume the absence of profound innate talent, which is what Gladwell appears to do.) A brilliant and hard-working mathematical professor once told me, with no hesitation, that true, world-changing mathematical prodigies are born and not made — a fact that seemed blindingly obvious to him.