The 10,000-hour rule
“At Michigan, I was probably programming eight or ten hours a day,” Bill Joy went on. “By the time I was at Berkeley I was doing it day and night. I was still relatively incompetent even when I got to Berkeley. I was proficient by my second year there. That’s when I wrote programs that are still in use today, thirty years later.” He paused for a moment to do the math in his head – which form someone like Bill Joy doesn’t take very long. Michigan in 1971. Programming in earnest by sophomore year. Add in the summers, then the days and nights in his first year at Berkeley. “So, so maybe … ten thousand hours?” he said, finally. “That’s about right.”
Is the ten-thousand-hour rule a general rule of success?
We pretend that success is exclusively a matter of individual merit. But there’s nothing in any of the histories we’ve looked at so far to suggest things are that simple. Therese are stories, instead, about people who were given a special opportunity to work really hard and seized it, and who happened to come of age at a time when that extraordinary effort was rewarded by the rest of society. Their success was not just of their own making. It was a product of the world in which they grew up.
