Which is why the 10K hour rule is absolute nonsense. It is meant to sell books by appealing to talentless individuals that make up the vast majority of the population. If you spend 10K hours playing tennis starting from childhood, you would not be a top pro. The only people who do that are those who already had talent and were successful at an early age based on that talent. That's the Outliers loophole. You can't find people without talent who spend 10K hours doing something, so therefore talent must not exist. If you can't understand this then there is just no hope for you. Outliers is simply a book to let losers feel better about themselves. That's all.<p>Bill Gates is an extremely talented individual. It took going through Math 50 at Harvard to tell him that they were actually people in the world markedly smarter than he. A lesser individual in Bill's circumstance would not have been able to do what he did. They would have learned to program and become a mediocre career software engineer somewhere, which is what I think the vast majority of this site's readers are. Sure, keep telling yourself you're just as talented as Gates. Pathetic.