Another casualty in my continued use of my audible.com account, “Outliers”, was highly insightful to yours truly and applicable to any student of the Martial Arts. An outlier, as defined by Wikipedia:
In statistics, an outlier[1] is an observation that is numerically distant from the rest of the data. Grubbs (Grubbs, F. E.: 1969, Procedures for detecting outlying observations in samples. Technometrics 11, 1–21. ) defined an outlier as:
An outlying observation, or outlier, is one that appears to deviate markedly from other members of the sample in which it occurs
Who is an outlier? Someone with exceptional and outstanding differences from the crowd, to put it simply, is an outlier. In this thought-provoking work, Gladwell analyzes some great successes – Bill Gates, Mozart, champion Canadian hockey players etc.
He discusses the 10,000 hour effect – to put simply, that any outlier and solid achiever never truly gets their best results until after 10,000 hours of practice or training in any study. Try that on for size – it is a daunting number – with obsessive practice (20 hours a week)you can achieve that level in 10 years. One 2 hour class 2x a month will take you 208 years.
The good news in this work though is that the seemingly unreal people are just like you – average people, they simply worked harder than everyone else did. Tiger Woods is a great golfer, but played constantly since he was 3 years old! As Jon Gruden says “it doesn’t take talent, it takes effort”.
So, my question to you is this: Will YOU be the one who puts in the extra work to be the best YOU can be?
