Excerpt from: New Yorker Magazine 2001/12/17/ Examined Life, Written by Malcolm Gladwell Some years ago, a group headed by the British psychologist John Sloboda conducted a study of musical talent. The group looked at two hundred and fifty-six young musicians, between the ages of ten and sixteen, drawn from élite music academies and public-school music programs alike. They interviewed all the students and their parents and recorded how each student did in England’s national music-examination system, which, the researchers felt, gave them a relatively objective measure of musical ability. “What we found was that the best predictor of where you were on that scale was the number of hours practiced,” Sloboda says. This is, if you think about it, a little hard to believe. We conceive musical ability to be a “talent”—people have an aptitude for music—and so it would make sense that some number of students could excel at the music exam without practicing very much. Yet Sloboda couldn’t find any. The kids who scored the best on the test were, on average, practicing eight hundred per cent more than the kids at the bottom. “People have this idea that there are those who learn better than others, can get further on less effort,” Sloboda says. “On average, our data refuted that. Whether you’re a dropout or at the best school, where you end up can be predicted by how much you practice.” Sloboda found another striking similarity among the “musical” children. They all had parents who were unusually invested in their musical education. It wasn’t necessarily the case that the parents were themselves musicians or musically inclined. It was simply that they wanted their children to be that way. “The parents of the high achievers did things that most parents just don’t do,” he said. “They didn’t simply drop their child at the door of the teacher. They went into the practice room. They took notes on what the teacher said, and when they got home they would say, Remember when your teacher said do this and that. There was a huge amount of time and motivational investment by the parents.” Does this mean that there is no such thing as musical talent? Of course not. Most of those hardworking children with pushy parents aren’t going to turn out to be Itzhak Perlmans; some will be second violinists in their community orchestra. The point is that when it comes to a relatively well-defined and structured task—like playing an instrument or taking an exam—how hard you work and how supportive your parents are have a lot more to do with success than we ordinarily imagine. Ability cannot be separated from effort. … Stanley Kaplan writes: “It requires practice, practice, practice. Repetition breeds familiarity. Familiarity breeds confidence.” In this, as in so many things, the grind was the natural.