Apart from the hockey players, he also gives the examples of the Beatles, the most famous rock band of all time and Bill Gates, the founder of Microsoft. The Beatles were really lucky to be invited to play in Hamburg in 1960. The club owner who invited on normally only invited bands from London, but on one trip to the UK he met an entrepreneur from Liverpool who told him that there were some really good bands in that city.
when the Beatles arrived in Hamburg, they had to work incredibly hard. They had to play for up to eight hours a night in the club, seven nights a week. As John Lennon said later, We got better and we got more confidence. We couldn't help it, with all the experience we got from playing all night long in the club By 1964, when they became really successful, the Beatles had been to Hamburg four times, and had already performed live an estimated 1,200 times far more than many bands today perform in their entire careers.
Bill Gates's huge stroke of good luck came in 1968, when the high school he was at decided to spend some money they'd been given on a computer. This computer was kept in a little room that then became the computer club. In 1968, most universities didn't have a computer club, let alone schools. From that time on Gates spent most of his time in the computer room, as he and his friends taught themselves how to use it. It was my obsession," Gates says of those early high school years. I skipped athletics. I went up there at night. We were programming at weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn't get 20 or 30 hours in.' So Gates was unbelievably lucky to have access to a computer, but of course he also put in all those hours of practice too.
Talent, Gladwell concludes, is obviously important, but there are many talented people out there. What makes just a few of them special is that they are lucky and that they put in far more hours of practice than the rest.