Well, of course if you put in ten thousand hours picking your nose your not gonna get very good at the violin. Again, the point to all this is that anything is acheivable, but to become an expert at something, you need to put in roughly 10K hours (Im sure you'd be pretty good at hour 9467 though). Everyone who is at the top of their game (in the sports world at least) has put in that time. Its not some ridiculous number someone just came up with out of thin air to piss people off and sell books...it's based on eveidence. Obviously, you have to take it with a grain of salt, but to call it bullshit flat out isn't entirely fair. The theory is open to variations too. For instance, they found that children who spent 10k hours playing serious competition from a young age, say 6 in only one sport had significantly less chance (far less) to make it to the professional levels as opposed to children who played many different sportsup until the age of 15. Even more, pro athletes were found to have played a substantial amount of pick-up/informal sports before the age of 15 than those who specialized at an early age. Also, kids who specialized early were found to burn out more easily and suffer from injury. Thus is the danger of uninformed parents getting a hold of the "rule" - they think that tossing their kid into intense hockey camps at the age of 6 is good for their kid, but the evidence proves otherwise.