Godin, or maybe Gladwell (haven't read the book), is missing the point of the "10,000 hours" theory. It is about being "good" at a subject, not being famous for it.
Tiger Woods has spent thousands of hours practicing and is one of the best in his field (and is famous for that). Miley Cyrus is (afaik) not considered among the best actors in the world - she's just famous for landing a disney role.
"Miley Cyrus is (afaik) not considered among the best actors in the world - she's just famous for landing a disney role."
I have to call you out on this point. Miley Cyrus isn't famous because she acted for Disney. There are plenty of child actors who did the same and went nowhere. Miley Cyrus is famous because she is the face of the Hannah Montana brand run by the Disney marketing machine. A brand that has net Disney revenues in the tens of millions of dollars.
You can't deny she is a talented actress, has a great voice, and is generally 'star quality'. A lot of it's just in the breeding and growing up around it all. She's probably done 10,000 hours of watching other people acting + singing while she grew up.
Disclaimer: Sure, I'm a Miley Cirus fan. Admission is first step to recovery + all that.
But then does the impressiveness rest with the Disney Marketing Machine for Hannah Montana. In part it seems like she would be replaceable (or at least - another could havew been picked) with probably no detriment to the result.
The same doesn't work for Tiger Woods or Bill Gates.
> In part it seems like she would be replaceable (or at least - another could havew been picked) with probably no detriment to the result.
Disney doesn't think so - she turned the role down and Disney put the show on hold for over a year while they tried to convince her to do it.
While there's no doubt that that show wouldn't have been nearly as popular without Disney pushing it, it doesn't follow that any cute kid would have been as successful given the Disney push. Disney is constantly pushing kids and only a few make it big.
If you're better than Disney at picking child stars, big bucks await.
Are you kidding? Disney very frequently makes kids this huge. When the kid's a singer/actress, especially so: they've done a good job of marketing her in both directions.
If you write a show entirely around one person, then yeah. You'll put the show on hold to wait for them. That doesn't mean she's particularly brilliant. Just that she's not entirely awful.
Here's the thing: talented song writing very rarely matters in terms of sales. There've been a ton of studies that look at how songs become popular. To some degree it's a matter of being in the right place at the right time.
If Miley Cyrus wasn't part of the Disney machine, she would not have sold millions of albums. She probably would not have gotten a record deal with anybody but Disney. If she did, she'd fizzle out pretty quickly. I've listened to her stuff: it's incredibly bland.
Yeah, props to her for actually releasing an album at 16 - though, again, with Billy Ray Cyrus as a father and Disney as a corporate overlord that's far less impressive than her doing it with no roots at all. But don't mistake that for songwriting talent in the larger sense. Look at the history of young songwriters who made an impact in the past, and you'll see there's a radical difference. They innovated. They made something new. Miley is just recycling old things.
As I said: it's totally fine that you like her. She seems like a sweet and nice girl, unlike, say, Katy Perry, who's worse and more calculating. But don't let your like for something elevate it above what it actually is, which in her case is pretty bland pop music.
This is exactly right, and I had written a comment ripping into Godin's post for that reason.
But then I checked Gladwell's book and he argues that 10,000 hours is the rule for "successful" people rather than the exception (that is, "successful" -> 10K, not 10K -> "successful"), and now I'm wondering if that's really true. Of course, he never really defines what he means by "successful", but by picking Bill Gates and The Beatles, he's probably got his sights set a little higher than The Doors and Miley Cyrus.
Also, quotes from at least one of the researchers who advocate the 10K theory assume that you need 10K to be a "world-class expert" in any discipline. That's a claim that probably needs to be heavily qualified to retain validity, since some of Godin's examples would seem to refute that.
Tiger Woods has spent thousands of hours practicing and is one of the best in his field (and is famous for that). Miley Cyrus is (afaik) not considered among the best actors in the world - she's just famous for landing a disney role.