I agree with the first half of your comment - the "deliberate" in "deliberate practice" is definitely necessary to understand what the 10,000 hour rule means.
However, I think you take it too far at the end. To say that the nature half of nurture+nature is unnecessary goes against a significant amount of research. In sports, this becomes pretty clear. What are the odds that short people never work hard enough to become good swimmers, for example? It seems drastically more likely that nature has an enormous impact. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is necessary, but by no means sufficient, for success at most sports.
It is less obvious in other domains, but there is still research to the effect that some people simply aren't wired for certain things, just like short people are can't swim at world-class levels. In HN's favorite domain, programming, there is reason to believe that some people simply can't think in the right way. Here's a reasonable article on the subject: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/is-it-....
PG's lazy rule sounds good, but only in the absence of opposing evidence. It behaves like Occam's razor - it leads in the right direction, but don't take it for truth.
However, I think you take it too far at the end. To say that the nature half of nurture+nature is unnecessary goes against a significant amount of research. In sports, this becomes pretty clear. What are the odds that short people never work hard enough to become good swimmers, for example? It seems drastically more likely that nature has an enormous impact. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is necessary, but by no means sufficient, for success at most sports.
It is less obvious in other domains, but there is still research to the effect that some people simply aren't wired for certain things, just like short people are can't swim at world-class levels. In HN's favorite domain, programming, there is reason to believe that some people simply can't think in the right way. Here's a reasonable article on the subject: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/is-it-....
PG's lazy rule sounds good, but only in the absence of opposing evidence. It behaves like Occam's razor - it leads in the right direction, but don't take it for truth.