It doesn't confirm that at all. The original study was that practice counted for much more in fields where the rules and values were stable (like musical instruments or games) and much less where the basic ground rules couldn't even be described (like business or war).
That part makes a lot of sense: practice and correcting errors only matters when you will be doing something basically the same next time and you have a fixed target of what "good" looks like to shoot for. It also explains a big question I had with the original study: what constitutes a "field"? Does 10,000 hours get me mastery of "software software", or "frontend software engineering", or "web-based frontend software engineering", or "web-based frontend software engineering using Angular.js"?
I think a better explanation is that practice is indeed the key to mastery - of fixed, seldom-changing skills where the goalposts are known and widely agreed upon. But most "fields" rely on combinations of many individual skills, along with a good number of exogenous factors. I may be a master at Chrome Javascript & rendering performance because I've spent a lot of team with the Chrome team understanding exactly how the rendering engine works. This makes me great at building a weekend-long demo or acing an interview, but is only a small component of being an effective frontend engineer. And then when I scale that up from "being an effective frontend engineer" to "founding a successful business", there's also all sorts of luck involved, like who I meet, what industry I target, how popular my initial customers are, what the rest of the technology industry does, etc.
That part makes a lot of sense: practice and correcting errors only matters when you will be doing something basically the same next time and you have a fixed target of what "good" looks like to shoot for. It also explains a big question I had with the original study: what constitutes a "field"? Does 10,000 hours get me mastery of "software software", or "frontend software engineering", or "web-based frontend software engineering", or "web-based frontend software engineering using Angular.js"?
I think a better explanation is that practice is indeed the key to mastery - of fixed, seldom-changing skills where the goalposts are known and widely agreed upon. But most "fields" rely on combinations of many individual skills, along with a good number of exogenous factors. I may be a master at Chrome Javascript & rendering performance because I've spent a lot of team with the Chrome team understanding exactly how the rendering engine works. This makes me great at building a weekend-long demo or acing an interview, but is only a small component of being an effective frontend engineer. And then when I scale that up from "being an effective frontend engineer" to "founding a successful business", there's also all sorts of luck involved, like who I meet, what industry I target, how popular my initial customers are, what the rest of the technology industry does, etc.