With Labor Day next week, the New Yorker’s Malcolm Gladwell writes about sports, though it may apply far beyond sports, beginning with an American Scientist paper from Herbert Simon and William Chase:

There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade’s intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions…

From there …

In the years that followed, an entire field within psychology grew up devoted to elaborating on Simon and Chase’s observation—and researchers, time and again, reached the same conclusion: it takes a lot of practice to be good at complex tasks. After Simon and Chase’s paper, for example, the psychologist John Hayes looked at seventy-six famous classical composers and found that, in almost every case, those composers did not create their greatest work until they had been composing for at least ten years. (The sole exceptions: Shostakovich and Paganini, who took nine years, and Erik Satie, who took eight.)

This is the scholarly tradition I was referring to in my book Outliers, when I wrote about the “ten-thousand-hour rule.” No one succeeds at a high level without innate talent, I wrote: “achievement is talent plus preparation.” But the ten-thousand-hour research reminds us that “the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.” In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room, straight out of a surgical rotation, and does world-class neurosurgery. And second—and more crucially for the theme of Outliers—the amount of practice necessary for exceptional performance is so extensive that people who end up on top need help. They invariably have access to lucky breaks or privileges or conditions that make all those years of practice possible. As examples, I focussed on the countless hours the Beatles spent playing strip clubs in Hamburg and the privileged, early access Bill Gates and Bill Joy got to computers in the nineteen-seventies. “He has talent by the truckload,” I wrote of Joy. “But that’s not the only consideration. It never is.” …

A more thoughtful response comes from David Epstein in his fascinating new book The Sports Gene. Epstein’s key point is that the ten-thousand-hour idea must be understood as an average. For example, both he and I discuss the same study by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson that looked at students studying violin at the elite Music Academy of West Berlin. I was interested in the general finding, which was that the best violinists, on average and over time, practiced much more than the good ones. In other words, within a group of talented people, what separated the best from the rest was how long and how intently they worked. Epstein points out, however, that there is a fair amount of variation behind that number—suggesting that some violinists may use their practice time so efficiently that they reach a high degree of excellence more quickly. It’s an important point. There are seventy-three great composers who took at least ten years to flourish. But there is much to be learned as well from Shostakovich, Paganini, and Satie.

Epstein makes two other arguments that are worth mentioning. The first is about chess. He cites a study by Guillermo Campitelli and Fernand Gobet of a hundred and four competitive chess players. Epstein says that they found that the average time it took to reach “master” status was eleven thousand hours—but that one player reached that level in just three thousand hours. This is variation on an extreme scale. Does that mean that in chess “naturals” really do exist? I’m not so sure. Epstein is talking about chess masters—the lowest of the four categories of recognized chess experts. (It’s Division II chess.) Grandmasters—the highest level—are a different story. Robert Howard, of the University of New South Wales, recently published a paper in which he surveyed a group of eight grandmasters and found that the group hit their highest ranking after fourteen thousand hours of practice. Even among prodigies who reached grandmaster level before the age of sixteen, we see the same pattern. Almost all of that group reached grandmaster level at fourteen or fifteen, and most started playing when they were four or five. The famous Polgár sisters (two of whom reached grandmaster status) put in somewhere north of fifty thousand hours of practice to reach the top. …

The point of Simon and Chase’s paper years ago was that cognitively complex activities take many years to master because they require that a very long list of situations and possibilities and scenarios be experienced and processed. There’s a reason the Beatles didn’t give us “The White Album” when they were teen-agers. And if the surgeon who wants to fuse your spinal cord did some newfangled online accelerated residency, you should probably tell him no. … What Simon and Chase wrote forty years ago remains true today. In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals.

If you work 40 hours a week, you work about 2,000 hours per year, depending on how much time off you take for illness or vacation or other reasons. The 10,000-hour rule would suggest that it takes people five years — whether that’s an average or a minimum depends on whom you ask — to become good at what they do. But that number is low because not all of a 40-hour week is taken up by tasks central to your work. (Time taken in, for instance, office meetings, cleaning your work space and deconstructing the previous Badger or Packer game would subtract from that 40 hours of weekly productive work.) The opposite would be the case for someone whose work requires more than 40 hours a week. ( have worked at a 40-hour-a-week job exactly 7½ months out of 25 years in the full-time work world.)

After you read that, read this from the Los Angeles Times:

Seven out of 10 workers have “checked out” at work or are “actively disengaged,” according to a recent Gallup survey.

In its ongoing survey of the American workplace, Gallup found that only 30 percent of workers are “were engaged, or involved in, enthusiastic about, and committed to their workplace.” Although that equals the high in engagement since Gallup began studying the issue in 2000, it is overshadowed by the number of workers who aren’t committed to a performing at a high level — which Gallup says costs companies money. …

The survey classifies three types of employees among the 100 million people in America who hold full-time jobs. The first is actively engaged, which represents about 30 million workers. The second type of worker is “not engaged,” which accounts for 50 million. These employees are going through the motions at work.

The third type, labeled “actively disengaged,” hates going to work. These workers — about 20 million — undermine their companies with their attitude, according to the report. …

Gallup estimates that workers who are actively disengaged cost the U.S. as much as $550 billion in economic activity yearly. The level of employee engagement over the past decade has been largely stagnant, according to researchers.

The report found that different age groups and those with higher education levels reported more discontent with their workplace. Millennials and baby boomers, for instance, are more likely to be “actively disengaged” than other age groups. Employees with college degrees are also more likely to be running on auto pilot at work.

Which makes David McElroy ask:

For most of human history, the notion of job satisfaction would have seemed like a puzzling concept. Life was short and difficult. Just finding a way to survive and produce a family was a big deal. You grew your own food or hunted what you ate. The idea of a job — doing work for someone else in exchange for pay — would have seemed alien.

Today, though, survival is a given. Some of us might struggle financially — especially in an economic downturn such as this one — but we’re not worrying about starving to death. We have such a standard of living in this country that even someone who’s poor today would have been wealthy by historical standards. Our middle class families have things beyond comprehension to those in most of human history.

We’ve created a complicated economy that’s capable of delivering all this, and it’s a marvel. But there’s a dark side — and I’m wondering whether it has to be this way or if it’s an indication that most people are settling for being cogs in machines instead of making positive choices about what to do with their lives. …

I’ll tell you right up front that I don’t have a real answer to this, but it’s something I’ve thought about a lot for my own life. I know some people who don’t mind investing most of their waking hours in jobs that bring them no rewards other than pay, simply so they can watch television at night and then “party” on the weekends. There are many variations of that outlook, but none of them appeal to me.

I have a need to love what I’m doing and to feel that what I’m doing matters. I think most of us do, even if some people aren’t always conscious of it. I wonder if it was easier to feel that what you were doing mattered when you were directly producing your own food and building your own shelter, even if the standard of living was horrible. Can it feel as though your life matters if you’re sitting in an office processing paperwork for a company that you don’t care about, working for a boss who treats you in ways that dehumanize you? I doubt it. …

I think most people today are still buying into ideas about work that were a reflection of the Industrial Age models that dominated most of the 20th century. We were taught — by schools, parents and more — that the smart thing was to get a college degree and get a job with some big company, which would then take care of us for life. That model has been changing for decades now — as companies have become willing to dump workers at the drop of a hat — but workers have found it difficult to know what to replace that way of thinking with. …

I’ve been self-employed for most of my adult life. It’s sometimes been difficult. I regret some of the choices I’ve made, especially staying in politics as long as I did. But I don’t regret taking the chance of working for myself and avoiding the grind that most people endure. There have been tradeoffs — some of them pretty severe at times — but when I look back on it, I can’t say that I would have been willing to spend the last 20 years in an office obeying a boss and doing something I didn’t care about — in exchange for having a nice suburban house and cushy retirement. Trading away most of life just to have an elusive form of “security” at the end of life seems ridiculous to me.

We are supposed to work — that is, do something meaningful in the world. “Work” is meaningful by its very definition. “Jobs” may be meaningful, but apparently seven of 10 Americans put in as little work as they can at work.

Our ancestors didn’t think about retirement; they were too busy surviving to the next day. As Tim Nerenz once put it, Americans are “the perfected DNA strand of rebelliousness. Each of us is the descendant of the brother who left the farm in the old country when his mom and dad and wimpy brother told him not to; the sister who ran away rather than marry the guy her parents had arranged for her; the freethinker who decided his fate would be his own, not decided by a distant power he could not name.” Put another way, strivers, someone looking to get more for doing more.

More on this subject on, of course, Labor Day.