In Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell eloquently articulates the key to success is simply a matter of putting in the hours. 10,000 hours to be specific. That’s 250, 40-hour work weeks, nearly five years of practicing a specific task over and over again. It’s estimated The Beatles performed over one thousand shows before they hit it big in ’64. In the late sixties, Bill Gates joined a computer club with access to a time-share computer. Within a seven month period in ’71, Bill and friends devoured over 1,500 hours. That’s eight hours a day, seven days a week. Bill put in his 10,000 hours before he graduated high school. If you polled the best screenwriters in the biz, you’d find similar numbers. [Read more…]