10,000 hours

Pete Best, George Harrison, John Lennon, Paul McCartney,

Stu Sutcliffe

Photo by Astrid Kirchherr

In his engaging book, Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell refers to the "10,000 hour rule"--the number of hours of practice that neurologist Daniel Levitan suggests are required to "achieve the level of mastery associated with a world class expert...in anything."

In 1960, still a struggling rock and roll band, the Beatles were invited to play in Hamburg, Germany. Gladwell writes:

And what was so special about Hamburg? It wasn't that it paid so well. It didn't. Or that the acoustics were fantastic. They weren't. Or that the audiences were savvy and appreciative. They were anything but. It was the sheer amount of time the band was forced to play.

Here is John Lennon, in an interview after the Beatles disbanded, talking about the band's performances at the Hamburg strip club called the Indra:

"We got better and got more confidence. We couldn't help it with all the experience playing all night long. it was handy them being foreign. We had to try even harder, put our heart and soul into it, to get ourselves over.

In Liverpool, we'd only ever done one-hour sessions, and we just used to do our best numbers, the same ones, at every one. In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing."

--Outliers, page 49