10,000 Hours: The Beatles in Hamburg

Here's something I never knew about the Beatles.

In 1960, they were recruited to play in Hamburg for "non-stop shows," playing to passing crowds and trying to lure them into the club. This meant that instead of 1 hour sets every so often in Liverpool, they were playing 7 - 8 hour sets, 7 nights a week at clubs in Hamburg.

From Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell:

"All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. ... Most bands today don't perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart."

I would quibble a bit that the Beatles only had their first burst of success in 1964 (the year they came to the US) since Beatlemania was already alive and well in Britain by that time. But I don't think that means his point is incorrect. Here Gladwell is quoting from the Beatles biography Shout!:

"They were no good onstage when they went there and they were very good when they came back. They learned only only stamina. They had to learn an enormous amount of numbers--cover versions of everything you can think of, not just rock and roll, a bit of jazz too. They weren't disciplined onstage at all before that. But when they came back, they sounded like no one else. It was the making of them."

Gladwell's book is about success, and what makes people wildly successful. A lot of things, he argues, but mostly practice and hard work.

He later acknowledges that Lennon and McCartney had a rare gift that comes along "once in a generation." But he puts practice and preparation at the top of the list. 10,000 hours of preparation to be precise.

From earlier in the book:

"The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert--in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. ...  No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery."

10,000 hours. That's a lot of time.