It seems worth noting that Anders Ericcson's handbook on expertise has chapters studying business expertise (though I get the feeling C level management gurus aren't reading it; there's an interesting chapter on entrepreneurs though!).

https://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handb...

"The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance" - http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

Here are some excerpts:

- http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...

- http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.mem.exp.htm...

One logical flaw in their argument, one I've seen frequently made by professors of psychology who focus on individual differences, is that they don't know whether or not the difference among participants in the Study of Exceptional Talent (a group of young people who score high on the SAT at a young age, a group that includes an immediate relative of mine) is from what they call "talent" or from practice. Nothing about the way the Study of Exceptional Talent gathers its rather limited data about study participants allow distinguishing one possibility from the other. There is no basis from the data-gathering done in that study to conclude that there is ANY difference between the "99.1 percentile" and the "99.9 percentile," especially given the error bands around SAT scores.

One of the really amazing things about the export performance literature by Ericsson, Charness, and others

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

is that it comes out of a tradition in psychology--individual differences psychology--that very readily defaults to genetic explanations and very readily ignores possible environmental explanations of the same individual differences. Ericsson's experimental results in training digit span (which is part of the item content of same IQ test batteries) were completely surprising when published in peer-reviewed journals--no one ever imagined that digit span

http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~kantor/t/MLIS/551/public_dump/m...

was such a malleable ability.

But digit span, which is malleable (trainable), is closely related to the "working memory capacity" that the authors are implicitly claiming is not malleable. That is not at all clear, and much experimental work suggests that working memory capacity is more malleable than the authors acknowledge in this opinion piece.

Also on-point here is pg's comment from his essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known"

http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

"I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."

I can recommend reading "The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance

I upvoted your comment to agree with your recommendation of the definitive book on the subject.

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

To answer the question you pose above about other domains, I have not seen language learning reported in the expert performance literature, but I was a language learner (native speaker of English who was studying Chinese) who perhaps arguably did reach expert level in my acquired language (I passed testing to be a contract Chinese-English interpreter for the United States federal government). It took perhaps 10,000 learning contact hours (many of those hours during a three-year stay overseas after completing my undergraduate degree in Chinese) to reach that level of language proficiency, which was confirmed by other tests. I also had excellent instruction in Chinese with some of the best materials then avaiable, and a lot of supportive help from linguistics that I studied at the time. Some of my advice on language learning

http://learninfreedom.org/languagebooks.html

would probably help other learners get the most benefit per hour in their language learning situations that they can.

What I find most interesting about K. Anders Ericsson's research on expert performance is the suggestion that some domains have few or no experts, when experts are defined as persons with statistically reliably superior performance in the domain. The example I recall from one of his research papers is choosing common stocks in which to invest for sustained high returns. Some people beat the market for a while, but most stick-pickers do very little better than simply investing in a diverse basket of stocks chosen without conscious thought.

Here's one of the original papers that put forth the theory of deliberate practice and the 10,000 hour rule (though in the paper it is given as a 10-year rule):

http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance also covers a wide range of research on performance and expertise in various areas http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

The claim originally came from the Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...).

If you'd like to skip all the pundits (Gladwell included) and go straight to source of all this discussion about developing expertise, look no further than this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

It's a compilation of academic papers and was the basis for Gladwell's book. It is not lightweight entertainment reading, but it's the real deal.