'10000 hours to mastery' is incoherent bullshit. 10000 hours to mastery of programming? to mastery of programming numerical methods? to mastery of programming gauss-seidel elimination? to mastery of programming sparse gauss-seidel elimination on vector supercomputers? to mastery of programming sparse gauss-seidel elimination on vector supercomputers for fluid mechanics? if your first 10000 hours were in c++, do you need another 10000 hours to get to mastery of programming sparse gauss-seidel elimination on vector supercomputers for fluid mechanics in fortran? at most one of these can be correct for a given level of mastery and for a given person (and that's not even getting into variations between people)

like most things gladwell made up, it sounds good at first but falls apart the moment you think about it for a second