What's the point? None of them started out average. Each had enough talent to develop far faster than the average person. What no such chart shows you is all the tens of thousands of people who worked as hard, and as long, as these people, but who never got any better than these few were a year after starting. This is one of the problems with the whole practice theory. You only see the few molehill successes, and not the mountain range of failures who often worked hard and longer, but who lacked the talent.
Not that the ten thousand hours thing is at all scientific, or has any objectivity to it at all. It simply isn't. It's been discredited over and over and over, and still gets air time. Even with visual artists, you have to be extremely selective in the drawings you display to make the practice hours stand up.
Talent is real, and without it, you'll go nowhere in any discipline, even with a million hours of practice. The simple, scientific way to prove this is to look at the work habits of the failures, not merely at the work habits of the tiny few successes. Talent, like IQ, means that a person with talent learns far, far faster than one without talent. You don't really believe everyone learns at the same rate, do you? Or believe that if you work really, really hard for ten thousand hours, you'll then automatically be really, really good at whatever it is you're doing?
The truth is that people with talent display that talent immediately. They progress many times faster than those around them who lack talent, even with the same amount of work. If they actually do work hard, they almost always produce things very early on that sell, that are good, that those around them can't do after ten thousand hours, or a hundred thousand hours.
Picking one drawing someone did at twenty, and then one drawing done a few years later, and then one drawing done ten years after that not only proves nothing, it's pointless.
The same is true with writing. It's easy to find writer after writer after writer who has put in ten thousand hours, or far more, but who still can't write as well as another writer who sits down and writes his first piece with no practice at all. I know a lot of very stubborn writers who have been writing for longer than I have, some for forty years now, and they still can't write well. They put in time every day, some have written more novels than Stephen King, and almost as many short stories as Ray Bradbury. They taken classes, ve gone to college, read the books, read the articles, and write their asses off, and still, after almost forty years, can't write any better than they did when they first started.
Whether it's baseball, math, visual arts, writing, or carpentry, peole are not equal. We all have our own inpenatrable ceiling, and even if it could be shown that it takes each of us ten thousand hours to reach that ceiling, which it can't, all our ceilings would still be different heights. Let ten people put in ten thousand hours at the same thing, and some will still be bad, some will be good, and one may be great.
