Can Israel Folau Beat the 10k Rule?

Malcolm Gladwell, author of the international bestseller The Tipping Point (2000), pored through reams of research data compiled by economists, psychologists and social scientists to construct a simple formula for becoming a genius in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success. Gladwell's own genius lies in teasing out previously unsuspected patterns and relationships from jumbles of arcane academic data, and weaving them into simple narratives accessible to the lay audience. His insights into the makings of a genius can be summarised as follows:

• True mastery in any complicated field requires 10,000 hours of conscious practice


• Geniuses such as Bill Gates, Bill Joy and the Beatles received their apprenticeships through a combination of good fortune and conscious effort


• The popular myth of a genius as a solitary figure fighting alone against the prevailing currents of society is just that, a myth. Most geniuses receive family support and community patronage during their formative years

A couple of weeks back, at the height of the media frenzy sparked by National Rugby League (NRL) superstar Israel Folau's six-million dollars defect to the rival Australian Football League (AFL), Channel 9's sports program Wide World of Sports re-played Folau's interview from a year back.

Many NRL fans regard Folau, a towering, powerfully-built young centre-winger whose gravity-defying jumps and electrifying bursts near the try line captured the imagination of NRL fans and excited the predatory instincts of AFL poachers, as a natural talent and born athlete. In the interview, Folau bristled at this notion, reminiscing about getting up at 5am in the mornings as a kid and being driven to trainings by his dad when most kids his age would have been sleeping like angels.

If Folau is not a natural talent, then I suppose no one is.

Another famous 'natural' talent, at least in the minds of sports fans, was Michael Jordan, who could perhaps teach even Folau a thing or two about gravity-defying jumps. However, many sports fans are unaware that Jordan could not even get picked for his high school basketball team. What Jordan did after being snubbed thus was practise, practise and practise until he had presumably clocked over 10,000 hours of conscious practice.

The operative word here is 'conscious'. Practice must be informed by a conscious, deliberate effort to improve, which more often than not entails seeking critical appraisals from mentors, coaches and peers, creating a positive feedback loop. This perhaps explains why many clubhouse chess players get stuck in a rut despite many years of weekend skirmishes, or most aspiring footy players fall by the wayside,  never graduating from park footy.

According to research, this 10k hours rule is quite general and applies across diverse non-trivial human pursuits such as music, mathematics, computer programming and writing.

Of British-Jamaican heritage, Gladwell, who currently writes for The New Yorker, is on the record saying that he completed his 10k writing apprenticeship working as a journalist, in which role he would have received feedback from experienced copy editors on his craft. He closes Outliers with his own chequered family history to buttress his thesis that family and the wider community play a vital role in the development and emergence of a genius.

Given that any non-trivial skills set requires 10k hours of practice to master, University of Sydney's David Anderson, a skills acquisition specialist who was quoted in a Sydney Morning Herald article on June 5-6, cast serious doubts on the ability of Folau to transfer his NRL skills to AFL, which is governed by a completely different set of rules and patterns of play.

Athletes with brute physical strength and ability to run short distances at explosive pace tend to thrive in NRL. AFL is more of an endurance sports requiring kicking skills absent in NRL and the temperament of a long distance runner. Then, there is that undefinable knack for reading the game, which separates elite players from merely good ones.

"They (NRL players) can run fast and they're big and strong, they can pass and catch and kick, but what they can't do is read the patterns of play and that puts them at a massive disadvantage," Anderson was quoted as saying. The article also pointed out the obvious: Folau and his fellow AFL convert Carmichael Hunt will simply not have enough time to log 10k hours of practice, which roughly takes around 10 years in real life, before the show begins.

Will Folau defy the 10k rule and prove his doubters wrong to have a productive AFL career, or will he, too, join the rank of other code-switching NRL stars such as Wendell Sailor, Lote Tuqiri and Timana Tahu, all of whom came back to NRL after disappointing stints at another rival footy code?  Only time will tell.