In the first of a new series on this blog, I talk to the American writer David Epstein about his book “The Sports Gene: What Makes the Perfect Athlete“. “The Sports Gene” has been seen as a riposte to Malcolm Gladwell’s “Outliers”, which popularised the view that the key to success, in sport as well as in other fields of endeavour, is not native talent but assiduous practice (Gladwell repeatedly invoked the so-called “10,000 hours rule” in this connection).
Did you conceive the book as a salvo in what one might call the “talent wars”?
That’s an interesting question. I think so. There was nothing in my book proposal about these other books, like Geoff Colvin’s Talent Is Overrated or Outliers. But as I began to investigate these questions of nature vs nurture, I realised that the popular writing narrative was all on one side of the issue. And that was where the public discussion was. It didn’t make much sense for me to discuss genes if the prevailing idea was that they didn’t matter at all. So that’s how I got into assessing the “10,000 hours rule” in the first place.

Kyle