Hard work is incredibly important—you can’t get to or stay at the elite level without it. But once you’re there, hard work is not enough. To continue to rise, you have to work smarter, more efficiently, and more strategically. Malcolm Gladwell alludes to this concept in his book Outliers. Gladwell makes a compelling case for what he calls “The 10,000 Hour Rule”—that is, that you need ten thousand hours of practice to become world-class at anything.
