Want to be good at something? Really, really good? Talent doesn't matter. What matters is practice, 10,000 hours of it to be precise. That's 20 hours a week, or about 3 hours a day, for 10 years. Do that, and chances are you will be very, very good at what you do.

Many of us see such accomplished people and attribute their skill and resulting success to innate talent, but in his book Outliers: The Story of success, Malcolm Gladwell proposes that the outrageous success some individuals achieve is mainly the result of two things. Primarily, it is the result of hard work. Successful people don't just work harder, they work much, much harder. To a lessor extent, and depending on the industry, timing can also have a huge influence.

In his book, Gladwell defines what he calls the "10,000" hour rule, and address the subject of innate ability. We like to think some people are just born with a unique gift or talent that will enable them to rise to the top, seemingly without any effort. When Gladwell digs into the success of some of these people, he learns innate ability plays a much smaller role than preparation.

"The idea that excellence at performing a complex task requires a critical minimum level of practice surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours."

So the question then becomes: What made these people different, in that they had the motivation and persistence to keep going to achieve that level of expertise? Why do some people burn out while others keep going? Most of us become bored far before we get close to that mythical 10,000 hours. Yet some others keep pushing forward. Why?

I see the pattern repeated time and again i my own life. I have had many interests, and most of them I stuck with until I reached a certain level of competence, and then I became bored, or disillusioned with the work I would have to do to keep getting better, and I quit.

Perhaps then the secret to success is not innate talent or ability, or even hard work, but rather the perseverance and persistence to keep doing the work until you achieve mastery. How do we keep ourselves interested in the seemingly endless effort and striving for improvement? Maybe the answer to that question is the secret of success. Maybe that persistence is the innate ability one needs to have to reach the highest levels of competence?