From a Washington Post review by Tom Vanderbilt of the book by Adam Gopnik titled “The Real Work: On the Mystery of Mastery”:

We know mastery, we like to think, when we see it in action: the kinetic poetry of Lionel Messi dancing through defenses; Whitney Houston crushing the notoriously difficult national anthem at the Super Bowl. Explaining mastery, however, is more elusive. We tend to romanticize it (reaching for phrases like “God-given talent”) or instrumentalize it (positing it as the product of those 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice” espoused by sociologist K. Anders Ericsson and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in “Outliers”).