Delighted as I was to be greeted Friday morning by David Brooks’sbook reviewish column headlined Genius: The Modern View, and as much as Iadmire Mr. Brooks, I was surprised to discover that he wasn’t writingsatirically when he described the path to genius. According to the two newbooks he was discussing, The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle and Talent isOverrated by Geoff Colvin, you can develop your children into geniuses. All ittakes is 10,000 hours of focused practice at an early age, plus ia dash offamily tragedy and toss in some neighborhood inspiration. Get the ingredientsright and, ta—dah! Instant Mozart.

I must beg to disagree. I was privileged to have grown upalongside thousands of “geniuses” of the 10,000 hour class. I went to theInterlochen summer camp for the arts as a youth (Slogan — Home of the GiftedYouth of America — weren’t we special!) and two of my children went to the yearround arts academy there. By now almost a hundred thousand gifted youth fromall over the world have gone through Interlochen, and they provide some 10% ofthe personnel of all the leading American orchestras. Interlochen alumni areprominent in all fields, including Larry Page founder of Google, the composerGeorge Crumb, opera stars Lorraine Hunt Lieberson and Jessye Norman. Many ofthese young people were the bright and often brilliant ones who put in their10,000 hours. But only a very, very few of them have a certain level of giftthat is completely beyond anything 10,000 or even a million hours of focusedwork can give you. These are the geniuses. And their gift came from inside, notfrom a parent dying at 12. Not from the good fortune of having a novelistliving down the street.

Where did this 10,000 hour belief come from, this notion that alarge numbers of hours of focused work will make little Sally over here into agenius? Brooks says Mozart was a good musician at an early age but would notstand out among today’s child performers. I don’t think you could find aserious musician who would agree. Mozart was not only one of the most giftedpianists and violinists of his era, but his compositions by the age of ten weremasterful. By the time he wrote his ninth opera, the delightful and stillfrequently performed Finta Giardiniera, he was just eighteen.

How did this 10,000 hour concept evolve from being a requirementfor competence into a false promise for the achievement of genius? You cantrace some of this to Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, from which too many peopletake away that Bill Gates became a programming genius because he had theopportunity to get his 10,000 hours on a computer early on in his life. ButGladwell didn’t discover this 10,000 hour rule, he just popularized it,acknowledging the source as Daniel Levitan, who wrote, This is Your Brain onMusic. But Levitan didn’t claim that 10,000 of focused work would make anyone agenius either. All he says is that it will make you a virtuoso. Are virtuososthe same as genius? I gotta tell you, after having spent  my own 10,000 hours and more atInterlochen, virtuosos are a dime a dozen.

Where did Levitan get the 10,000 hour genius concept from? Thatwould be K. Anders Ericsson, who did the actual pioneering work. Ericsson isquoted, in an essay about him on his home university website, Florida State,“How, then, does Ericsson account for standouts such as Mozart, Michael Jordanand Tiger Woods? Surely their prowess is evidence that they are beneficiariesof random gifts of greatness. Not so, says Ericsson, whose landmark findingsattribute the expertise of such phenoms not to their inherent talents but to,in a word, practice.”

There you have it, theall-that-makes-Mozart-special-is-10,000-hours meme started here, with Ericssonanswering his own rhetorical question, and sweeping Mozart into the same hopperas two high-performing athletes. I could see how Ericsson might be able to saythat his research actually included Michael Jordan and Tiger Woods. But unlessEricsson is a couple of hundred years older than his bio indicates, he can’thave much of a clue about how Mozart became a genius.

I believe that thinking is all about making distinctions. When wefail to make distinctions, or even worse, sweep ideas that ought to be keptdistinct into one larger idea that now automatically loses its validity, thenwe really aren’t helping move things forward. No Mr. Ericsson, I respect Mr.Woods for his hard work and great achievement. But I know Herr Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart after a fashion, and I can tell you that Tiger Woods, virtuoso that he is,is no Mozart.

So unless little Louie was born a genius, all the work in theworld is not going to make him one.