Think you meant http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_%28book%29 .. at appx 40 hours per week, that's more like 5 years.. which is same as a PhD, black-belt etc.

I'd argue business owners don't work just 40 hours a week on their business. 60 minimum in my experience, even more in those early days.

Year 1, Building the business, Year 2, Adapting the business, Year 3, Improving the business.

That's my take on it.

Righto. Fair enough. I just have a general aversion to these sorts of rules, mostly because there are around a ton of exceptions .. to the point where one wonders about it all.

You may have more expertise in this, so deferring it to your good judgment. I was delimiting my stuff to the Gladwell book which attacks " mastery ".

Four hours a day is about the maximum amount of dedicated practice possible. Three is more usual.

In my experience, though I haven't achieved it myself yet, a black belt is more like training 4 hours a week for about 10 years.

I don't think this applies to starting companies. You're probably already some sort of expert in the field you're starting up in (otherwise you've really got the deck stacked against you). Sure, there's some overhead in learning how to do all the other things, admin, hiring, selling etc., but it's not something you become an expert in.

Well, no, you're not an expert in the field of running businesses - and that's the expertise we're talking about.

Running a, say, engineering business, is a very different skill set than being an engineer that works in an engineering business. Many people are experts at the latter and totally clueless at the former.

The point I was trying to make is that I don't think you become an expert in running a business in the same way you can become an expert in programming or playing the piano. Running a business is too dynamic where the 10,000 hour skills are more static in nature.

You don't have to be an expert to have a successful business, it certainly helps though.