This was very interesting, not sure where I found this.

LEADERSHIP: LINCOLN AND THE 10,000-HOUR RULE
The Beatles did it before they became a phenomenon. Bill Gates did it before there was a Microsoft. And Abraham Lincoln did it before becoming President. Malcolm Gladwell, author of Outliers, maintains that anyone who expects to become world-class at anything had better plan on doing it.

And what is It?

It is getting thousands of hours of practice at whatever you plan to do. In the case of the Beatles, they played night after night in Hamburg, Germany’s strip clubs. Here’s how John Lennon remembered the experience: “We got better and got more confidence. We couldn’t help it with all the experience playing all night long….In Hamburg, we had to play for eight hours, so we really had to find a new way of playing.” When they returned, they had become a seasoned, musically disciplined band with their own sound.

Bill Gates started getting his practice-time in when he was in the eighth grade. His high school purchased a teletype machine that was linked to a mainframe computer in Seattle. Bill Gates and his buddy Paul Allen used that system to the max, then found a way to get computer time at a software company where they spent literally thousands of hours. Here’s Bill Gates on that topic: “It was my obsession. I skipped athletics. I went up there at night. We were programming on weekends. It would be a rare week that we wouldn’t get twenty or thirty hours in.”

And Lincoln? Historian Gerald J. Prokopowicz writes: “Over the 25 years that he practiced law, Lincoln (and his partners) handled an average of more than two-hundred cases a year, an awesome workload.”

Do the math. Two-hundred cases for twenty-five years come to 5000 cases. (Actually there were more than 5000 cases.) Let’s say Lincoln spent just two hours on each case. (On some he certainly spent less time, on others far more.) That easily comes to the magic number 10,000 hours that Gladwell has written about.

Lincoln, like everybody who has ever made a lasting mark in any field, got to be good at what he did by putting in thousands of hours of practice.

(For a beautifully written account of this phenomenon, see Malcolm Gladwell, OUTLIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS, NY: Little, Brown, & Co. Chapter Two)