"A fundamental question thus becomes why some people are willing to undertake repeated and focused practice and others aren’t. It is not sufficient merely to log 10,000 hours “practicing” a complex task; one must sustain an intensity that seems beyond the reach of most people, and that must come from loving the process. You can’t just force yourself to do it; you must somehow actually enjoy it.

So why can some people do this and others can’t? And even if the end result of purposeful practice is not always (or even usually) performance at the gold-medal level, are there lessons from those experiences that can be useful in earning the equivalent of the bronze?

Stanford psychologist Carol Dweck suggests that what she calls“mindset” (in her 2006 book of that name) plays a crucial role in sustaining the necessary type of intense practice — and that the right mindset can be quite useful even if your goal is not to win the gold. Dweck puts forward two mindsets — a fixed mindset, which occurs when someone believes that personal qualities like intelligence are immutable, and a growth mindset, which occurs when someone believes that skills and characteristics can be cultivated through effort. In the fixed mindset, success is showing you’re talented; in the growth mindset, it’s developing yourself."

now to me peter orszag might want to do more than recapitulate malcolm gladwell. the idea of "mindset" is a typical psychological pseudo-explanation, a dormative virtue : little more than a restatement of the original facts. and if you're actually asking why people don't spend 10,000 hours learning particle phsyics or computer programming, you might ask yourself, say, what it's like growing up in an american ghetto, or on a farm, or what happens when you have a kid when you're 17, or when you have to have a job to eat, etc.

in terms of things like fonts and indentation, the typepad word processor can be amazingly difficult to use.