It depends on what you mean by 10,000 hours. I have not spent that much time actually trading--maybe only a fraction of that, and I am making enough to live on. However, if you count all the hours I have spent studying the state of the world, economics, politics, and everything else that affects stuff I trade, then it would be way over 10,000 hours.
Gladwell really confused me, and turned me off, with all that skin color stuff, which seemed really disconnected from the rest of the book. What was that about???? This is America: everyone here is from somewhere else, or their parents or grandparents were, or they have been here so long that they are ethnic-and-color-mutts anyway. No one with any intelligence cares about your skin--it's who you are and what you can do that counts. What is the expression: those who care don't matter; those who matter don't care. As a famous author, shouldn't Gladwell be setting an example? As long as people like him keep jawing about skin color like it counts for anything, these stupid attitudes are not going to die.