Based on Dr.Anders Ericsson's [1] studies and earlier Herbert Simon's comments the 10000 hours rule was popularized after Malcom Gladwell drew attention to this assertion in his book Outliers. Does it apply to mainly specialized fields like Chess, Medicine or any intellectually challenging fields which require specialist knowledge or also to general fields like Politics, Management or Acting (?) which are by definition more general in nature. [Politics or management or acting also require specialist knowledge in a sense requiring in-depth knowledge of international affairs, macro economics, emotive expression control etc.,] The question arises because I have observed many instances of people switching over careers into these general fields late in their careers and shining. (e.g., actor turned politicians or house-wife turned politicians or people who started acting at an expert level from the very first movie). May be my classification of general vs. special fields could be wrong. But I thought this was an interesting question at least in these three fields (may be more) to ponder over?[1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice%28PsychologicalReview%29.pdf
[2] http://allaboutwork.org/2012/11/21/malcolm-gladwells-10000-hour-rule-doesnt-add-up/
[3] http://www.newyorker.com/online/blogs/sportingscene/2013/08/psychology-ten-thousand-hour-rule-complexity.html