People have many characteristics and abilities. These abilities make them who they are. Some abilities are extraordinary compared to others. But the age old question is whether an extraordinary ability something you're born with or something you develop? Both the excerpt from Malcolm Gladwells book Outliers and the book review of Temple Grandins Thinking in Pictures both discuss extraordinary abilities and how they might have developed. Even though many people have amazing talents or born with deficiencies such as autism, extraordinary abilities are developed through hard work, passion and not from genes. The excerpt from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers demonstrates one must prepare themselves to do and be extraordinary. The excerpt brings up a study that was done in the early 1990s by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and two colleagues at Berlin's elite Academy of Music. In the study, they divided the school's violinists into three groups. The first group were the stars, second group were the merely good and the third group were the ones that were most likely to never play professionally. Then, all three groups were asked the same questions, but only one question had three different answers. This question was how many hours have you practiced. The third group, the ones that were most likely to never play professionally, practiced a total of four thousand hours by the age of twenty. The second group, the merely good, practiced a total of eight thousand hours. The first group, the stars, practiced a total of ten thousand hours. Just by looking at these hours one can see extraordinary abilities come from development, preparation and practice. These people went out of their way to perfect their skill and better themselves. The study also proves that the magic number is ten thousand hours, which supports the phrase practice makes perfect. In the book review of Temple Grandin's "Thinking in Pictures," they discuss Temple Grandin who is