I think kids can be born talented or smart but real achievement takes work and effort. It's easy to see a kid who self-teaches reading and writing and math through 3rd grade at 3 or 4 and believe that things will always be so easy, but even very smart kids don't usually self-teach fluent Japanese or high-level music or ballet performance, or differential equations without some effort and time and coaching or teaching. To succeed at high levels of anything, there's a lot of luck involved (I think Gladwell covers that well) and a lot of work, or at least a lot of practice.

I'd like to teach my kids to reach towards their goals with lots of effort. If they are talented and naturally gifted, that work might get them farther towards their goals, but they also need to put in some effort. At very high levels of anything, talent seems less important to me since everyone involved will be talented. If you go to Julliard for music performance, you will have lots of talented company. In elite PhD programs, very smart folks really are quite common. Work and effort can distinguish someone in that situation or reveal relative mediocrity when everyone else is working hard and passing by someone who is coasting.

In the best of all possible worlds, the "work" doesn't seem like work to the child/adult. It may be that the violinist with 10000 hours has been brow beaten by Amy Chua, but it may also be that the child can't wait to play and desperately waits through school and meals trying to get back to the piano or violin or science experiment or sport. Practice isn't necessarily torture.