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New Research Casts Doubt On the "10,000 Hour Rule" of Expertise
First time accepted submitter Scroatzilla writes What makes someone rise to the top in music, games, sports, business, or science? This question is the subject of one of psychology's oldest debates. Malcolm Gladwell's '10,000 hours' rule probably isn't the answer. Recent research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle—and not necessarily the biggest piece.
I mastered masturbation in far less time.
Most of the great works people do were based on work they actually did when they started (early doctorate or masters work, beginning music, that kind of thing).
Then they fine tune it.
But the mastery came early. It just got sanitized and polished later.
-- Tigger warning: This post may contain tiggers! --
What a shocker..
So decreasing returns isn't obvious that someone needs to study it??
There is an exponential skill on time spent, and the return -- the skill acquired.
If "success" only required mastery the world would be full of experts. One also needs to be in the right time, at the right place, with the right "product."
If you want to succeed in anything, forget practicing and start networking.
We used to have a Bill of Rights. Now, with the rights gone, all we have left is the bill.
Gladwell never said you needed 10,000 hours to be an expert...
http://problogservice.com/2012/03/15/what-malcolm-gladwell-really-said-about-the-10000-hour-rule/
The article had logic approximately like this:
Doing it for a long time doesn't always make you an expert.
Therefore, it's genetics that make you an expert.
All around me, I see my co-workers doing it _wrong_ for a long time. I just discovered that one guy who has been in the same job for over ten years was completely unaware of some of the most basic concepts anyone starting in the field should know. This is a database administrator and developer who didn't understand that there is a difference between the number zero, the empty string, and null. He just had never heard of null, it seems. After I explained the idea of null to him, he said our database system (DB2) doesn't support nulls. DB2 has supported nulls since it's first release in 1983. This is a guy who has spent 10-20 years as a professional DB2 developer.
He's had lots of practice, but apparently never opened a book, including the manual. So he's been practicing it wrong for 10-20 years. Surprise, he's not an expert!
I don't agree. I think Gladwell is the master of thought-provoking oversimplified perhaps-sort-of obvious but counter-cultural idea. For example, in this case, although we have the saying, "practice makes perfect", our culture is disposed to believe that some people are simply better than others, and if you're not gifted, you just shouldn't try. Gladwell sets off on an argument that, no, if you spend enough time practicing you can be great. He oversimplifies the whole thing, but probably (I haven't read this book, actually) puts some admission that practice isn't *everything* and people do also have innate gifts. If you really researched it, you'd probably find that he has an interesting point that isn't complete enough to be "the truth".
At least, this is the pattern I've noticed in his other books. And... I don't really mind it. It would be unwise to just read Gladwell's books and take everything he's saying on faith, but I'm not sure that's what he expects you to do. I think he might just be shooting for "thought-provoking", and in that, he's successful.
You can train a skill, but you cannot learn talent.
And Justin Bieber is proof that a lack of both doesn't correlate with success.
"Transparent" is a shit show that trades on every stereotype going. A man in drag is NOT a transsexual.
Except this time the snark was perfectly delivered at the perfect target.
Gladwell sets off on an argument that, no, if you spend enough time practicing you can be great.
The problem is that this is nonsense. Unless you have a LOT of innate talent, you are unlikely to be "great" at anything. When I was in 7th grade, I joined the school band, and I practiced and practiced and practiced. One day the school music teacher took me aside, and advised me to quit. She explained that I basically sucked at music, and no amount of practice was going to make much difference. She suggested that I go join the computer club instead. That was the best advice I ever had, and it changed my life.
I tend to think of the 10,000 hour rule and Gladwell's observations as this: Competence builds confidence which builds mastery and passion. The first couple thousand hours create the competence. You start to get the feeling that you're getting better than average about this and with confidence you start to reach out some, have some missteps, push your limits, and start to really refine and hone your skills which breeds more competence and mastery and then passion. People love things that they're really good at. Doing that tends to take quite a few thousand hours, with 10,000 being a pretty good round number to ascribe to the process. I've actually turned a couple of things that I absolutely loathed and avoided as a young adult into things that I'm passionate about now, solely because I decided to spend enough effort to get competent at it, and then it ballooned from there.
I hate hearing described this supposed "10,000 hour Malcom Gladwell rule". There's no such thing. Gladwell has long been trying to explain that the 10,000 hour rule was not a recipe for success, only a requirement for mastery. The fact is that mastery is no guarantee of success.
And lately, Gladwell has been giving a much greater emphasis to the notion of love for what you're doing being a more direct quality of those who are successful. And it's more than really just "love". There's an element of intent and desire and yes, love. What made Michael Jordan shoot free throws for hours and hours after it had gotten dark when he was 12 years old? And continue to do so when he was 27 and already a world champion? Why did Charlie Parker disappear for three years and practice 13 hours every day after he had been so badly embarrassed on the bandstand for not knowing how to play in more than one key? Part of it was his desire to "show those guys" after his earlier failure. And part of Michael Jordan's incentive was his famous (or infamous) almost pathological competitiveness. But those things are never enough. Because spite and desire can only take you so far, and they both have negative effects. They'll eventually eat you up (as may have been the case in Bird's example, because clearly his drug use and self-destructiveness would seem to indicate that something was eating him up). But to put the time in requires love. Doing something because it's something you can't imagine not doing. Because that's how you see yourself - that's who you are. The possible financial rewards are not nearly certain enough for that to be the sole motivation. I will bet that Michael saw himself as a basketball player and Bird as a jazz man well before they were on their way to success.
There's no guarantee for success, but there are recipes and the ingredients are often kind of specific. The good news, is that if you really love doing something, it improves the chances the recipe will be successful. Kind of like garlic and butter. There's no guarantee that a dish will be delicious, but if you start with garlic and butter, the odds improve, you know?
You are welcome on my lawn.
The world is full of people that are gifted in some way but don't work hard (it came too easily or they burn out). They ultimately don't make near the impact that good but not necessarily gifted people that work their butts off.
It's a truly rare bird when someone is truly gifted, they personally recognize it early, chase it, and has the drive to perfect their skill until it shines above the rest. These are the oddballs in society, secretly feared/hated and sometimes taken advantage of by their more socially adjusted but lesser peers, that move their world of influence forward. Socrates. Archimedes. (William) Tyndale. Galileo. Newton. Mozart. Tesla. Einstein. (George) Patton. Bobby Fischer. Michael Jordan. Imagine if any of these people decided to sluff off... How different would our world be?
How can you be sure she wasn't just a terrible teacher? You didn't even get a second opinion.
10,000 hours isn't some magical perfect answer to every one of life's skill and talent questions. It's a round number - notice that there's only a single significant digit. And "mastery" really changed depending on your subject. But more importantly, you're parent rolled 3d6 for all 6 of your attributes and, god damnit, if you got a 5 for intelligence you are never going to be a fucking magic user no matter how many hours you study. Hell, you could have rolled an 18, but you're still going to need to get some experience if you really want to cast a delayed blast fireball.
10,000 hours is about 5 years of working at something - diligently - full time. Your profession, your reason for being, your everything. Yes, somebody is going to be better than you and beat you to it with less time. There are 7 billion people in the world, the chances of finding somebody with more innate talent is pretty damned high. And, hey - no matter how long you practice, the chances of you becoming a master in something for which you have no aptitude or - worse - missing some serious prerequisites is going to be very low. But take the average person with average aptitude and give him or her 10,000 hours to practice or train with the goal of becoming proficient in a chosen field, and they're going to learn enough to be considered a "master". Not the best in the world, probably not the second or third best, or whatever you want to call the absolute cream, but you will have mastered it.
And, lets face it, even after 10,000 hours you're still not going to be able to cast a Wish spell and get what you want, but you can sure as hell go on a quest with me 'cause after 10,000 hours you're going to be one bad ass magic user. Or dragon poo. (which I understand goes for a fair sum to the right NPC)
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
Perhaps 10,000 hours is what it takes to reach your personal level of mastery. The average or the genius - once you've put in your 10,000 (or 6000 or 14,000; 10,000 is only one significant digit), you've essentially gotten as good as you will every get, down to some number far to the right of the decimal.
Is it just my observation, or are there way too many stupid people in the world?
WTF?
The rule isn't "practice 10,000hrs and you'll be successful"
It's: "If you are successful, you probably practiced 10,000 hours"
Meaning, if you have the correct body shape, mental acuity, financial situation, then 10,000hrs of practice could give you the opportunity to be an outlier. Midgets can't be in the NBA just because they practiced a lot. I'm not going to win spelling bees just because I've spent 10k hours posting to slashdot. etc...
If I take 2 sets of identical twins from an upper class neighborhood and "whole" family and compared them to 2 sets of fraternal twins in different homes (divorced parents), I would surely have biased results. Age of the twins makes a difference, abuse in the home makes a difference, etc.. etc...
-The wise argue that there are few absolutes, the fool argues that there are no probabilities.
Unless you have a LOT of innate talent,
Problem is that no one can identify innate talent beforehand. The primary manifestation of 'talent' is that someone has become very good.
Your music teacher rejected you because you weren't improving. Instead of identifying your weakness and helping you overcome it, she judged you as incapable, not because you were incapable, but because you weren't improving.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."
meh.
My interpretation of the article: You can't teach height, but tall untrained basketball players can be beaten by shorter experts. To be the "world's best" you need both.
There is a difference between "expert" and "world's best".
When it comes to expert, guided practice and training is generally enough. Even if you are short I can still teach you to be an expert at basketball. Others can still teach you how to block, how to dribble, how to pass, how to shoot, how to referee, how to coach, and how to be an expert.
When it comes to world's best, sure, there is often a genetic component. Most people, no matter how much you train them, will never become the world's best. They can be expert and still judge and teach and work the field, being expert is not the same as being world's best. Similarly, some people, no matter how much they try to work with numbers, struggle to handle them intuitively. Given enough effort they can be taught all the way through college math and become experts, but that doesn't mean they'll become the world's expert on mathematics. Just because someone is tall doesn't make them a world-class basketball player, training is still needed. Just because someone has a pretty voice doesn't make them an automatic world's best vocalist, just because someone has a more intuitive grasp of spatial representations doesn't make them a world renown mathematician, training is still needed.
You can become expert with guided practice, even without much natural ability. To become world's best you need both guided practice AND a genetic predisposition.
//TODO: Think of witty sig statement
You can get awesome at anything in much less than 10,000 hrs if you have a montage.
Ho! Haha! Guard! Turn! Parry! Dodge! Spin! Ha! Thrust!
So you say that everybody can pick up a skill equally? Look around you, talent is not equally distributed. Some people are good at math, some people good at writing, some are good at music. Some just pick up a skill intuitively and others struggle with it. The article hints that it is strongly based on genetics and why should it not be? You can see this very well with primary school children. Some pick up math easily and some don't, for example.
But the point you are making is not fully off either. The different talents are distributed more or less evenly in the populace. But to convert that talent into a skill you need practice and tutoring. Your social class will be a strong indicator if you will get the tutoring, mentoring and practice required to convert it into a skill. If you can barely make rent, you will not pay your children around 100 bucks for violin lessons.
In addition you social class will also determine the amount of tutoring you get despite of your lack talent. Not good in math, extra lessons, because we can. As a result your parent's income is the strongest indicator, if you will graduate for the university or not. Partially because you get all the additional training required to even out your difficulties, partially because it is expected of you.
Claiming that genetics has nothing to do with it is nonsense. But there is much untapped talent, simply because of social economic circumstances. It remains that you need a lot of practice to make your talent into a skill.
It seemed obvious to me, even when I was young, that lots of practice is important in mastering a skill.
But it also seemed obvious that having innate talent is just as, or more important than practice. Guy with 90 IQ is never gonna be a chess grandmaster or a nuclear physicist, even after 10,000 hours or 100,000 hours.
Or maybe I'm not a genius and these are pretty damn obvious points that should occur to anyone looking without blinders on (e.g. religious liberal belief that every child is a precious flower equally capable of anything as every other child)
As a music teacher, I have never - ever - found that I could not teach someone who practiced regularly and intelligently to be as good as they wanted to be. Your teacher was too damned lazy to teach you properly and as a consequence has denied you the ability to be the musician you could perfectly well have been. I can't comment on whether you ended up in a better place or not, but I can say, with absolute certainty, that your teacher was dead wrong.
[FUCK BETA]
Some people cannot sing in tune. Most people do not need to be taught to do this, they can just do it straight away. If you can't sing in tune there is little point trying to be a singer.
Tell that to Neil Young.
Some people cannot sing in tune. Most people do not need to be taught to do this,
Wow, that is so false you must have not spent much time around high school choirs. Most people do need to practice, a lot, to sing in tune. Some take longer than others to get it.
"First they came for the slanderers and i said nothing."