8 ms·

Don't become an expert

118 points by dmytton 17y ago

IgorPartola 17y ago
While Gladwell makes a compelling argument for the 10,000 hour rule, I just can't buy that. It can't be that simple.
- bscofield 17y ago
  Simple? It's not like you're sit around eating snacks and thinking about a topic for 10,000 hours - that's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which is hard work.
  - sp332 17y ago
    "Simple" is not the same thing as "easy."
    - seanos 17y ago
      But I think the point the poster is trying to make is that it isn't simple. The actual task of carrying out 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is complicated. You have to be constantly revising your strategy, measuring your progress, determining what, when and how to practice, and the actual tasks that comprise the practice may be complicated (as the poster said - you can't sit there eating snacks).
      - mdg 17y ago
        Simple, but easier said then done.
        seanos 17y ago
        Or maybe - Simple, but complicated to do. Someone could ask me "How do I make the perfect search engine?" and I might reply "For any user and query make it return the most relevant results." That is a simple instruction but actually complicated to do.
  - starkfist 17y ago
    Two people can play 10,000 hours of golf, and one of them becomes Tiger Woods, and the other one becomes a course pro teaching lessons for $45/hr. Tiger Woods was amazing at age 5 on "That's Incredible," long before his 10,000 hours. Similarly it's obvious that Steve Jobs is expert at what he does, but what is that, exactly? What did he practice for 10,000 hours? Talent, expert level preparation, and success are related but the interaction between them is still mysterious.
    - dagw 17y ago
      It's not just playing 10000 hours of golf, it's actively and effectively practicing golf for 10000 hours. There is huge difference between the two. Sure innate talent and physical attributes make a difference, but exactly how you spend your 10000 hours probably makes a much bigger difference.
      - timwiseman 17y ago
        I couldn't agree more. To add slightly, I think the intensity and novelty of what you are doing are probably the biggest factors in how you spend your 10000 hours. I know I learn more from spending 1 hour trying to solve a new problem I have never tackled before than spending 10 writing yet another CRUD procedure or yeat another GUI for the database. Similarly, I improved my running faster (back when I was still running regularly) with runs that challenged me and on varied terrain more than I did from yet another tread mill run at a regular pace.
prosa 17y ago
The nice thing about expertise is anticipating mistakes that would otherwise cost time and energy. With emerging best practices in continuous deployment and customer development, those costs are on the decline. Furthermore, with the mentorship opportunities emerging from the wealth of angel networks and seed funds, you can replicate some of those gains without the prohibitive time investment.
skolor 17y ago
What? After reading that, all I got was "You can't be an expert when innovating". Ok, I can buy that. I don't, however, understand where on Earth he got the idea that the blogger is any different from the other people he listed at the end. Unless there's something I'm missing, no one ever said you should wait until you were an "expert" in something before you tried to be successful at it. The focus of this "expert" movement, if you can call it that, is to strive to become an expert in something, rather than being a jack of all trades, so to speak.
Davertron 17y ago
I think what Jason is saying is don't FOCUS on being an expert, and don't obsess over it. I know that I personally feel like I never know enough, and often think things like "well, I'd like to do x or y, but I should probably learn more about z first". I think the important thing to realize is that there is always more to learn, and you shouldn't be killing yourself over not feeling like an expert. Of course there's lots you don't know; there always will be. You just have to accept that and realize that there's plenty you DO know, and taking on challenges that seem just a bit above where you're at is one of the greatest ways to grow and continue learning. As a semi-related side note, when I first started reading HN (almost a year ago), I felt like 95% of the stuff that was on the front page didn't even MAKE SENSE to me (some would probably argue that HN has changed over the last year, and I think I came in to HN during one of those "let's push Erlang articles to the top to scare off the incoming swarm of n00bs" phases...didn't work on this n00b though :) ). Over the last year, I find that I at least have a general idea what most of the posts are about, even if I still don't totally grok everything that gets posted, and I've learned a ton. I'm happy with that, since I still feel like I learn something new everyday.
barnaby 17y ago
I think he's arguing that you shouldn't wait until you have 10,000 hours before you go out to be successful, rather go out and pursue the thing you want to be successful at and that will give you the 10,000 hours. In other words, don't set preconditions to your success, including the precondition of "being an expert"
seanos 17y ago
I think the 10,000 hour rule is more applicable to skills that are somewhat stationary. Technology is a moving target, as new technologies are introduced some of the skills in which you were an expert become obsolete. On the other hand, something like playing Piano is a stationary target - if an expert in playing Piano travelled 30 years into the future, they would still be an expert in playing the Piano. So I think you have to be constantly learning and the most important skills of all are learning how to learn efficiently and having the ability to teach yourself.
- hello_moto 17y ago
  What kind of tech related skills that makes one obsolete pretty quickly? Take Rails and Merb as examples. Both are using the well known enterprise patterns (despite the crowds hatred against the word enterprise, the ActiveRecord and DataMapper patterns came from Fowler's Enterprise Pattern book). These enterprise patterns dated back since early 2000. Unfortunately there are many developers who do not want to take their time to read books and decided to write their own frameworks. Java is a 15 years old platform and these days it is still relevant. Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Hudson, and other infrastructure stuffs are being written in Java. Scala, Clojure and Groovy are written on top of JVM (and the idea of VM, which is roughly 15 years old or more, is still around). LISP has been around since late 1950 yet these days some "elite" still considered the best language out there (or at least the paradigm of functional programming is considered the best one out there). Object Oriented Programming has been around since early 1980 and I don't see it to be obsolete anytime soon. The practice of data structure and algorithms (list, binary search, sorting, tree, graphs and so on) are still relevant until today. The concept of distributed VCS has been around since early 2000 (probably even earlier than that) except that it's not F/OSS. (Remember BitKeeper?). The concept of VCS itself has been around since 1990 or maybe even earlier than that. C and VHDL are still the strong players in embedded/system programming. Yes, there's "Go", but it's a newcomer/niche right now. People who program in C are still programming in C if they are in the embedded world. Linear Algebra and Statistics which have been around since probably forever are still relevant today and I don't view them as a moving target. Though I do understand your point of view of certain technologies that are considered as moving targets. Here are a few examples: .NET related frameworks (WinForms to WPF, WCF, WF, Silverlight), C# from OOP to mixed with functional, Flash to Flex/Air, Windows specific development, JS/HTML/CSS. Though one could argue that since 1996-1998, there aren't too many changes in the HTML/CSS specs except between HTML4 to HTML5. Another point of view as to why Technology is a moving target is that if a programmer/developer is moving from one ecosystems to another: Embedded to Web development, Desktop App to Embedded, etc. But one could argue that it's like a Pianist decided one day that Guitar is his/her next playground.
jpablo 17y ago
I'll only like to be an expert, like Asimov, in sounding like an expert. Meaning that I could learn and understand the stuff I need very fast and be able to explain it to others easily.
- huherto 17y ago
  You chose an interesting example. And yet we can argue Asimov was expert at writing, he probably had more practice at it than any other human being that I know.(or heard of)
matrix 17y ago
If you'd like to skip all the pundits (Gladwell included) and go straight to source of all this discussion about developing expertise, look no further than this book: http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbooks-Psychology/dp/0521600812/ http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo... It's a compilation of academic papers and was the basis for Gladwell's book. It is not lightweight entertainment reading, but it's the real deal.
oostevo 17y ago
I think he's missing the point. So many people (Gladwell, Cohen, and apparently the Brazen Careerist person) have referenced this 10,000 hours claim, but no one has cited the actual research paper that came up with this notion. The paper actually addresses almost all of his points.[1] "There are more high school swimmers than ever, therefore more opportunities to find and train great swimmers. They have access to diet, training, technology, and facilities that didn't exist years ago. That's all." Yes! That's the point! The authors of the research point out that "the fastest time for the marathon in the 1896 Olympic Games was just a minute faster than the required entry time in ... races such as the Boston Marathon," _because_ people now know the proper way to focus their efforts at practice.[2] 'Practice,' here, being training and diet. But it still takes 10 years or so of _deliberate practice_ to become world class. It's just that the bar for world class has been moved. "I'm a case in point: I practiced the piano for an hour a day for more than ten years. I became good, but there were others who practiced twice as much who were worse, and still others who practiced less and are much better." Again, he is unwittingly supporting the 10,000 hours claim. The study points out that "the view that merely engaging in a sufficient amount of practice, regardless of the structure of that practice leads to maximal performance has a long and contested history."[3] It is not just 'putting in the hours' that matters (because then one falls into the trap of assembly-line-worker syndrome, where "improvement of performance was often arrested at less than maximal levels"), but rather what it calls "deliberate practice," which takes quite a bit of very hard work and practice tasks that are defined in a very specific way. (There's a good description of the characteristics of deliberate practice on p. 367 of the study). That is, people who just practice for hours without much thought as to what that practice should be and how it will challenge them in new ways are doomed to be less successful than those who are coached through a process of deliberate practice. It's quality, not quantity. All that being said, I don't think being an entrepreneur actually has anything to do with being an expert. It's much more luck and hard work. Cohen gets around to saying this too. I agree with him. I'm just not sure why he felt the need to try to refute the current literature on becoming a domain expert to say, "Hey, becoming a domain expert probably isn't your goal. Your goal is to become an innovative entrepreneur." [1] http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti... [2] Ibid, p.366 [3] Ibid, p.365 --> Edit 1: matrix cited a more recent text by the same author I was describing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142983 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142983 --> Edit 2: Oops. The Harvard Business Review article that Penelope Trunk talks about was actually written by the same person who wrote the paper that I cited and the book that matrix referenced, so my "but no one has cited the actual research" claim was inaccurate: http://www.coachingmanagement.nl/The%20Making%20of%20an%20Expert.pdf http://www.coachingmanagement.nl/The%20Making%20of%20an%20Ex...
contagionhealth 17y ago
Anyone I've seen advertise themselves as an expert in something (as opposed to being named or termed an expert by someone who's hired them to work/speak etc) seems to be a generalist with ego or confidence issues. Developing expert-level skills in an area requires focus, talent, and time. These three variables are all present but vary in concentration in 'expert' folks I've met operating within various disciplines and niche sectors. Some are initially more talented, so their 'expertise' development takes less time. Some have less native talent so spend more time developing skills. Unless you're a prodigy, the development of expert level skills requires persistence most of all, but persistence is not necessarily equivalent to time spent practicing. To barnaby's point, everyone I consider an 'expert' doesn't feel like they're done learning - they remain voracious.
- jrwoodruff 17y ago
  They remain voracious - and will probably never consider themselves experts - because they are passionate about what they are doing. They are passionate enough to not just 'practice' but to also know who the experts in their field are, know what those experts accomplished, and know what they themselves don't know. This 10,000 hours thing is an effect of expertise, not a cause. Focused passion * (time+talent) = expertise
- hop 17y ago
  Stumbled on the author of Millionaire Next Door's website a while ago, proclaims himself an expert. I'm sure he is, but saying that rubbed me the wrong way. http://www.thomasjstanley.com http://www.thomasjstanley.com
diN0bot 17y ago
the op points out one end of the spectrum. i'm far more concerned with the other end, where people think that writing a program, or worse, achieving some general credential, makes them an expert. it's refreshing to interact with folks who see themselves and others making continuous progress towards mastery. such folks tend to have a stable foundation of confidence and a more open attitude when speaking with others. the thought that some people are magically and suddenly experts is damaging to collaboration and progress.
callmeed 17y ago
I have to agree with the author. In fact I'd go so far as to say luck has more to do with success than being an expert–especially with regards to financial success.
- adg 17y ago
  I disagree. Luck may play a role in one's success, but it's not the deciding factor. The problem is that people like to play off their success as just "being lucky". Why? Because this answer is a lot quicker and sexier than explaining to someone how they spent countless hours working their ass off to get where they are. Have you read Warren Buffett's biography, The Snowball? Sure, Buffett caught some lucky breaks, but the man has essentially spent his entire life completely engrossed in investing. Anyone who claims Buffett is just the luckiest investor alive should really take a closer look at how the man has accomplished what he has.
runT1ME 17y ago
So, his two examples of people who weren't experts but succeeded were Larry and Sergey, two PhD students from Stanford studying search algorithms, and that doesn't qualify them as experts? Or Joel, who was a program manager at one of the most successful and selective Software companies on the planet?
- smartbear 17y ago
  No, it DOES NOT qualify them as experts by the definition given by this latest 10k hours craze. And no being a program manager at Excel DOES NOT qualify Joel as an expert on blogging or bug tracking. My point is: Neither of those matter.
  - Locke1689 17y ago
    No, it DOES NOT qualify them as experts by the definition given by this latest 10k hours craze. Sure it does. The computer science curriculum at top schools like Stanford probably requires about 30 hours a week of time devoted to computer science. At 52 weeks per year, this puts the number around 6.5 years. After 4 years undergraduate computer science and his master's degree and Page's statement that he got into programming/CS at around 12 years old, we can deduce that 10,000 hours is probably a completely reasonable amount of time.
    - donaq 17y ago
      You miss the OP's point that none of these hours were spent at advertising, the core of Google's business success.
      - snitko 17y ago
        I think the point is we should be questioning the field of expertise which lead a company to success. Google has become a success not because it introduced advertising, but because it was a a great and simple search engine (with ads at first, btw). Thus Larry and Sergey were experts and their example in the article is bad. On the other hand there are probably other examples out there that may prove the point. So, like Forrest Gump said, I think maybe it's both.
rationalbeaver 17y ago
You don't have to be an expert marksman to shoot yourself some food.
10ren 17y ago
A minor aside: I don't know anything about the person Penelope, but one key to popular characters is to be relatable. This also applies to the persona one projects. A person with a very popular blog is likely an expert at being relatable - part of that is being an everyman/woman, and sharing the trials and difficulties, the foolishnesses and mistakes that many people can relate to and feel comfortable around. i.e. not being an "expert". A blog might also include explicit expertise, in the form of a secondary character: a mentor. But that's not the entry point for the reader; it's not who you relate to.
andywood 17y ago
It's trivially true that being an expert and being successful are different things. Being successful generally means being a key part of a value chain that comes together at a certain time/place in society. Some experts do this. Some non-experts do this. Some non-experts become experts in the course of doing this. So what? A lot of people naturally put in 10,000+ hours doing the things they love the most anyway, and I'd bet they like being successful experts. This looks suspiciously like trying to console yourself, saying "there, there. you done alright in your own way". That's perfectly valid, but doesn't require rejecting other conceptions of what's desirable for personal growth. Certainly not publicly.

118 points by dmytton 17y ago

IgorPartola 17y ago

While Gladwell makes a compelling argument for the 10,000 hour rule, I just can't buy that. It can't be that simple.

bscofield 17y ago
Simple? It's not like you're sit around eating snacks and thinking about a topic for 10,000 hours - that's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which is hard work.
- sp332 17y ago
  "Simple" is not the same thing as "easy."
  - seanos 17y ago
    But I think the point the poster is trying to make is that it isn't simple. The actual task of carrying out 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is complicated. You have to be constantly revising your strategy, measuring your progress, determining what, when and how to practice, and the actual tasks that comprise the practice may be complicated (as the poster said - you can't sit there eating snacks).
    - mdg 17y ago
      Simple, but easier said then done.
      - seanos 17y ago
        Or maybe - Simple, but complicated to do. Someone could ask me "How do I make the perfect search engine?" and I might reply "For any user and query make it return the most relevant results." That is a simple instruction but actually complicated to do.
- starkfist 17y ago
  Two people can play 10,000 hours of golf, and one of them becomes Tiger Woods, and the other one becomes a course pro teaching lessons for $45/hr. Tiger Woods was amazing at age 5 on "That's Incredible," long before his 10,000 hours. Similarly it's obvious that Steve Jobs is expert at what he does, but what is that, exactly? What did he practice for 10,000 hours? Talent, expert level preparation, and success are related but the interaction between them is still mysterious.
  - dagw 17y ago
    It's not just playing 10000 hours of golf, it's actively and effectively practicing golf for 10000 hours. There is huge difference between the two. Sure innate talent and physical attributes make a difference, but exactly how you spend your 10000 hours probably makes a much bigger difference.
    - timwiseman 17y ago
      I couldn't agree more. To add slightly, I think the intensity and novelty of what you are doing are probably the biggest factors in how you spend your 10000 hours. I know I learn more from spending 1 hour trying to solve a new problem I have never tackled before than spending 10 writing yet another CRUD procedure or yeat another GUI for the database. Similarly, I improved my running faster (back when I was still running regularly) with runs that challenged me and on varied terrain more than I did from yet another tread mill run at a regular pace.

prosa 17y ago

The nice thing about expertise is anticipating mistakes that would otherwise cost time and energy. With emerging best practices in continuous deployment and customer development, those costs are on the decline. Furthermore, with the mentorship opportunities emerging from the wealth of angel networks and seed funds, you can replicate some of those gains without the prohibitive time investment.

skolor 17y ago

What? After reading that, all I got was "You can't be an expert when innovating". Ok, I can buy that. I don't, however, understand where on Earth he got the idea that the blogger is any different from the other people he listed at the end. Unless there's something I'm missing, no one ever said you should wait until you were an "expert" in something before you tried to be successful at it. The focus of this "expert" movement, if you can call it that, is to strive to become an expert in something, rather than being a jack of all trades, so to speak.

Davertron 17y ago

I think what Jason is saying is don't FOCUS on being an expert, and don't obsess over it. I know that I personally feel like I never know enough, and often think things like "well, I'd like to do x or y, but I should probably learn more about z first". I think the important thing to realize is that there is always more to learn, and you shouldn't be killing yourself over not feeling like an expert. Of course there's lots you don't know; there always will be. You just have to accept that and realize that there's plenty you DO know, and taking on challenges that seem just a bit above where you're at is one of the greatest ways to grow and continue learning. As a semi-related side note, when I first started reading HN (almost a year ago), I felt like 95% of the stuff that was on the front page didn't even MAKE SENSE to me (some would probably argue that HN has changed over the last year, and I think I came in to HN during one of those "let's push Erlang articles to the top to scare off the incoming swarm of n00bs" phases...didn't work on this n00b though :) ). Over the last year, I find that I at least have a general idea what most of the posts are about, even if I still don't totally grok everything that gets posted, and I've learned a ton. I'm happy with that, since I still feel like I learn something new everyday.

barnaby 17y ago

I think he's arguing that you shouldn't wait until you have 10,000 hours before you go out to be successful, rather go out and pursue the thing you want to be successful at and that will give you the 10,000 hours. In other words, don't set preconditions to your success, including the precondition of "being an expert"

seanos 17y ago

I think the 10,000 hour rule is more applicable to skills that are somewhat stationary. Technology is a moving target, as new technologies are introduced some of the skills in which you were an expert become obsolete. On the other hand, something like playing Piano is a stationary target - if an expert in playing Piano travelled 30 years into the future, they would still be an expert in playing the Piano. So I think you have to be constantly learning and the most important skills of all are learning how to learn efficiently and having the ability to teach yourself.

hello_moto 17y ago
What kind of tech related skills that makes one obsolete pretty quickly? Take Rails and Merb as examples. Both are using the well known enterprise patterns (despite the crowds hatred against the word enterprise, the ActiveRecord and DataMapper patterns came from Fowler's Enterprise Pattern book). These enterprise patterns dated back since early 2000. Unfortunately there are many developers who do not want to take their time to read books and decided to write their own frameworks. Java is a 15 years old platform and these days it is still relevant. Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Hudson, and other infrastructure stuffs are being written in Java. Scala, Clojure and Groovy are written on top of JVM (and the idea of VM, which is roughly 15 years old or more, is still around). LISP has been around since late 1950 yet these days some "elite" still considered the best language out there (or at least the paradigm of functional programming is considered the best one out there). Object Oriented Programming has been around since early 1980 and I don't see it to be obsolete anytime soon. The practice of data structure and algorithms (list, binary search, sorting, tree, graphs and so on) are still relevant until today. The concept of distributed VCS has been around since early 2000 (probably even earlier than that) except that it's not F/OSS. (Remember BitKeeper?). The concept of VCS itself has been around since 1990 or maybe even earlier than that. C and VHDL are still the strong players in embedded/system programming. Yes, there's "Go", but it's a newcomer/niche right now. People who program in C are still programming in C if they are in the embedded world. Linear Algebra and Statistics which have been around since probably forever are still relevant today and I don't view them as a moving target. Though I do understand your point of view of certain technologies that are considered as moving targets. Here are a few examples: .NET related frameworks (WinForms to WPF, WCF, WF, Silverlight), C# from OOP to mixed with functional, Flash to Flex/Air, Windows specific development, JS/HTML/CSS. Though one could argue that since 1996-1998, there aren't too many changes in the HTML/CSS specs except between HTML4 to HTML5. Another point of view as to why Technology is a moving target is that if a programmer/developer is moving from one ecosystems to another: Embedded to Web development, Desktop App to Embedded, etc. But one could argue that it's like a Pianist decided one day that Guitar is his/her next playground.

jpablo 17y ago

I'll only like to be an expert, like Asimov, in sounding like an expert. Meaning that I could learn and understand the stuff I need very fast and be able to explain it to others easily.

huherto 17y ago
You chose an interesting example. And yet we can argue Asimov was expert at writing, he probably had more practice at it than any other human being that I know.(or heard of)

matrix 17y ago

If you'd like to skip all the pundits (Gladwell included) and go straight to source of all this discussion about developing expertise, look no further than this book: http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbooks-Psychology/dp/0521600812/ http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo... It's a compilation of academic papers and was the basis for Gladwell's book. It is not lightweight entertainment reading, but it's the real deal.

oostevo 17y ago

I think he's missing the point. So many people (Gladwell, Cohen, and apparently the Brazen Careerist person) have referenced this 10,000 hours claim, but no one has cited the actual research paper that came up with this notion. The paper actually addresses almost all of his points.[1] "There are more high school swimmers than ever, therefore more opportunities to find and train great swimmers. They have access to diet, training, technology, and facilities that didn't exist years ago. That's all." Yes! That's the point! The authors of the research point out that "the fastest time for the marathon in the 1896 Olympic Games was just a minute faster than the required entry time in ... races such as the Boston Marathon," _because_ people now know the proper way to focus their efforts at practice.[2] 'Practice,' here, being training and diet. But it still takes 10 years or so of _deliberate practice_ to become world class. It's just that the bar for world class has been moved. "I'm a case in point: I practiced the piano for an hour a day for more than ten years. I became good, but there were others who practiced twice as much who were worse, and still others who practiced less and are much better." Again, he is unwittingly supporting the 10,000 hours claim. The study points out that "the view that merely engaging in a sufficient amount of practice, regardless of the structure of that practice leads to maximal performance has a long and contested history."[3] It is not just 'putting in the hours' that matters (because then one falls into the trap of assembly-line-worker syndrome, where "improvement of performance was often arrested at less than maximal levels"), but rather what it calls "deliberate practice," which takes quite a bit of very hard work and practice tasks that are defined in a very specific way. (There's a good description of the characteristics of deliberate practice on p. 367 of the study). That is, people who just practice for hours without much thought as to what that practice should be and how it will challenge them in new ways are doomed to be less successful than those who are coached through a process of deliberate practice. It's quality, not quantity. All that being said, I don't think being an entrepreneur actually has anything to do with being an expert. It's much more luck and hard work. Cohen gets around to saying this too. I agree with him. I'm just not sure why he felt the need to try to refute the current literature on becoming a domain expert to say, "Hey, becoming a domain expert probably isn't your goal. Your goal is to become an innovative entrepreneur." [1] http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti... [2] Ibid, p.366 [3] Ibid, p.365 --> Edit 1: matrix cited a more recent text by the same author I was describing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142983 http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142983 --> Edit 2: Oops. The Harvard Business Review article that Penelope Trunk talks about was actually written by the same person who wrote the paper that I cited and the book that matrix referenced, so my "but no one has cited the actual research" claim was inaccurate: http://www.coachingmanagement.nl/The%20Making%20of%20an%20Expert.pdf http://www.coachingmanagement.nl/The%20Making%20of%20an%20Ex...

contagionhealth 17y ago

Anyone I've seen advertise themselves as an expert in something (as opposed to being named or termed an expert by someone who's hired them to work/speak etc) seems to be a generalist with ego or confidence issues. Developing expert-level skills in an area requires focus, talent, and time. These three variables are all present but vary in concentration in 'expert' folks I've met operating within various disciplines and niche sectors. Some are initially more talented, so their 'expertise' development takes less time. Some have less native talent so spend more time developing skills. Unless you're a prodigy, the development of expert level skills requires persistence most of all, but persistence is not necessarily equivalent to time spent practicing. To barnaby's point, everyone I consider an 'expert' doesn't feel like they're done learning - they remain voracious.

jrwoodruff 17y ago
They remain voracious - and will probably never consider themselves experts - because they are passionate about what they are doing. They are passionate enough to not just 'practice' but to also know who the experts in their field are, know what those experts accomplished, and know what they themselves don't know. This 10,000 hours thing is an effect of expertise, not a cause. Focused passion * (time+talent) = expertise
hop 17y ago
Stumbled on the author of Millionaire Next Door's website a while ago, proclaims himself an expert. I'm sure he is, but saying that rubbed me the wrong way. http://www.thomasjstanley.com http://www.thomasjstanley.com

diN0bot 17y ago

the op points out one end of the spectrum. i'm far more concerned with the other end, where people think that writing a program, or worse, achieving some general credential, makes them an expert. it's refreshing to interact with folks who see themselves and others making continuous progress towards mastery. such folks tend to have a stable foundation of confidence and a more open attitude when speaking with others. the thought that some people are magically and suddenly experts is damaging to collaboration and progress.

callmeed 17y ago

I have to agree with the author. In fact I'd go so far as to say luck has more to do with success than being an expert–especially with regards to financial success.

adg 17y ago
I disagree. Luck may play a role in one's success, but it's not the deciding factor. The problem is that people like to play off their success as just "being lucky". Why? Because this answer is a lot quicker and sexier than explaining to someone how they spent countless hours working their ass off to get where they are. Have you read Warren Buffett's biography, The Snowball? Sure, Buffett caught some lucky breaks, but the man has essentially spent his entire life completely engrossed in investing. Anyone who claims Buffett is just the luckiest investor alive should really take a closer look at how the man has accomplished what he has.

runT1ME 17y ago

So, his two examples of people who weren't experts but succeeded were Larry and Sergey, two PhD students from Stanford studying search algorithms, and that doesn't qualify them as experts? Or Joel, who was a program manager at one of the most successful and selective Software companies on the planet?

smartbear 17y ago
No, it DOES NOT qualify them as experts by the definition given by this latest 10k hours craze. And no being a program manager at Excel DOES NOT qualify Joel as an expert on blogging or bug tracking. My point is: Neither of those matter.
- Locke1689 17y ago
  No, it DOES NOT qualify them as experts by the definition given by this latest 10k hours craze. Sure it does. The computer science curriculum at top schools like Stanford probably requires about 30 hours a week of time devoted to computer science. At 52 weeks per year, this puts the number around 6.5 years. After 4 years undergraduate computer science and his master's degree and Page's statement that he got into programming/CS at around 12 years old, we can deduce that 10,000 hours is probably a completely reasonable amount of time.
  - donaq 17y ago
    You miss the OP's point that none of these hours were spent at advertising, the core of Google's business success.
    - snitko 17y ago
      I think the point is we should be questioning the field of expertise which lead a company to success. Google has become a success not because it introduced advertising, but because it was a a great and simple search engine (with ads at first, btw). Thus Larry and Sergey were experts and their example in the article is bad. On the other hand there are probably other examples out there that may prove the point. So, like Forrest Gump said, I think maybe it's both.

rationalbeaver 17y ago

You don't have to be an expert marksman to shoot yourself some food.

10ren 17y ago

A minor aside: I don't know anything about the person Penelope, but one key to popular characters is to be relatable. This also applies to the persona one projects. A person with a very popular blog is likely an expert at being relatable - part of that is being an everyman/woman, and sharing the trials and difficulties, the foolishnesses and mistakes that many people can relate to and feel comfortable around. i.e. not being an "expert". A blog might also include explicit expertise, in the form of a secondary character: a mentor. But that's not the entry point for the reader; it's not who you relate to.

andywood 17y ago

It's trivially true that being an expert and being successful are different things. Being successful generally means being a key part of a value chain that comes together at a certain time/place in society. Some experts do this. Some non-experts do this. Some non-experts become experts in the course of doing this. So what? A lot of people naturally put in 10,000+ hours doing the things they love the most anyway, and I'd bet they like being successful experts. This looks suspiciously like trying to console yourself, saying "there, there. you done alright in your own way". That's perfectly valid, but doesn't require rejecting other conceptions of what's desirable for personal growth. Certainly not publicly.