The 10,000 hour rule does more damage than good. Guitar is a perfect example to illustrate why. a) It doesn't take 10,000 hours to be halfway decent at guitar.

The 10,000 hour rule does more damage than good. Guitar is a perfect example to illustrate why. a) It doesn't take 10,000 hours to be halfway decent at guitar. If all you want to do is be able to strum the chords for most popular music, you should be able to do that in way less than 10,000 hours. b) Even 10,000 hours isn't going to turn you into Stevie Ray Vaughan or Walter Becker. There's lots of guitar players out there with way more than 10,000 hours who are damn good and still aren't those guys. The 10,000 hour rule as Gladwell presents it makes people believe that time investment is key in developing a skill and that's just not true for all skills. c) 10,000 hours is such an arbitrary number as to be totally meaningless. As guitar perfectly illustrates, it's almost never going to be the right number. For most people who just want to be able to strum some Beatles tunes, that's way too much time. For people who want to be Yngwie Malmsteen, it's not enough. But it's not just guitar, most skills are like this. The 10,000 hour number is totally meaningless. How much time you need to invest into a skill depends on what your goals are with that skill, and also how good you are at related skills that feed into that ability already. The 10,000 hour meme needs to be taken out back, hit with a shovel and buried. It's awful.