12 ms·

Practice does not always make perfect, finds study of violinists

66 points by EwanToo 7y ago

kerng 7y ago
After reading this article I'm not sure if I read or learned anything new. The article tries to challenge the 10000 hours rule, but fails to provide details or numbers that suggest what other factors would be more important. It briefly mentions things like "talent", but after reading Growth Mindset I'm convinced that talent alone just provides a starting advantage. The book gives plenty of examples of that. The article should highlight more what kind of practice they refer to and what they think is the main contributing factor. I think to become an expert in something like playing a musical instrument focused practice and repetition is necessary, so having the right coach is extremely important. However, the most crucial piece might actually be the passion or willingness to learn in my opinion.
- Blackstone4 7y ago
  I feel like I hold two conflicting beliefs...growth mindset (the brain is a muscle which can be exercised) and inherit talent... My belief in growth mindset has help me improve my communication skills both oral and written. However I also recognise that I have certain limitations based on natural talent. For instance, I’m likely to never to be as good at word games (i.e. scrabble) as many friends and family members. This is at odds with my growth mindset to a certain extent. Maybe any skill can be improved upon but natural talent gives us an inherit advantage over the rest of the field.
  - apersona 7y ago
    The model I have right now is that talent is learning rate, so I don't see how the beliefs conflict with each other. Some people pick things up faster than others, but if you put more effort you can still catch up. It also explains why even talented people still need to practice/learn/etc. to be at the top of their fields.
    - rmetzler 7y ago
      Yes, and the article even fails to mention that it might be more important how someone practices than how much the person practices.
    - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
      Talent is the amount of work you don't have to do to better than the average person. It also sets a ceiling. Beyond a certain level, no amount of work will make you any better, because you fundamentally don't have the cognitive skill or physical ability to improve further. I've spent a fair amount of time with musicians, and talent can be very obvious. You can have a room full of people who have spent years practicing and been through a degree program. They're all outstanding compared to most of the population. But sometimes one person in that room will still stand out, because their playing will be insightful, compelling, and musical in a way the others can't match. It's an instant thing - it only takes a few bars to hear it. They won't necessarily have done the most work, or put the most hours in. But they will, in some absolutely fundamental way, "get it" - usually from birth. The hours and the work refine that ability and make it more obvious. But they can't create it.
    - kerng 7y ago
      A friend of mine is a professional violinist. People say she is really talented and skilled. The interesting thing is that she gets very upset when people say: you are so talented. The reason she explained to me once is that people see her perform and play and think that's just how easy it is for her. She said to me once: "Noone sees the thousands of hours I practiced by myself in a dark rehearsal room without even a window at school". That was quite enlightening to me. So, if someone says it's just "talent", its quite offensive to her. It's hard and dedicated work.
      - AstralStorm 7y ago
        But it is true. Take any random person and get them to train for this many hours, they won't even come close. Both are necessary. She gets upset because she bought into the culture that tells us we control everything about ourselves. Which is somewhat of a lie in many ways.
  - yomly 7y ago
    If you've ever thought about or done some lifting, you might be familiar with noob gains If you imagine every skill is a dimension, you'll be able to traverse to "proficient/adept" quite easily with some dedicated practice I find the more interesting reflection is how much people overestimate their abilities in the more day to day/mundane skills that everyone has some proficiency in - think "conversation" or separately "running". Both things most humans can do but also most people don't get too much further past novice in them despite being things that we have been doing all our lives. Turns out that without dedicated practice and good feedback loops, it's possible to stay a novice at something your entire life. So for me at least, talent is about your ability to improve at something with little to no direction. When I think of the greatest salespeople I know, they have been honing the skill all life, but they also never had anyone teach them what they needed to know or what was important to learn. And yet when I analyze their lives and realize that from young they were constructing feedback loops for things like "how to be funny" or "how to wow a crowd" or "how to negotiate" with virtually zero guidance, I can only infer that this is what genius looks like...
  - Daub 7y ago
    Completely agreed. Any realistic model of creativity has to accommodate both nature and nurture. Unfortunately, in the humanities, the idea that anything is natural is an unpopular position. In defence of nurture, 28% of Nobel Prize winning physicists come from families where the father was an academic professional. From the same book (The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity) we learn that this number falls to 6% for Nobel Prize winning writers. However, a whopping 30% of these writers lost at least one parent through death, abandonment or desertion. In contrast, physicists lead fairly normal lives.
- xkgt 7y ago
  // The article tries to challenge the 10000 hours rule, but fails to provide details or numbers that suggest what other factors would be more important. As per the article, one of the author Macnamara claims that a complex combination of environmental factors, genetic factors and their interactions explains the performance differences across people. I couldn't access the original paper, however it would be interesting to see how they establish this claim. Also, based on the guardian article, the refutation seems to be targeted at a strawman since the original 1993 paper never claimed that mere repetition was not sufficient. "Nonetheless, Bryan and Harter (1897, 1899) had clearly shown that with mere repetition, improvement of performance was often arrested at less than maximal levels, and further improvement required effortful reorganization of the skill"[1] Even if the authors had considered only deliberate practice, it would be quite difficult to measure the nature of a practice. 1. http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
  - AstralStorm 7y ago
    Said strawman has become a relatively widely believed myth, due to misrepresentation by a person mentioned in the article. The original paper did not claim it indeed. Read more carefully next time.
- pietrovismara 7y ago
  I think for musicians especially the effects of talent aren't possible to ignore. I've seen musicians study/play for 20 years and be good but not special, while others in the same time managed to build an international career. It's something you can clearly hear and see when they play too, not just a matter of how famous they are. It might be sad for someone but I'm convinced that not everyone has the right talent to be a musician or to play a certain instrument. Some people are geniuses, others are mediocre at best. Everyone has his strengths and talents and it's only normal that we excel at very different things.
- Kaveren 7y ago
  A new study of 5,000 students shows no material impact from growth mindset. [0] It's just feel good science. [0] https://www.tes.com/news/exclusive-growth-mindset-lessons-had-no-impact https://www.tes.com/news/exclusive-growth-mindset-lessons-ha...
seieste 7y ago
1. Deliberate practice is different than merely putting in hours. So 5,000 of difficult practice could build skills more than 10,000 of mindless repetition. 2. "10,000 hours" is a necessary, not sufficient, condition. Further, some fields (like chess) can enable expert performance with fewer hours than other fields (like history) due to the difference in skills required.
- lkjhdcba 7y ago
  I'm sorry, how does history require fewer hours than chess? Are you a historian or chess player? What does history 'performance' even mean?!
  - SamReidHughes 7y ago
    The parent said history may take more hours. I don't know much about chess, but fields like software and math are analogously low on information volume compared to history, making a much lower baseline on hours for good talent. I'd say musical performance, likewise.
    - david38 7y ago
      This is why I love computer science but hate chemistry. Too much volume.
      - noonespecial 7y ago
        If the volume bothers you, you can work mostly in moles...
    - lonelappde 7y ago
      That normalizes away, because the hours required is based on relative comparison to others, not some objective measure of talent across fields. Math has low information volume, but it is slower information. A good historical treatment of a topic may be 2000 pages, and a good math treatment of a topic may be 100pages, but both requiring the same amount of time to study and comprehend.
anthony_doan 7y ago
> “Practice makes you better than you were yesterday, most of the time,” she said. “But it might not make you better than your neighbour. Or the other kid in your violin class.” I like the ending. Self improvement should be more important than just comparing yourself with others for most things. And it is up to oneself to figure out if it's worth continuing or that the skill is worth your time.
- abootstrapper 7y ago
  Practice makes better.
  - rehasu 7y ago
    If you do it right. I think there is no book or study that says you can just improve from random activities. You need to study, focus on a topic, experiment, repeat the good stuff until you got it, find a new detailed area where you can improve.
  - CalRobert 7y ago
    My choral director long ago liked the phrase "practice makes permanent". Practicing the wrong technique can be deleterious.
- ancorevard 7y ago
  “Compare Yourself To Who You Were Yesterday, Not To Who Someone Else Is Today.” - JBP
scottlocklin 7y ago
Gee, something Malcolm Gladwell said in one of his wormy love letters to the upper middle class might be completely false? I'm terribly surprised! https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/30/malcolm_gladwell_no/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/30/malcolm_gladwell_no... https://staffanspersonalityblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/am-i-missing-something-or-is-malcolm-gladwell-a-fraud/ https://staffanspersonalityblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/am-... http://monkeysuncle.stanford.edu/?p=541 http://monkeysuncle.stanford.edu/?p=541
- swsieber 7y ago
  So, I get that you like to hate on Malcom Gladwell, but I feel this particular instance it's a little overblown. There is a huge difference between "Excellence requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice" and "If you log 10,000 you will be excellent". The article would disprove the second, but I always came away with the impression of the first (after reading the book). So to me, in this instance, I'd say "Gee, a misinterpretation of what somebody else said is false? What a surprise".
  - anthonypasq 7y ago
    Malcolm Gladwell is just trying to appeal to every dumb suckers wishful thinking that if they just try hard enough they could be the best at anything.
  - genghizkhan 7y ago
    The issue is that Malcolm Gladwell wanted a catchy number/title, and 10,000 hours happened to be one which caught his (and admittedly even my own) fancy. The book "Outliers" does not try to delve into the places where the 10,000 rule doesn't work. And more importantly, if you read the literature, you'll find that there's a great deal of dependence on the kind of practice you do. Merely performing mindless repetition isn't going to help at all. You require a certain kind of focussed practice to get the benefits of the 10,000 hours rule Gladwell extols. The book "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" goes in depth about the fallacies in Galdwell's book. One of the authors of that book is the guy whose research formed the basis of Gladwell's own book. I would recommend you read that in order to understand where Gladwell misleads. In summary, if what you want from a book is pseudo-scientific reasoning for increasing practice time, Malcolm Gladwell is your man. If his words motivate you to practice harder, go ahead and read him. However, if you want scientific reasoning behind why practicing works and how to extract the most out of it, you'd best look elsewhere. The statement "Excellence requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice" is itself untrue. This varies wildly with the kind of practice you do, the kind of feedback you get, and the field in which you wish to gain excellence. Oversimplification, as Gladwell does, is an easy way to make yourself a target of accusations of quackery. The statement that "Excellence requires many hours of deliberate practice, and you'd better practice things the correct way for your practice routine to work for you" might be a better characterisation of the science as is currently understood.
bsder 7y ago
I believe that the current phrase is: "Practice makes permanent." It's up to the person to make sure that what they practice is correct.
- hellofunk 7y ago
  That’s correct, it’s usually said that perfect practice makes perfect. But bad habits are just as easy to form.
- kcoul 7y ago
  Exactly - I have done a number of research studies focused on how musicians do or do not develop robust memory models of the pieces they learn, based on how they practice, and the data consistently pointed to a correlation between robustness and practice approach. Anyone who has taught piano for example knows the most common mistake of novice students is to omit sharp or flat notes (the black notes) when learning notated music which begins to include them. In this case, the student will practice the wrong notes for long enough before their next lesson that the wrong notes become engrained in their memory model, resurfacing under duress such as in recital. There are similarities for other instruments (strings: intonation, woodwinds: embouchure, percussion: rhythmic accuracy, etc.) The most talented students seem to gravitate consistently towards robust memory models for their respective instruments technique as a way of freeing themselves up as quickly as possible for the more enjoyable aspects of perfecting a piece of music: refining expression. Perhaps one day there will be tools which can assist those less naturally predisposed to developing robust memory models, before it's too late for their brain, the way the most talented students do.
irjustin 7y ago
I feel like this is responding to the extreme simplification simply practicing more produces results which is analogous to the 10,000 hour Gladwell comment. Most people would agree simply spending hours on something doesn't usually get you very far. It's the quality of that training tied to your own aptitude for the subject. Sadly or thankfully, since we don't know the limits of our own aptitudes, we can really only do high quality training to see where we peak out. I think it's easy to believe that the above statement is widely understood, but it's not. Meet any kid who has been forced to do piano, swimming or whatever by their parents. My parents and I know so many others who simply forced their kids to practice practice practice in hopes it will lead somewhere. 12 years of piano. I barely even know how to read music and play any instrument.
- iovrthoughtthis 7y ago
  Repetition without feedback (from reflection or assessment) is just repetition. You need some feedback about how wrong you are and in what dimension. You then have to adjust that dimension proportionally to the feedback. All of that is hard.
chasing 7y ago
> In the book, Gladwell states that “ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness”. > “The idea has become really entrenched in our culture, but it’s an oversimplification,” said Brooke Macnamara, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Yeah, that's because Malcolm Gladwell peddles bullshit.
- juniusfree 7y ago
  The 10,000-Hour Rule Was Wrong, According to the People Who Wrote the Original Study https://www.inc.com/nick-skillicorn/the-10000-hour-rule-was-wrong-according-to-the-people-who-wrote-the-original-stu.html https://www.inc.com/nick-skillicorn/the-10000-hour-rule-was-...
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    That article is a list of irrelevant nitpickery and mischaracterization of Gladwell. https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/complexity-and-the-ten-thousand-hour-rule https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/complexity-a...
- lonelappde 7y ago
  No, people who intentionally misquote Gladwell peddle bullshit. https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/complexity-and-the-ten-thousand-hour-rule https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/complexity-a...
CJKerr 7y ago
For a much better treatment of the same general idea, read "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" by K. Anders Ericsson.
plaidfuji 7y ago
My karate instructor always said “perfect practice makes perfect”. Your teacher helps you define what “perfect” is, and it’s up to you to slow down or break up what you’re practicing in order to achieve that standard.
vintermann 7y ago
Anyone who knows anything about violins or violinists, know that the difference between the "best" and the merely "very good" is rather arbitrary, subjective and down to fashion (or even nonmusical factors). It's thus not surprising practice makes little difference - all those violinists are as good at the technical aspects as you can sensibly get.
- sirspacey 7y ago
  As a classically trained violinist with decades Of experience as a professional musician, this is not at all my experience. At the age of 16 I was dedicating 6 to 8 hours a day practicing. That was the norm among my classmates. The lead violinist in our orchestra was a prodigy who picked up and mastered a piece in two weeks which most of us would never be able to play. Trained violinists can tell the difference between many levels of ability and performance. The truth is that there are people who can play the instrument beyond the reach of everyone else. That’s true for any highly technical instrument, of which the violin is certainly one. If studying violin taught me anything, it is that there is a power law to human ability and deliberate practice is simply an augmentation (which is also an unevenly distributes ability).
ChrisRR 7y ago
As a learning violinist with 2 years experience I can understand this completely, especially with good teaching and focused practice. I noticed a real difference between when I switched from a teacher more suited to children to one more for adults. My practice became more focused, my time was better spent and overall the quality of my playing drastically improved. Additionally, if my teacher is away for a week and I go without a lesson, I notice that I can spend a lot of time creating bad habits which then become muscle memory. So I can understand why 10k hours of poor quality practice can be worth 5k hours of good, focused practice
blue_devil 7y ago
2 methodological issues: >> They interviewed three groups of 13 violinists [...] before having them complete daily diaries of their activities over a week. You're basically priming interviewees, and without a control group, you're unable to partial out the variance due to "being interviewed". They need diaries from people who were interviewed _after_ taking diaries, and a group of people never interviewed. >> [... ] complete daily diaries of their activities _over_a _week. While the less skilful violinists clocked up an average of about 6,000 hours of practice by the age of 20, there was little to separate the good from the best musicians, with each logging an average of about 11,000 hours Extrapolation from a 1-week diary to your entire life until age 20?
noelwelsh 7y ago
It takes one look at a professional sports team to see that practice is not sufficient to reach the highest levels of ability. This is particularly pronounced in basketball. For example, compare the skill level between two very good players: Steph Curry (6'3") and Shaq (7'1"). Shaq at 6'3" would never have been a pro player. Steph at 7'1" would be the greatest player of all time.
- lonelappde 7y ago
  How do you know steph could have developed the same way it he were taller?
  - mc_blue 7y ago
    Exactly! If Steph was 7'1", my bet is he would rely more on playing closer to the basket (like Shaq did) and would not have had a need to develop his 3-point shooting to the level that it is today. Also, how do we know that Shaq at 6'3" wouldn't have developed into a different style of pro player?
- deleted 7y ago
  [deleted]
Daub 7y ago
As an art teacher, I have certainly seen the best artists evolve naturally from those who also work the hardest. As Weisberg mentions in 'Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius', when the Beatles moved to Hamburg, they were a run of the mill band. When they returned, they were the Beatles as we know them. The reason: gigging four hours a day, seven days a week over one year. However, I have also seen other factors play a part. Certainly, the very intelligent artists are prone to self-destruictive criticism, and frequently fade from view. But in my experience, the most important thing an artists can posses is a coherent sense of self.
- majos 7y ago
  When you think of the "best artists" you've seen, are you making any distinction between technical and creative skill? For example, there are many great studio musicians who are nonetheless nowhere near as good as composers of original music. I would expect that technical skill is a more natural outgrowth of hard work than creative skill, even as the Beatles-in-Hamburg story claims a growth in creative skill.
  - Daub 7y ago
    Well... generally I would say that a good artist is a mix of the technically adept, some kind of sense of self, and ‘being there where it’s at’. That last value refers to how in tune they are with the cultural zeitgeist. There are ways around the first value, but not the second and third.
lawn 7y ago
I like "perfect practice makes perfect" and "practice makes permanent". It's why you often have to spend a lot of time unlearning bad practices before you can move forward to a higher level.
astura 7y ago
Seems obvious, I think we've all worked with that one person who's been writing software for 20 years and still sucks, making the same mistakes over and over again.
delidumrul 7y ago
But the perfectness always comes with the practicing.
lonelappde 7y ago
Article is just a long-winded confusion of correlation vs causation. Nothing to see.
AceyMan 7y ago
One of my canonical examples of "first, start with talent" is found in the world's great football (soccer) players. As the most popular sport in the world—and one which a huge share of young persons try to attain some mastery AND where scouts comb every corner of the earth in search of talent—the stars of the sport are outliers on the orders of 1 in 10^7. This YT clip (2m33s) of Neymar, Jr doing "The Crossbar Challenge" demonstrates how far out on the long tail the best players are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zre-uH2p4M0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zre-uH2p4M0 I think it's not controversial to claim no amount of practice could take you to this level unless you "have it."
- perl4ever 7y ago
  If talent, luck, resources, and a temperament for hard work are assigned randomly, some people will have all of them, and you will find them at the top. What stories they tell themselves or others about the key to success are irrelevant, because only people with every advantage can be the best. That's what being the best is. How can one factor be more important?

66 points by EwanToo 7y ago

After reading this article I'm not sure if I read or learned anything new. The article tries to challenge the 10000 hours rule, but fails to provide details or numbers that suggest what other factors would be more important. It briefly mentions things like "talent", but after reading Growth Mindset I'm convinced that talent alone just provides a starting advantage. The book gives plenty of examples of that. The article should highlight more what kind of practice they refer to and what they think is the main contributing factor. I think to become an expert in something like playing a musical instrument focused practice and repetition is necessary, so having the right coach is extremely important. However, the most crucial piece might actually be the passion or willingness to learn in my opinion.

Blackstone4 7y ago
I feel like I hold two conflicting beliefs...growth mindset (the brain is a muscle which can be exercised) and inherit talent... My belief in growth mindset has help me improve my communication skills both oral and written. However I also recognise that I have certain limitations based on natural talent. For instance, I’m likely to never to be as good at word games (i.e. scrabble) as many friends and family members. This is at odds with my growth mindset to a certain extent. Maybe any skill can be improved upon but natural talent gives us an inherit advantage over the rest of the field.
- apersona 7y ago
  The model I have right now is that talent is learning rate, so I don't see how the beliefs conflict with each other. Some people pick things up faster than others, but if you put more effort you can still catch up. It also explains why even talented people still need to practice/learn/etc. to be at the top of their fields.
  - rmetzler 7y ago
    Yes, and the article even fails to mention that it might be more important how someone practices than how much the person practices.
  - TheOtherHobbes 7y ago
    Talent is the amount of work you don't have to do to better than the average person. It also sets a ceiling. Beyond a certain level, no amount of work will make you any better, because you fundamentally don't have the cognitive skill or physical ability to improve further. I've spent a fair amount of time with musicians, and talent can be very obvious. You can have a room full of people who have spent years practicing and been through a degree program. They're all outstanding compared to most of the population. But sometimes one person in that room will still stand out, because their playing will be insightful, compelling, and musical in a way the others can't match. It's an instant thing - it only takes a few bars to hear it. They won't necessarily have done the most work, or put the most hours in. But they will, in some absolutely fundamental way, "get it" - usually from birth. The hours and the work refine that ability and make it more obvious. But they can't create it.
  - kerng 7y ago
    A friend of mine is a professional violinist. People say she is really talented and skilled. The interesting thing is that she gets very upset when people say: you are so talented. The reason she explained to me once is that people see her perform and play and think that's just how easy it is for her. She said to me once: "Noone sees the thousands of hours I practiced by myself in a dark rehearsal room without even a window at school". That was quite enlightening to me. So, if someone says it's just "talent", its quite offensive to her. It's hard and dedicated work.
    - AstralStorm 7y ago
      But it is true. Take any random person and get them to train for this many hours, they won't even come close. Both are necessary. She gets upset because she bought into the culture that tells us we control everything about ourselves. Which is somewhat of a lie in many ways.
- yomly 7y ago
  If you've ever thought about or done some lifting, you might be familiar with noob gains If you imagine every skill is a dimension, you'll be able to traverse to "proficient/adept" quite easily with some dedicated practice I find the more interesting reflection is how much people overestimate their abilities in the more day to day/mundane skills that everyone has some proficiency in - think "conversation" or separately "running". Both things most humans can do but also most people don't get too much further past novice in them despite being things that we have been doing all our lives. Turns out that without dedicated practice and good feedback loops, it's possible to stay a novice at something your entire life. So for me at least, talent is about your ability to improve at something with little to no direction. When I think of the greatest salespeople I know, they have been honing the skill all life, but they also never had anyone teach them what they needed to know or what was important to learn. And yet when I analyze their lives and realize that from young they were constructing feedback loops for things like "how to be funny" or "how to wow a crowd" or "how to negotiate" with virtually zero guidance, I can only infer that this is what genius looks like...
- Daub 7y ago
  Completely agreed. Any realistic model of creativity has to accommodate both nature and nurture. Unfortunately, in the humanities, the idea that anything is natural is an unpopular position. In defence of nurture, 28% of Nobel Prize winning physicists come from families where the father was an academic professional. From the same book (The Cambridge Handbook of Creativity) we learn that this number falls to 6% for Nobel Prize winning writers. However, a whopping 30% of these writers lost at least one parent through death, abandonment or desertion. In contrast, physicists lead fairly normal lives.
xkgt 7y ago
// The article tries to challenge the 10000 hours rule, but fails to provide details or numbers that suggest what other factors would be more important. As per the article, one of the author Macnamara claims that a complex combination of environmental factors, genetic factors and their interactions explains the performance differences across people. I couldn't access the original paper, however it would be interesting to see how they establish this claim. Also, based on the guardian article, the refutation seems to be targeted at a strawman since the original 1993 paper never claimed that mere repetition was not sufficient. "Nonetheless, Bryan and Harter (1897, 1899) had clearly shown that with mere repetition, improvement of performance was often arrested at less than maximal levels, and further improvement required effortful reorganization of the skill"[1] Even if the authors had considered only deliberate practice, it would be quite difficult to measure the nature of a practice. 1. http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracticePR93.pdf http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...
- AstralStorm 7y ago
  Said strawman has become a relatively widely believed myth, due to misrepresentation by a person mentioned in the article. The original paper did not claim it indeed. Read more carefully next time.
pietrovismara 7y ago
I think for musicians especially the effects of talent aren't possible to ignore. I've seen musicians study/play for 20 years and be good but not special, while others in the same time managed to build an international career. It's something you can clearly hear and see when they play too, not just a matter of how famous they are. It might be sad for someone but I'm convinced that not everyone has the right talent to be a musician or to play a certain instrument. Some people are geniuses, others are mediocre at best. Everyone has his strengths and talents and it's only normal that we excel at very different things.
Kaveren 7y ago
A new study of 5,000 students shows no material impact from growth mindset. [0] It's just feel good science. [0] https://www.tes.com/news/exclusive-growth-mindset-lessons-had-no-impact https://www.tes.com/news/exclusive-growth-mindset-lessons-ha...

seieste 7y ago

1. Deliberate practice is different than merely putting in hours. So 5,000 of difficult practice could build skills more than 10,000 of mindless repetition. 2. "10,000 hours" is a necessary, not sufficient, condition. Further, some fields (like chess) can enable expert performance with fewer hours than other fields (like history) due to the difference in skills required.

lkjhdcba 7y ago
I'm sorry, how does history require fewer hours than chess? Are you a historian or chess player? What does history 'performance' even mean?!
- SamReidHughes 7y ago
  The parent said history may take more hours. I don't know much about chess, but fields like software and math are analogously low on information volume compared to history, making a much lower baseline on hours for good talent. I'd say musical performance, likewise.
  - david38 7y ago
    This is why I love computer science but hate chemistry. Too much volume.
    - noonespecial 7y ago
      If the volume bothers you, you can work mostly in moles...
  - lonelappde 7y ago
    That normalizes away, because the hours required is based on relative comparison to others, not some objective measure of talent across fields. Math has low information volume, but it is slower information. A good historical treatment of a topic may be 2000 pages, and a good math treatment of a topic may be 100pages, but both requiring the same amount of time to study and comprehend.

anthony_doan 7y ago

> “Practice makes you better than you were yesterday, most of the time,” she said. “But it might not make you better than your neighbour. Or the other kid in your violin class.” I like the ending. Self improvement should be more important than just comparing yourself with others for most things. And it is up to oneself to figure out if it's worth continuing or that the skill is worth your time.

abootstrapper 7y ago
Practice makes better.
- rehasu 7y ago
  If you do it right. I think there is no book or study that says you can just improve from random activities. You need to study, focus on a topic, experiment, repeat the good stuff until you got it, find a new detailed area where you can improve.
- CalRobert 7y ago
  My choral director long ago liked the phrase "practice makes permanent". Practicing the wrong technique can be deleterious.
ancorevard 7y ago
“Compare Yourself To Who You Were Yesterday, Not To Who Someone Else Is Today.” - JBP

scottlocklin 7y ago

Gee, something Malcolm Gladwell said in one of his wormy love letters to the upper middle class might be completely false? I'm terribly surprised! https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/30/malcolm_gladwell_no/ https://www.theregister.co.uk/2008/11/30/malcolm_gladwell_no... https://staffanspersonalityblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/am-i-missing-something-or-is-malcolm-gladwell-a-fraud/ https://staffanspersonalityblog.wordpress.com/2013/10/24/am-... http://monkeysuncle.stanford.edu/?p=541 http://monkeysuncle.stanford.edu/?p=541

swsieber 7y ago
So, I get that you like to hate on Malcom Gladwell, but I feel this particular instance it's a little overblown. There is a huge difference between "Excellence requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice" and "If you log 10,000 you will be excellent". The article would disprove the second, but I always came away with the impression of the first (after reading the book). So to me, in this instance, I'd say "Gee, a misinterpretation of what somebody else said is false? What a surprise".
- anthonypasq 7y ago
  Malcolm Gladwell is just trying to appeal to every dumb suckers wishful thinking that if they just try hard enough they could be the best at anything.
- genghizkhan 7y ago
  The issue is that Malcolm Gladwell wanted a catchy number/title, and 10,000 hours happened to be one which caught his (and admittedly even my own) fancy. The book "Outliers" does not try to delve into the places where the 10,000 rule doesn't work. And more importantly, if you read the literature, you'll find that there's a great deal of dependence on the kind of practice you do. Merely performing mindless repetition isn't going to help at all. You require a certain kind of focussed practice to get the benefits of the 10,000 hours rule Gladwell extols. The book "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" goes in depth about the fallacies in Galdwell's book. One of the authors of that book is the guy whose research formed the basis of Gladwell's own book. I would recommend you read that in order to understand where Gladwell misleads. In summary, if what you want from a book is pseudo-scientific reasoning for increasing practice time, Malcolm Gladwell is your man. If his words motivate you to practice harder, go ahead and read him. However, if you want scientific reasoning behind why practicing works and how to extract the most out of it, you'd best look elsewhere. The statement "Excellence requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice" is itself untrue. This varies wildly with the kind of practice you do, the kind of feedback you get, and the field in which you wish to gain excellence. Oversimplification, as Gladwell does, is an easy way to make yourself a target of accusations of quackery. The statement that "Excellence requires many hours of deliberate practice, and you'd better practice things the correct way for your practice routine to work for you" might be a better characterisation of the science as is currently understood.

bsder 7y ago

I believe that the current phrase is: "Practice makes permanent." It's up to the person to make sure that what they practice is correct.

hellofunk 7y ago
That’s correct, it’s usually said that perfect practice makes perfect. But bad habits are just as easy to form.
kcoul 7y ago
Exactly - I have done a number of research studies focused on how musicians do or do not develop robust memory models of the pieces they learn, based on how they practice, and the data consistently pointed to a correlation between robustness and practice approach. Anyone who has taught piano for example knows the most common mistake of novice students is to omit sharp or flat notes (the black notes) when learning notated music which begins to include them. In this case, the student will practice the wrong notes for long enough before their next lesson that the wrong notes become engrained in their memory model, resurfacing under duress such as in recital. There are similarities for other instruments (strings: intonation, woodwinds: embouchure, percussion: rhythmic accuracy, etc.) The most talented students seem to gravitate consistently towards robust memory models for their respective instruments technique as a way of freeing themselves up as quickly as possible for the more enjoyable aspects of perfecting a piece of music: refining expression. Perhaps one day there will be tools which can assist those less naturally predisposed to developing robust memory models, before it's too late for their brain, the way the most talented students do.

irjustin 7y ago

I feel like this is responding to the extreme simplification simply practicing more produces results which is analogous to the 10,000 hour Gladwell comment. Most people would agree simply spending hours on something doesn't usually get you very far. It's the quality of that training tied to your own aptitude for the subject. Sadly or thankfully, since we don't know the limits of our own aptitudes, we can really only do high quality training to see where we peak out. I think it's easy to believe that the above statement is widely understood, but it's not. Meet any kid who has been forced to do piano, swimming or whatever by their parents. My parents and I know so many others who simply forced their kids to practice practice practice in hopes it will lead somewhere. 12 years of piano. I barely even know how to read music and play any instrument.

iovrthoughtthis 7y ago
Repetition without feedback (from reflection or assessment) is just repetition. You need some feedback about how wrong you are and in what dimension. You then have to adjust that dimension proportionally to the feedback. All of that is hard.

chasing 7y ago

> In the book, Gladwell states that “ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness”. > “The idea has become really entrenched in our culture, but it’s an oversimplification,” said Brooke Macnamara, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio. Yeah, that's because Malcolm Gladwell peddles bullshit.

juniusfree 7y ago
The 10,000-Hour Rule Was Wrong, According to the People Who Wrote the Original Study https://www.inc.com/nick-skillicorn/the-10000-hour-rule-was-wrong-according-to-the-people-who-wrote-the-original-stu.html https://www.inc.com/nick-skillicorn/the-10000-hour-rule-was-...
- lonelappde 7y ago
  That article is a list of irrelevant nitpickery and mischaracterization of Gladwell. https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/complexity-and-the-ten-thousand-hour-rule https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/complexity-a...
lonelappde 7y ago
No, people who intentionally misquote Gladwell peddle bullshit. https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/complexity-and-the-ten-thousand-hour-rule https://www.newyorker.com/sports/sporting-scene/complexity-a...

CJKerr 7y ago

For a much better treatment of the same general idea, read "Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise" by K. Anders Ericsson.

plaidfuji 7y ago

My karate instructor always said “perfect practice makes perfect”. Your teacher helps you define what “perfect” is, and it’s up to you to slow down or break up what you’re practicing in order to achieve that standard.

vintermann 7y ago

Anyone who knows anything about violins or violinists, know that the difference between the "best" and the merely "very good" is rather arbitrary, subjective and down to fashion (or even nonmusical factors). It's thus not surprising practice makes little difference - all those violinists are as good at the technical aspects as you can sensibly get.

sirspacey 7y ago
As a classically trained violinist with decades Of experience as a professional musician, this is not at all my experience. At the age of 16 I was dedicating 6 to 8 hours a day practicing. That was the norm among my classmates. The lead violinist in our orchestra was a prodigy who picked up and mastered a piece in two weeks which most of us would never be able to play. Trained violinists can tell the difference between many levels of ability and performance. The truth is that there are people who can play the instrument beyond the reach of everyone else. That’s true for any highly technical instrument, of which the violin is certainly one. If studying violin taught me anything, it is that there is a power law to human ability and deliberate practice is simply an augmentation (which is also an unevenly distributes ability).

ChrisRR 7y ago

As a learning violinist with 2 years experience I can understand this completely, especially with good teaching and focused practice. I noticed a real difference between when I switched from a teacher more suited to children to one more for adults. My practice became more focused, my time was better spent and overall the quality of my playing drastically improved. Additionally, if my teacher is away for a week and I go without a lesson, I notice that I can spend a lot of time creating bad habits which then become muscle memory. So I can understand why 10k hours of poor quality practice can be worth 5k hours of good, focused practice

blue_devil 7y ago

2 methodological issues: >> They interviewed three groups of 13 violinists [...] before having them complete daily diaries of their activities over a week. You're basically priming interviewees, and without a control group, you're unable to partial out the variance due to "being interviewed". They need diaries from people who were interviewed _after_ taking diaries, and a group of people never interviewed. >> [... ] complete daily diaries of their activities _over_a _week. While the less skilful violinists clocked up an average of about 6,000 hours of practice by the age of 20, there was little to separate the good from the best musicians, with each logging an average of about 11,000 hours Extrapolation from a 1-week diary to your entire life until age 20?

noelwelsh 7y ago

It takes one look at a professional sports team to see that practice is not sufficient to reach the highest levels of ability. This is particularly pronounced in basketball. For example, compare the skill level between two very good players: Steph Curry (6'3") and Shaq (7'1"). Shaq at 6'3" would never have been a pro player. Steph at 7'1" would be the greatest player of all time.

lonelappde 7y ago
How do you know steph could have developed the same way it he were taller?
- mc_blue 7y ago
  Exactly! If Steph was 7'1", my bet is he would rely more on playing closer to the basket (like Shaq did) and would not have had a need to develop his 3-point shooting to the level that it is today. Also, how do we know that Shaq at 6'3" wouldn't have developed into a different style of pro player?
deleted 7y ago
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Daub 7y ago

As an art teacher, I have certainly seen the best artists evolve naturally from those who also work the hardest. As Weisberg mentions in 'Creativity: Beyond the Myth of Genius', when the Beatles moved to Hamburg, they were a run of the mill band. When they returned, they were the Beatles as we know them. The reason: gigging four hours a day, seven days a week over one year. However, I have also seen other factors play a part. Certainly, the very intelligent artists are prone to self-destruictive criticism, and frequently fade from view. But in my experience, the most important thing an artists can posses is a coherent sense of self.

majos 7y ago
When you think of the "best artists" you've seen, are you making any distinction between technical and creative skill? For example, there are many great studio musicians who are nonetheless nowhere near as good as composers of original music. I would expect that technical skill is a more natural outgrowth of hard work than creative skill, even as the Beatles-in-Hamburg story claims a growth in creative skill.
- Daub 7y ago
  Well... generally I would say that a good artist is a mix of the technically adept, some kind of sense of self, and ‘being there where it’s at’. That last value refers to how in tune they are with the cultural zeitgeist. There are ways around the first value, but not the second and third.

lawn 7y ago

I like "perfect practice makes perfect" and "practice makes permanent". It's why you often have to spend a lot of time unlearning bad practices before you can move forward to a higher level.

astura 7y ago

Seems obvious, I think we've all worked with that one person who's been writing software for 20 years and still sucks, making the same mistakes over and over again.

delidumrul 7y ago

But the perfectness always comes with the practicing.

lonelappde 7y ago

Article is just a long-winded confusion of correlation vs causation. Nothing to see.

AceyMan 7y ago

One of my canonical examples of "first, start with talent" is found in the world's great football (soccer) players. As the most popular sport in the world—and one which a huge share of young persons try to attain some mastery AND where scouts comb every corner of the earth in search of talent—the stars of the sport are outliers on the orders of 1 in 10^7. This YT clip (2m33s) of Neymar, Jr doing "The Crossbar Challenge" demonstrates how far out on the long tail the best players are. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zre-uH2p4M0 https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Zre-uH2p4M0 I think it's not controversial to claim no amount of practice could take you to this level unless you "have it."

perl4ever 7y ago
If talent, luck, resources, and a temperament for hard work are assigned randomly, some people will have all of them, and you will find them at the top. What stories they tell themselves or others about the key to success are irrelevant, because only people with every advantage can be the best. That's what being the best is. How can one factor be more important?