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My understanding is that “10,000 hours” isn’t a strategy, or rule, or evidence-based observation but rather a catch phrase of Malcolm Gladwell’s to make memorab
by riazrizvi 6y ago
My understanding is that “10,000 hours” isn’t a strategy, or rule, or evidence-based observation but rather a catch phrase of Malcolm Gladwell’s to make memorable a finding that he references in his book Outliers. The finding is by Anders Ericsson, it’s detailed in his book The Path To Excellence, along with his evidence, and it says that extensive Deliberate Practice is what makes an outstanding expert, and that instead people generally mistakenly assume that semi-automatic repetition strongly correlates with expertise development, which it does not.
So counting how many hours you’ve been working in a field is the exact mistake that most people make. Gladwell’s book has reinforced that confusion.
- redis_mlc 6y ago> My understanding is that “10,000 hours” isn’t a strategy Try and play a sport or instrument without practising. Oh wait ... > So counting how many hours you’ve been working in a field is the exact mistake that most people make. No, the mistake most people make is not practising. You're making the mistake of being a tool and virtue signalling on HN for other nerds. "On HN, our job is being a pedant."
- SilverRed 6y agoIMO the 10,000 hours thing is more of a truism based on the definition of what we call an expert. Its based on the human lifespan more than anything. If we lived twice as long, we would have professionals with much higher times spent practicing on average.
- locuscoeruleus 6y agoThe 10,000 hours is how much solitary deliberate practice the students who were accepted into some acknowledged music conservatory had put in by the age of 18 (or some such). They aren't considered experts. But for the ones that make it through the ordeal of that school, some of them will be what we consider experts some day in the future.
- Retric 6y agoI disagree, an expert isn’t a master. Compare applicants and graduates of these elite conservatory’s and there is real improvement, but most people off the street would have trouble distinguishing the before and after simply by ear.
- mavhc 6y agoPart of the point was that you have to be quite rich to be able to afford to spend 10,000 hours on something, you require other people to take up the slack of things you're not doing because you're practisting things, pay for lessons, drive you to practise.
- riazrizvi 6y agoLook, there it is again! You’re implying that 100% of their practice is deliberate practice. Which is, I think extremely unlikely. People like Wayne Goretsky, Michael Jordan, or Dan Gable, likely approached high ratios of deliberate practice in addition to high practice volumes, it’s rare.
- omega3 6y agoI have a theory (very likely not novel) that the number of hours isn't as important as the continuity and the quality. I've seen first hand the tax people pay when they master something and then stop that activity and then rejoin in martial arts, domain specific knowledge, languages etc.
- cryptica 6y agoAgreed, 10K hours is not enough to become an expert in coding for example. You need at least 40K hours with many different languages, companies and projects to become a senior developer. I did 44K hours in 15 years working for around 15 different companies in 6 different countries and open source work on the side for nights and weekends before I became CTO of a small bootstrapped startup.