6 ms·

How many 10K hours do you have left?

57 points by muan 14y ago

vowelless 14y ago
Somewhat relevant, "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 years" by Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html
jack_trades 14y ago
A graph since no calculator was provided. Zoom out a bit to get the right scale. http://bit.ly/11wIBQo http://bit.ly/11wIBQo
mrleinad 14y ago
5 more achievements to unlock before game over
- kiba 14y ago
  Clearly, we need to hack the underlying codebase to allows more time for achievements. On a serious thought, if old people live longer, we have longer access to their knowledge and expertise. When old people die, we lost some their expertise forever. So if we cure cancer and other diseases, that would be money well spent.
  - muan 14y ago
    On a serious thought, here's how to NOT lose elders' expertise forever: http://www.theamazings.com/ http://www.theamazings.com/
  - Evbn 13y ago
    Thanks we have books, videos, and Internet. A lot of what people know is redundantly distributed.
psycr 14y ago
How could anyone actually sustain such a rate of learning? Two hours every weekday, plus an additional sixteen hours every weekend for 48 weeks every year? Life creeps up, and seeps into the cracks so tenuously occupied by free time. Mastering but a single skill is impressive.
- mrleinad 14y ago
  2 hours a day is not something completely unachievable. Hell, I spent that time everyday watching some movie or just relaxing.
  - daok 14y ago
    Yes but if you work full time and you have a family this 2 hours per day become rare. It's also important to notice that your body require to have some relaxing time which is also needed to be in consideration. Yes you may remove all "wasted time" of your day, but at the end, your brain will need rest. Spending your whole life optimizing this time will just get you more chance to get a burnout. 18 hours per week on free time is huge and hard to get once you have children, friends, and social activities.
    - mrleinad 14y ago
      Of course. I don't have a family and live alone. If you can't get those 2 hours because of other things, well, it won't work.
    - ternaryoperator 13y ago
      That's exactly right. As you get older, you begin to derive joy from things other than mastering new skills. I understand the OP's original post was more about time in the abstract, but the point you make is in fact the reality.
- Evbn 13y ago
  That rate sounds like what many kids do who become successful adults. Kids are born learners, at a far more intense rate than that. But adults? Become a manager and wise advisor.
sireat 14y ago
Sadly, the problem is that the older you does not get the same out of 10k hours of deliberate practice than the younger you. Let's take chess: 10k hours of deliberate practice in your teen years will make you a master level player (and possibly near GM caliber if you think Polgar experiment was not a fluke). There are no known instances of someone starting to play chess after age of 30 and getting near GM. Conversely, I've known people who retired in their 40s and dedicated themselves to chess and could not achieve more than a 50-100 point gain. I would love to be proven wrong, but I suspect the story is the same with piano, violin and programming. Your 10k hours at age 40 will not get you near anywhere the same return than 10k hours at age 10-16. I would love to see some references to people achieving mastery in some field past the age of 40 starting from scratch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity is supposed to show that it is possible to get good at a later age, but I am very skeptical.
- kylescheele 14y ago
  I'll agree with the idea that it's harder for the older you to master something than it is for the younger you, but I don't think it has to do with physiological reasons. I think it has to do with things like time, commitments, obligations, and fears. When you're young, you have more time, less commitments and obligations (family, job, etc.), and generally less fears (if I screw this up, it's fine because I'm 17). As you grow older, these things get added on and it becomes difficult to motivate yourself to actually spend the 10k hours. If you're talking about something like skateboarding, I think you're right that younger people will learn it better and faster than old people, because it's inherently physical. If you're talking about a mental task, I think it's a matter of whether or not you will sit down and do the work.
  - incision 14y ago
    Well said. I think this discussion [1] from other day is relevant. Basically, getting old and taking on more responsibilities doesn't necessarily have to mean becoming less productive as long as you can adapt your strategy and habits. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5488037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5488037
Felix21 14y ago
With the amount of hours i work now i can master 3 new things by the time i'm 30. That's incredibly exciting.
anthonycerra 14y ago
This is a cool brain hack in that it uses math to convince you that you're not too old to become a master at something. One issue I have with the 10,000 hour rule in general is this: there are approximately 2,088 hours in a work-year not counting overtime. To achieve mastery in your profession would then take less than 5 years. Most professions don't consider someone an expert 5 years into their careers. So does that mean a) you're not really improving that much in those 5 years b) there are more conditions to the 10,000 hour rule c) the 10,000 hour rule is flawed or d) the evaluation of one's expertise is flawed? Another issue I have with the 10,000 hour rule is the idea of competence and sufficient experience. At what level of experience (in this case, hours) are you competent enough to achieve your goal? If programming, at what level can you create something that solves a given problem. If business, at what level can you successfully run a startup, etc. So if the target changes to "enough experience to achieve a specific goal" then I'd argue one has much more time available to him/her than what this math suggests.
- kenjackson 14y ago
  The 10k hour rule isn't about experience, but about deliberate practice. Two very different things.
- sputknick 14y ago
  I work roughly 2000 hours a year in my field, but that includes meetings, and HR stuff, and answering client questions, creating proposals etc.. I would bet I spend right around 400-800 hours a year growing in my field. That would put mastery more like 10-25 years away.
- kylescheele 14y ago
  Agreed. I think this is where you get into mastery vs. experience. 10k hours of a task does not make you an expert unless you've spent those 10k hours deliberately attempting to gain expertise. This is also where you get into good practice vs. bad practice. i.e., the average golf enthusiast "practices" by going to the driving range, because it's easy and fun and he's probably already decent at using a driver. Someone who wants to become a golf professional practices by hitting a hundred balls out of a sand trap or driving into the wind or any number of other difficult techniques they're not good at yet. It's not so much the passage of time (10k hours) that matters, as it is how you spend those hours. To your second point, "mastery" is sort of a vague term. I like your idea of "enough to achieve a certain goal". That's probably better from a mental health perspective too (experts in many fields are pretty crazy because they've devoted themselves exclusively to this one narrow area for years and years).
localfugue 14y ago
Looks like we hugged this site to death: I now get a "500 Internal Server Error". Here's the google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fnowincolour.com%2F2013%2F04%2Fhow-many-10k-hours-do-you-have-left%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fnowincolour.com%2F2013%2F04%2Fhow-many-10k-hours-do-you-have-left%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cac...
dgabriel 14y ago
I thought the "10k" rule had been discredited. http://allaboutwork.org/2012/11/21/malcolm-gladwells-10000-hour-rule-doesnt-add-up/ http://allaboutwork.org/2012/11/21/malcolm-gladwells-10000-h...
- Evbn 13y ago
  Really, finding a few examples of 7000k hour violin players discredits the 10k hour rules? It's an estimate, not a mission to mars. Are you also offended by astronomers getting the mass of a star, or geologists measuring the amount of oil in a well wrong? They would be delighted to get the order of magnitude right.
samegreatsleeve 14y ago
Why do you guys buy into this 10k hours bullshit? The 10k hours claim is utter nonsense on the most basic level. How exactly is "one skill" defined? There is no such thing as "one skill." Every skill, field, whatever is a highly complex amalgam of countless sub-skills. How do you determine the extent of the "one skill" that you're devoting to? Let's say you want to master 18th century history, defined as achieving a skill/knowledge level of X in that field. Does this take 10k hours? Why not 20k? Why not 5k? How can anyone assume that just because 18th century history has been defined as a particular "skill" that reaching some skill level X will take 10k hours? If you instead choose to master early 18th century history from 1700-1730 so that you know the years 1700-1730 just as well as the 1700-1800 specialist, does it now take you only 3K hours instead of 10K? Does any of this math make any sense at all? Since the concept of "one skill" is utterly absurd nonsense that is completely undefinable, and the concept of "mastery" is equally undefinable and meaningless, this whole 10k meme is nothing but marketing bullshit of the kind that Gladwell mass produces in his shitty vapid books. Gladwell is a hack of the highest order. He has never said anything meaningful. This 10k hour meme is just another marketing turd he shit out to mystify and flatter the dumb middle classes who read poppy trash like Gladwell so they can call themselves literate. Fucking disgrace that people take this seriously
TrevorJ 13y ago
Couple flaws I see here: first, I'm not convinced that 10k hours is a reasonable estimate given how vastly different any given discipline is from another. Some disciplines allow for fast iteration and thus more practice in a shorter amount of time, for one thing. Second and more important, we need to remember that none of us learn in a vacuum. How much faster did you pick up programming because you already understood the concept of grammar, and had taken a logic or debate class in high school? Even in wildly different fields of study, there are dots we connect, analogies that we construct, and skills that we posses and bring to the table. It is reasonable to assume that we gain some efficiency in learning new skills, by virtue of the masteries we already possess.

57 points by muan 14y ago

Somewhat relevant, "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 years" by Peter Norvig: http://norvig.com/21-days.html http://norvig.com/21-days.html

jack_trades 14y ago

A graph since no calculator was provided. Zoom out a bit to get the right scale. http://bit.ly/11wIBQo http://bit.ly/11wIBQo

mrleinad 14y ago

5 more achievements to unlock before game over

kiba 14y ago
Clearly, we need to hack the underlying codebase to allows more time for achievements. On a serious thought, if old people live longer, we have longer access to their knowledge and expertise. When old people die, we lost some their expertise forever. So if we cure cancer and other diseases, that would be money well spent.
- muan 14y ago
  On a serious thought, here's how to NOT lose elders' expertise forever: http://www.theamazings.com/ http://www.theamazings.com/
- Evbn 13y ago
  Thanks we have books, videos, and Internet. A lot of what people know is redundantly distributed.

psycr 14y ago

How could anyone actually sustain such a rate of learning? Two hours every weekday, plus an additional sixteen hours every weekend for 48 weeks every year? Life creeps up, and seeps into the cracks so tenuously occupied by free time. Mastering but a single skill is impressive.

mrleinad 14y ago
2 hours a day is not something completely unachievable. Hell, I spent that time everyday watching some movie or just relaxing.
- daok 14y ago
  Yes but if you work full time and you have a family this 2 hours per day become rare. It's also important to notice that your body require to have some relaxing time which is also needed to be in consideration. Yes you may remove all "wasted time" of your day, but at the end, your brain will need rest. Spending your whole life optimizing this time will just get you more chance to get a burnout. 18 hours per week on free time is huge and hard to get once you have children, friends, and social activities.
  - mrleinad 14y ago
    Of course. I don't have a family and live alone. If you can't get those 2 hours because of other things, well, it won't work.
  - ternaryoperator 13y ago
    That's exactly right. As you get older, you begin to derive joy from things other than mastering new skills. I understand the OP's original post was more about time in the abstract, but the point you make is in fact the reality.
Evbn 13y ago
That rate sounds like what many kids do who become successful adults. Kids are born learners, at a far more intense rate than that. But adults? Become a manager and wise advisor.

sireat 14y ago

Sadly, the problem is that the older you does not get the same out of 10k hours of deliberate practice than the younger you. Let's take chess: 10k hours of deliberate practice in your teen years will make you a master level player (and possibly near GM caliber if you think Polgar experiment was not a fluke). There are no known instances of someone starting to play chess after age of 30 and getting near GM. Conversely, I've known people who retired in their 40s and dedicated themselves to chess and could not achieve more than a 50-100 point gain. I would love to be proven wrong, but I suspect the story is the same with piano, violin and programming. Your 10k hours at age 40 will not get you near anywhere the same return than 10k hours at age 10-16. I would love to see some references to people achieving mastery in some field past the age of 40 starting from scratch. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Neuroplasticity is supposed to show that it is possible to get good at a later age, but I am very skeptical.

kylescheele 14y ago
I'll agree with the idea that it's harder for the older you to master something than it is for the younger you, but I don't think it has to do with physiological reasons. I think it has to do with things like time, commitments, obligations, and fears. When you're young, you have more time, less commitments and obligations (family, job, etc.), and generally less fears (if I screw this up, it's fine because I'm 17). As you grow older, these things get added on and it becomes difficult to motivate yourself to actually spend the 10k hours. If you're talking about something like skateboarding, I think you're right that younger people will learn it better and faster than old people, because it's inherently physical. If you're talking about a mental task, I think it's a matter of whether or not you will sit down and do the work.
- incision 14y ago
  Well said. I think this discussion [1] from other day is relevant. Basically, getting old and taking on more responsibilities doesn't necessarily have to mean becoming less productive as long as you can adapt your strategy and habits. 1: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5488037 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5488037

Felix21 14y ago

With the amount of hours i work now i can master 3 new things by the time i'm 30. That's incredibly exciting.

anthonycerra 14y ago

This is a cool brain hack in that it uses math to convince you that you're not too old to become a master at something. One issue I have with the 10,000 hour rule in general is this: there are approximately 2,088 hours in a work-year not counting overtime. To achieve mastery in your profession would then take less than 5 years. Most professions don't consider someone an expert 5 years into their careers. So does that mean a) you're not really improving that much in those 5 years b) there are more conditions to the 10,000 hour rule c) the 10,000 hour rule is flawed or d) the evaluation of one's expertise is flawed? Another issue I have with the 10,000 hour rule is the idea of competence and sufficient experience. At what level of experience (in this case, hours) are you competent enough to achieve your goal? If programming, at what level can you create something that solves a given problem. If business, at what level can you successfully run a startup, etc. So if the target changes to "enough experience to achieve a specific goal" then I'd argue one has much more time available to him/her than what this math suggests.

kenjackson 14y ago
The 10k hour rule isn't about experience, but about deliberate practice. Two very different things.
sputknick 14y ago
I work roughly 2000 hours a year in my field, but that includes meetings, and HR stuff, and answering client questions, creating proposals etc.. I would bet I spend right around 400-800 hours a year growing in my field. That would put mastery more like 10-25 years away.
kylescheele 14y ago
Agreed. I think this is where you get into mastery vs. experience. 10k hours of a task does not make you an expert unless you've spent those 10k hours deliberately attempting to gain expertise. This is also where you get into good practice vs. bad practice. i.e., the average golf enthusiast "practices" by going to the driving range, because it's easy and fun and he's probably already decent at using a driver. Someone who wants to become a golf professional practices by hitting a hundred balls out of a sand trap or driving into the wind or any number of other difficult techniques they're not good at yet. It's not so much the passage of time (10k hours) that matters, as it is how you spend those hours. To your second point, "mastery" is sort of a vague term. I like your idea of "enough to achieve a certain goal". That's probably better from a mental health perspective too (experts in many fields are pretty crazy because they've devoted themselves exclusively to this one narrow area for years and years).

localfugue 14y ago

Looks like we hugged this site to death: I now get a "500 Internal Server Error". Here's the google cache link: http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fnowincolour.com%2F2013%2F04%2Fhow-many-10k-hours-do-you-have-left%2F&oq=cache%3Ahttp%3A%2F%2Fnowincolour.com%2F2013%2F04%2Fhow-many-10k-hours-do-you-have-left%2F http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?hl=en&q=cac...

dgabriel 14y ago

I thought the "10k" rule had been discredited. http://allaboutwork.org/2012/11/21/malcolm-gladwells-10000-hour-rule-doesnt-add-up/ http://allaboutwork.org/2012/11/21/malcolm-gladwells-10000-h...

Evbn 13y ago
Really, finding a few examples of 7000k hour violin players discredits the 10k hour rules? It's an estimate, not a mission to mars. Are you also offended by astronomers getting the mass of a star, or geologists measuring the amount of oil in a well wrong? They would be delighted to get the order of magnitude right.

samegreatsleeve 14y ago

Why do you guys buy into this 10k hours bullshit? The 10k hours claim is utter nonsense on the most basic level. How exactly is "one skill" defined? There is no such thing as "one skill." Every skill, field, whatever is a highly complex amalgam of countless sub-skills. How do you determine the extent of the "one skill" that you're devoting to? Let's say you want to master 18th century history, defined as achieving a skill/knowledge level of X in that field. Does this take 10k hours? Why not 20k? Why not 5k? How can anyone assume that just because 18th century history has been defined as a particular "skill" that reaching some skill level X will take 10k hours? If you instead choose to master early 18th century history from 1700-1730 so that you know the years 1700-1730 just as well as the 1700-1800 specialist, does it now take you only 3K hours instead of 10K? Does any of this math make any sense at all? Since the concept of "one skill" is utterly absurd nonsense that is completely undefinable, and the concept of "mastery" is equally undefinable and meaningless, this whole 10k meme is nothing but marketing bullshit of the kind that Gladwell mass produces in his shitty vapid books. Gladwell is a hack of the highest order. He has never said anything meaningful. This 10k hour meme is just another marketing turd he shit out to mystify and flatter the dumb middle classes who read poppy trash like Gladwell so they can call themselves literate. Fucking disgrace that people take this seriously

TrevorJ 13y ago

Couple flaws I see here: first, I'm not convinced that 10k hours is a reasonable estimate given how vastly different any given discipline is from another. Some disciplines allow for fast iteration and thus more practice in a shorter amount of time, for one thing. Second and more important, we need to remember that none of us learn in a vacuum. How much faster did you pick up programming because you already understood the concept of grammar, and had taken a logic or debate class in high school? Even in wildly different fields of study, there are dots we connect, analogies that we construct, and skills that we posses and bring to the table. It is reasonable to assume that we gain some efficiency in learning new skills, by virtue of the masteries we already possess.