10 ms·

The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

190 points by ode 12y ago

Broken_Hippo 12y ago
I like the doable attitude of this - and the words hold true. Very few 'inspirational' things I read actually manage to break things down to something reasonable. Once the teacher strikes here (In norway) stop, I start language classes. The teacher doing the initial questions told me I have 550 hours of required language classes - but then made sure I know I get up to 3000, with the note that 550 hours really isn't enough to learn a language and be good. Just enough to survive. The same principle applies here - that first 1000 hours of instruction will be absolutely priceless for me. I'll get good.
- oskarth 12y ago
  1000 focused hours for most European languages is really good, see for example these quotes: Deutsche Welle suggests A1 is reached with about 75 hours of German tuition, A2.1 with about 150 hours, A2.2 with about 225 hours, B1.1 with about 300 hours, and B1.2 with about 400 hours.[5] Cambridge ESOL said that each level is reached with the following guided learning hours: A2, 180–200; B1, 350–400; B2, 500–600; C1, 700–800, and C2, 1,000–1,200.[6] Alliance Française has stated students can expect to reach CEFR levels after the following cumulative hours of instruction: A1 60–100, A2 160–200, B1 360–400, B2 560–650, C1 810–950, C2 1060–1200.[7] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Relationship_with_duration_of_learning_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...) For those who don't know about CEFR, C1 is basically fluent. It might take a bit longer to learn Mandarin, Russian or Arabic, but it's just by a reasonably small constant factor (based on FSI numbers that I can't find right now). They key is to make the practice good practice, and not just mindless repetition.
  - jliechti1 12y ago
    > They key is to make the practice good practice, and not just mindless repetition. This - it needs to be emphasized more. I feel a bit pedantic when I make this point, but I really think it's crucial. If you read the original research, it's not 10000 hours of just practice. There is a reason many people can play golf for 30 years (and probably accumulate 10000+ hours of play), but still never even get close to shooting par. The term they use in the research is deliberate practice. The quality of the practice is just as important as the practice itself. Practice does not make perfect, practice makes things a habit. If you develop the wrong techniques in an area, you'll reach plateaus and hit a point where you can't progress. Deliberate practice requires tasks that are designed to stretch you in specific areas and have fast feedback loops so you are able to correct mistakes quickly. This is easier to apply in some domains (music, sports, etc...) than others.
    - jebus989 12y ago
      Absolutely right, Anders Ericsson has called Malcolm Gladwell out for misinterpreting his results for this exact reason. Not sure how widely available this is for playback but "More or Less" did a great podcast on this earlier this year: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01sqly1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01sqly1
    - PhantomGremlin 12y ago
      Here's how Jerry Rice, probably the greatest wide receiver of all time, practiced: http://jamesclear.com/jerry-rice http://jamesclear.com/jerry-rice It's a short read and very instructive. One amazing thing is just how that practice translated into so little time in actual games. I.e. if a football team plays 20 games a year (1 hour each), and the offense is only out there half the time, then a wide receiver is playing for at most 10 hours a year. Jerry Rice played for 20 years, so that works out to 200 hours of actual game time over his entire career!
- graeme 12y ago
  That seems excessive. Pimsleur uses 45 hours of lessons over 90 days. I've used it for Italian, Portuguese and German. In each case, I've been able to have conversations with native speakers after the program ended. The next step, to really master any of them, would be going to one of those countries. Suppose I spend four hours a day in conversation with native speakers. 1 week = 28 hours. 3 months = 336 hours. Total of 381 hours. I'd be astonished if that program didn't make someone fluent, at least in a language with some similarities to their native language, as close as any of the romance languages are to English. I'm speaking from experience, having got part of the way with Italian and Portuguese, and having had a six month visit to Cuba make me fluent for all intents and purposes (but I didn't do Pimsleur before, just ineffective college classes) The key to shortening is the intro lessons which make all additional practice much more effective, since you can simply practice by fluid conversation. This isn't the only method; I've heard very good things about Benny Lewis' method as well.
  - xp3ll3d 12y ago
    For anyone that is interested in picking up a language really quickly, I can highly recommend Fluenz http://fluenz.com/ http://fluenz.com/ I tried the Pimsleur audio lessons, but I am a visual learner. Fluenz structured things very easily. After 2 hours I could point and say I wanted items. 6 hours I could say I want to look at things and talk about other people. I'm at the 12 goes out lessons point and I can now go into shops and ask basic questions and know how to ask about prices. I'm doing this with just 1 hour every few days with the lessons.
onion2k 12y ago
Slightly tangential, but the latest You Are Not So Smart podcast is about practise and how it changes your brain, particularly with regard to the 10,000 hour 'rule'. It's well worth a listen (and so are all the previous episodes if you've not heard it before). http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-podcast-030-how-practice-changes-the-brain-with-david-epstein/ http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-podcast-030-how...
- silverbax88 12y ago
  Thanks for posting that. One of the best things I've ever listened to.
TeMPOraL 12y ago
I have my own take on this - if you triple-Pareto the 10k hours rule you end up with 80 hours of work responsible for 51.2% of your skill. I round it up and call 100-hours rule: if you put one hundred hours of actual practice into something it might not make you an expert, but you'll be proficient and/or good enough to impress people around you. I started applying this to random things, and I think one could cut it down to even 10 hours for things one would just want to have a familiarity with. It's surprising how much progress can you make in few initial hours of practice. I could never toss a coin without it landing in completely random places or hitting someone. After just 3-5 hours of practice total over span of few days I learned how to toss various coins and catch them with one (the same) hand, and I could even spin them in ways that make or don't make sound on demand. So my take is: apply 10-hour rule to random stuff you fancy, things that could make good party tricks, etc. Apply 100-hour rule to things you end up caring about enough that you want to be proficient in them.
- noahl 12y ago
  If we combine your rules of thumb with the original essay and the 10,000 hour rule, we get a rough order-of-magnitude scale of work and levels of ability: * 10 hours: familiar * 100 hours: proficient * 1000 hours: good * 10000 hours: expert Not perfect, of course, but it's sort of intriguing in its simplicity.
  - NickPollard 12y ago
    I like this, I think as an aphorism it actually has a good bit of descriptive power. A while back I started learning the guitar - having learnt drums and (some) piano as a child with a teacher and structured learning, I decided to teach myself at a much slower process for 'fun'. I'm probably somewhere between the proficient and good categories now and I think this trajectory matches my experiences. What is an important take away for people is that you can learn something, and it doesn't take that long for you to get to a point where it is useful, enjoyable and satisfying. So many adults shy away from learning new skills unnecessarily. Learn to play guitar. Learn to code. Learn to paint, learn to speak Dutch, learn to write poetry, learn to bake, learn to woodwork. Your life will be richer for it.
king_jester 12y ago
Is the 10,000 hour rule even true? I know this was popularized by Gladwell's book 'Outliers' but I had heard the study referred to in the book might not be accurate. Is it that 10,000 of practice is common to experts or that there are no experts without 10,000 hours of practice?
- swagasaurus-rex 12y ago
  In my interpretation, 10,000 hours is the amount of time most other people are unwilling to spend on a skill, which places you as world-class.
- kelukelugames 12y ago
  I agree. It's a bit too catchy.
- tbrownaw 12y ago
  Being an expert means being noticeably better than non-experts. This will depend on how much you practice, how well you practice, and whatever relevant innate abilities you have (appropriate personality, IQ, extra-sensitive hearing, tetrachromacy or color-blindness, etc). And also, on how well/much other people practice. Apparently if you fudge things just right, you get most people either not practicing well or losing interest shortly before 10k hours.
- Freeboots 12y ago
  The original study by K. Anders Ericsson involved how top athletes became the very best in their highly specific field. Since then it has been diluted to say that you need 10000 hours to become an 'expert' (definition required); then that you need 10000 hrs to become proficient. So no, its not true.
- thirdtruck 12y ago
  Many people miss that the rule is supposed to predict world-class expertise, the kind that wins Olympic events. Raising yourself into, say, the top 5-10% requires an order of magnitude less effort. It's the difference between "The fastest possible version of this real-time algorithm" and "No longer doing it by hand."
diminoten 12y ago
10k hours rule is not general to a topic, and is quite specific -- 10,000 hours of a skill-based, feedback giving action in which productive practice takes place is different from, "spend 10k hours learning about history and you become a history master." And 1k hours is completely unsupported by experimentation. Why do people think they can just randomly throw nonsense at a wall and expect it to stick?
- deleted 12y ago
  [deleted]
- joeframbach 12y ago
  Such a poor attitude! This isn't Science magazine. The entire article -- a hypothesis anyway -- is prefaced by "words I would have wanted to hear as a child". Were you expecting him to run experiments for this piece?
  - diminoten 12y ago
    "This isn't Science magazine." Finish that thought. This isn't Science magazine so... we can just make things up and say whatever we want, even if it's blatantly and provably untrue?
    - joeframbach 12y ago
      This isn't Science magazine; an interesting or thought-provoking idea is just as valuable as a repeatable experiment.
      - diminoten 12y ago
        Yes, in the same way a good fiction story is. "Wouldn't it be nice if life were so simple as I'm about to describe?" But this doesn't present itself as a fiction, this presents itself as true, when it's clearly the case that the author has no idea if it's true or not, having not done the requisite legwork to verify.
sayemm 12y ago
"If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all." - Michelangelo
mkhalil 12y ago
I consider myself a expert in .NET/C# development, and it did not take no where NEAR 10,000 hours. 3000 hours is a fair estimate. 4000 to be on the safe side. I was good after 1000 though, so I'd have to agree with this "rule".
af3 12y ago
This is what you are telling your grad students, OP ?
erikb 12y ago
This is exactly my plan with most of my hobbies. Just continuously do it now and then and you ought to get better at some point. It still needs dedicated practise, though. Just "doing" it is not enough.
zxcvvcxz 12y ago
Given the 10,000 hour rule as generally true (at least in spirit), what's very difficult and seldom discussed is just how hard it is to get there at anything worthwhile once you're passed a certain point in life. Why? Because job. Having gone through college and taken work terms between years, I saw this first-hand: after you're done 9 to 5 for that paycheck (+food, +commuting, +exercise, +social life), good luck finding 4 hours a day for building your skills at something meaningful - or starting a side project. You have to sacrifice a ton, or say goodbye to full-time work. While a lot of graduate students won't outright admit it, I get the feeling this is a big motivator for a lot of people "delaying the real world". (BTW, 4 hours a day means an actual 4 hours of high concentration and high output, which can take a full working day as anyone with a day job will attest.) And then you get people who look down on you for "delaying the real world", and so many people who do anything other than a 9-5 after basic college feel guilty for doing so. I used to look down on those people too quite frankly (lazy bums, you don't get to learn interesting things while I fix this bullshit Perl script). But now I get it. To me, this is the best argument for basic income, although I'm still not sold on it. How can we have a passionate society of master craftsmen and artisans when we're busy inventing bullshit jobs for people to fill, so they can support themselves? A big caveat is if somehow the stars align and your work contributes to mastery at your craft. The odds actually aren't nearly so bad if you're in tech. As I alluded to above, they didn't work out so great for me, at least initially. Web and app development, I found out, isn't my thing. As some final anecdotal data, it's fairly well-known that the Dutch have a disproportionately high amount of world-class DJs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dutch_DJs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dutch_DJs). In examining this anomaly, one finds out that the Dutch offer disproportionately more grants and funding for music and the arts. So people can take those years they would have otherwise spent in typical 9-5's and instead focus on DJ-ing. </rant from someone who would rather not be job hunting>
- DanielStraight 12y ago
  It's interesting you didn't mention family at all. Having kids is a huge commitment of time. I think a good take-away from your rant (plus the consideration of family) is that we need to be talking more about making time for things. Too often we talk a great deal about what can be done in a few hours a day, but when it comes to making that time, we just say, "If it's important to you, you'll make the time." We should be looking at ways to maximize the use of very small chunks of time. I may not be able to commit even a single hour of dedicated time per day... but I can certainly do something for a few minutes here and there throughout the day which adds up to an hour. How can we make that kind of practice more effective?
Freeboots 12y ago
How about 20 hours? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY The 10k hours thing is based on how long it took athletes to become the very top of their field. The very top of their highly specific, highly competitive field. It doesnt even mean becoming an 'expert' (whatever that means), let alone just being good at it. Anyway, check the TED Talk above, 20 hours to proficiency.
- systematical 12y ago
  I first heard of it from Malcolm Gladwell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
- silverbax88 12y ago
  Actually, Gladwell has specifically said it does not really apply to sports.
  - Freeboots 12y ago
    i was referring more to the original 10 000 hour rule proposed by K. Anders Ericsson & co. I would also say that in Outliers, Gladwell seems to implying that while 10 000 hours of practice is common in such 'outliers', simple luck is an equal if not greater part.
IvyMike 12y ago
I've been wondering if there's another level to be reached after another factor of 10--in other words, is there a "100,000 hour" rule? Which at 8 hours per day would take over 30 years, so there's not going to be a lot of them. Maybe Jiro from Jiro Dreams of Sushi?
- kensai 12y ago
  I had the same Master in mind. He is probably one of the few that matches or surpasses these needed hours. ;)
- danelectro 12y ago
  That's what I thought when I first started innovating in the mature technical field of petro/chemical analysis. It would require a lot of self-dedication. Since I was already a young performance leader, I stuck with it and avoided the institutional path where they only accomplish a few hours of progress a day, take breaks, have useless meetings, etc. Similar to a musical instrument, industrial instruments are never truly mastered, and proficiency declines once the hands are removed from regular use. This also worked to my advantage since gifted PhD's with high aptitudes seldom can keep their hands on the gear for even one whole decade before they are needed to fill a place on the corporate ladder. Now after 30+ years, I do not look at ordinary researchers as loafers, there are some brilliant workers and wonderful experts I can draw upon when needed. Normally you are only allowed to do a limited amount before you run the risk & woe of making co-workers look less productive. By comparison, I now have "60years" experience compared to what would have only been about half as many accomplishments if I had been employed by an oil or chemical company over the same 3 decades. Plus I own my own technology for decades now. Not trying to toot my own horn but it is an unfair advantage.
systematical 12y ago
10,000 hour rule is a bit strange. I've been programming for 8 years doing so at work and at home. Working full time there are roughly 2,080 work hours in a year. 2,080 * 8 = 16,640 hours of programming. Now there is also all of that time spent programming in classes, on homework, on hobbies, and doing freelance work. That easily brings the amount of hours spent programming to 18,000. To account for all the time spent on hacker news, reddit, etc... instead of actually programming I'll drop that number to 16,000 total hours programming. By all accounts I should be an expert. I'd imaging there are many on here with a similar hours, many with more. I don't feel like an expert though. Do you?
- thedufer 12y ago
  The 10,000 hour rule is often taken out of context. In Outliers, it is made clear that Gladwell means 10,000 hours of focused practice with the intent to improve. A small percentage of day-to-day programming fits that criteria (unless you're a researcher, or something along those lines). So you may have 16,000 hours of programming, but still be significantly short of the 10,000 hour rule.
  - Mvandenbergh 12y ago
    If you're a CS researcher who actually codes as part of their research, much of the time you'll be banging out barely functional proof of concept code to get some results you can take to conference. I'm not sure there's any group that actually does focused practice coding for a significant number of hours on a regular basis.
- flying_squirrel 12y ago
  The 10 000 hour commitment only makes you an expert when you spend all those hours deliberately practicing and focusing on improving your performance. Just engaging in an activity for 10 000 hours does not guarantee expert performance, you need to spend those hours constantly looking for the rough edges in your performance and finding strategies to polish them off. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice%28PsychologicalReview%29.pdf http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...
induscreep 12y ago
On a tangent: could you consider centering the content on your site? Right now I have to turn my head left by about 30 degrees to read your blog, on a widescreen monitor. margin-left in <body> of 25% makes it much better to read.
NDizzle 12y ago
This is a pretty solid rule. I've taken a similar approach with my kids, but they're not really old enough to report back any results. I didn't round down to 1k hours or look at 10k seriously. I've been trying to teach them that it's important to take the journey to get actually good at something. You pick up a lot of things on the way to becoming proficient. I let my oldest pick something to get good at this year. She went with fast pitch softball. (she's 8) She's threw about a thousand pitches the first month with me having her get out there. Since then (I thought that was too much) she's been the one to get me out there to catch her and that number has settled on about 500 a month. With how many pitches you get in a normal little league (farm league softball) game, she basically pitched about 5 years worth of seasons over summer. It'll be fun to watch this next season. I don't think anyone will expect a 4' 50 pound girl to throw as hard as she does.
- tannerj 12y ago
  I don't know about softball, but I played baseball from the time I was 4 until I was 19 and the biggest change in youth baseball has been monitoring pitch counts for youth pitchers. If I remember correctly, Softball pitchers usually have trouble with their knees while baseball pitchers have arm trouble. I still have arm trouble and I had parents who put my safety first and did the best they could to take care of my arm. Please do some research on the topic to make sure your daughter doesn't hurt herself. I only speak up because I saw it happen over and over again growing up. Youth sports are awesome, I got to travel all over the country playing, but I still have issues almost 10 years after quitting.
  - NDizzle 12y ago
    Yeah, I cut back significantly after talking to a cousin of mine who played college ball. At first I was a bit frustrated because she was really interested in pitching, as was roughly half of her team. So when you play 3 games a week for a 4 month season, if you spread it around (like you should at a young age - give everyone a chance) you have each kid throwing about 2 innings a week. (6 inning games, ~8 kids who want to pitch on a 14 player team) What's your thoughts on the right amount? Maybe a game a week and really concentrate on form and technique? (No fancy pitches, just straight with accuracy.)
goshx 12y ago
I believe there are three factors to consider: - what you are trying to learn - your ability to learn things on that particular area - how you measure [familiar/proficient/good/expert/impress people] The time it takes to get to those levels can vary a lot and you can't really use the same rule for all. It is almost like saying that if a group of people spent 5 years in college together and by the end of it all of them have the same level of expertise. We all know it doesn't work this way. I think these X-hour rules are flawed unless they are very specific on the three factors I mentioned. The 10k hours probably works simply because it is a lot of time... not because everybody learns the same way. EDIT: formatting
tokenadult 12y ago
I like this submission a lot. It is consistent with the "expert performance" research literature pioneered by K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues in that it points out that lots of competent, gainfully employed adults are not "experts" (as rigorously defined in the expert performance research literature)[1] but are capable journeymen. We may as well all resolve ourselves, and all advise young people, to find something that we enjoy doing anyhow in our free time, something that is useful in solving problems other people experience, and practicing how to do it well enough to trade with other people for resources we can use to solve the problems we can't solve on our own. Better that we be competent journeymen rather than unknowingly incompetent.[2] I like too that he links to Paul Graham's essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known,"[3] which everyone should read before finishing high school. [1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D... [2] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201006/when-ignorance-begets-confidence-the-classic-dunning-kruger-effect http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201006/w... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702783/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702783/ [3] http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html
quaffapint 12y ago
I have the constant conversation with my kids of just finding an interest - any interest and trying it. It's great when your kids like sports, etc, but when you have one's that find it very hard to come up with any interest they want to explore, I'd be thrilled with even 2 hours worth. For now, it's us getting them trying things and they're middle/high school age, so they should be coming up with stuff on their own. I only hope someday it clicks and they find things they want to explore on their own.
elwell 12y ago
> http://www.pgbovine.net/oldpages/fourth.jpg http://www.pgbovine.net/oldpages/fourth.jpg Wow...
- k2enemy 12y ago
  That's actually really awesome that he has screenshots of all of his old homepages. I wish I had thought to do that.
- pgbovine 12y ago
  hey, that was state-of-the-art in 1998!
  - agumonkey 12y ago
    I love it, it appaer cheesy in hindsight, but it was pure gold back then.
free2rhyme214 12y ago
The rule? Solid. In practicality how many will follow this? Few. It's like telling someone how to get rich. You can literally tell someone but few will do the action required to get the results. But then the few that do end up like Drew Houston or Aaron Levie when they apply their skills to business and if they fail they're more experienced than the average 20 something.
netcan 12y ago
I think the order of magnitude scale is a good guide for most things you can learn. Obviously these are rules of thumb. "Practice" can vary in quality, prerequisites and starting points matter. YMMV based on a huge number of factors. That said, the order of magnitude scale is usually a greta way of looking at things. 1,000 hours will get you to entry level "professional" level. 1,000 hours is also 20 hours per week (of deliberate practice) for one year. An hour will get you a definition (different keys play different notes. This is a note. A scale. A chord). 10 will get you an overview of a subject (This is what mean, median, variance and variance mean) and perhaps a usable tidbit. At 100 hours knowledge starts being functional in a limited way (write code that generates a sales report). 1000 hours is entry level professional. Learning to read 1 hr: Understand that letters represent sounds 10 hrs: practice reading and writing all the letters. read simple words like cat 100 hrs: know all letters, most common words and can sound out most words 1000 hrs: functionally fluent 10000: achieve your potential as a poet or novelist Judo 1 hr: Overview of that martial art's approach 10 hrs: Understand basic vocabulary of the style: stances, throws, etc 100 hrs: Can perform a limited number of techniques effectively. Would be advantageous in a self defense situation 1000 hrs: You are eying that black belt. Consistently overcome most untrained opponents. Very useful in a self defense situation. You can ref a match, teach Beginners or invent some moves. 10000: achieve your maximal potential as a competitor or instructor 10,000 hours in an interesting thinking tool. In my mind it represents the level of practice required to maximize your potential. 1,000 hours is another useful tool. To me, it's a more liberating concept because it's achievable without dedicating your life to a thing. Put in 1,000 hours and you will be able to code that app, play in a band or terrorize your husband with a flying triangle choke.
- robert_tweed 12y ago
  It should be noted that in the context of martial arts, especially Chinese ones, that the number 10,000 has special significance because it's a sort of colloquialism for "many" or "infinite". For instance the phrase commonly attributed to Bruce Lee: "Fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once. Fear him who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." In this case you could substitute any large number and the phrase retains its meaning. Similarly, "The Classics" (an important illustrated text in Tai Chi, also studied in several other Chinese martial arts) and Taoist texts will occasionally mention "the ten thousand things", which should actually be read as "everything in the universe". So in other words, when a translated Chinese text talks about practising something 10,000 times, it should generally not be interpreted literally as the number 10,000, but rather as "as much as is possible within a lifetime".
njharman 12y ago
Do people really need to be told "Find something that you enjoy doing and then keep doing it"? Really? I do the things I enjoy, um cause I enjoy them. I also don't (or try not to) do the things I don't enjoy. Nobody gave me that stunning advice. It's nature's built in reinforcement loop. How about; "Do something you suck at (but want not to) or are afraid of. Stick with it at least until you don't suck or are no longer afraid."
jonsen 12y ago
A detailed an well argumented framework to be found in Chapter 1: Five Steps from Novice to Expert Mind Over Machine by Hubert Dreyfus http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Over-Machine-Hubert-Dreyfus/dp/0029080614/ http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Over-Machine-Hubert-Dreyfus/dp/00...

190 points by ode 12y ago

I like the doable attitude of this - and the words hold true. Very few 'inspirational' things I read actually manage to break things down to something reasonable. Once the teacher strikes here (In norway) stop, I start language classes. The teacher doing the initial questions told me I have 550 hours of required language classes - but then made sure I know I get up to 3000, with the note that 550 hours really isn't enough to learn a language and be good. Just enough to survive. The same principle applies here - that first 1000 hours of instruction will be absolutely priceless for me. I'll get good.

oskarth 12y ago
1000 focused hours for most European languages is really good, see for example these quotes: Deutsche Welle suggests A1 is reached with about 75 hours of German tuition, A2.1 with about 150 hours, A2.2 with about 225 hours, B1.1 with about 300 hours, and B1.2 with about 400 hours.[5] Cambridge ESOL said that each level is reached with the following guided learning hours: A2, 180–200; B1, 350–400; B2, 500–600; C1, 700–800, and C2, 1,000–1,200.[6] Alliance Française has stated students can expect to reach CEFR levels after the following cumulative hours of instruction: A1 60–100, A2 160–200, B1 360–400, B2 560–650, C1 810–950, C2 1060–1200.[7] (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_Reference_for_Languages#Relationship_with_duration_of_learning_process https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Common_European_Framework_of_R...) For those who don't know about CEFR, C1 is basically fluent. It might take a bit longer to learn Mandarin, Russian or Arabic, but it's just by a reasonably small constant factor (based on FSI numbers that I can't find right now). They key is to make the practice good practice, and not just mindless repetition.
- jliechti1 12y ago
  > They key is to make the practice good practice, and not just mindless repetition. This - it needs to be emphasized more. I feel a bit pedantic when I make this point, but I really think it's crucial. If you read the original research, it's not 10000 hours of just practice. There is a reason many people can play golf for 30 years (and probably accumulate 10000+ hours of play), but still never even get close to shooting par. The term they use in the research is deliberate practice. The quality of the practice is just as important as the practice itself. Practice does not make perfect, practice makes things a habit. If you develop the wrong techniques in an area, you'll reach plateaus and hit a point where you can't progress. Deliberate practice requires tasks that are designed to stretch you in specific areas and have fast feedback loops so you are able to correct mistakes quickly. This is easier to apply in some domains (music, sports, etc...) than others.
  - jebus989 12y ago
    Absolutely right, Anders Ericsson has called Malcolm Gladwell out for misinterpreting his results for this exact reason. Not sure how widely available this is for playback but "More or Less" did a great podcast on this earlier this year: http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01sqly1 http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/p01sqly1
  - PhantomGremlin 12y ago
    Here's how Jerry Rice, probably the greatest wide receiver of all time, practiced: http://jamesclear.com/jerry-rice http://jamesclear.com/jerry-rice It's a short read and very instructive. One amazing thing is just how that practice translated into so little time in actual games. I.e. if a football team plays 20 games a year (1 hour each), and the offense is only out there half the time, then a wide receiver is playing for at most 10 hours a year. Jerry Rice played for 20 years, so that works out to 200 hours of actual game time over his entire career!
graeme 12y ago
That seems excessive. Pimsleur uses 45 hours of lessons over 90 days. I've used it for Italian, Portuguese and German. In each case, I've been able to have conversations with native speakers after the program ended. The next step, to really master any of them, would be going to one of those countries. Suppose I spend four hours a day in conversation with native speakers. 1 week = 28 hours. 3 months = 336 hours. Total of 381 hours. I'd be astonished if that program didn't make someone fluent, at least in a language with some similarities to their native language, as close as any of the romance languages are to English. I'm speaking from experience, having got part of the way with Italian and Portuguese, and having had a six month visit to Cuba make me fluent for all intents and purposes (but I didn't do Pimsleur before, just ineffective college classes) The key to shortening is the intro lessons which make all additional practice much more effective, since you can simply practice by fluid conversation. This isn't the only method; I've heard very good things about Benny Lewis' method as well.
- xp3ll3d 12y ago
  For anyone that is interested in picking up a language really quickly, I can highly recommend Fluenz http://fluenz.com/ http://fluenz.com/ I tried the Pimsleur audio lessons, but I am a visual learner. Fluenz structured things very easily. After 2 hours I could point and say I wanted items. 6 hours I could say I want to look at things and talk about other people. I'm at the 12 goes out lessons point and I can now go into shops and ask basic questions and know how to ask about prices. I'm doing this with just 1 hour every few days with the lessons.

onion2k 12y ago

Slightly tangential, but the latest You Are Not So Smart podcast is about practise and how it changes your brain, particularly with regard to the 10,000 hour 'rule'. It's well worth a listen (and so are all the previous episodes if you've not heard it before). http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-podcast-030-how-practice-changes-the-brain-with-david-epstein/ http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-podcast-030-how...

silverbax88 12y ago
Thanks for posting that. One of the best things I've ever listened to.

TeMPOraL 12y ago

I have my own take on this - if you triple-Pareto the 10k hours rule you end up with 80 hours of work responsible for 51.2% of your skill. I round it up and call 100-hours rule: if you put one hundred hours of actual practice into something it might not make you an expert, but you'll be proficient and/or good enough to impress people around you. I started applying this to random things, and I think one could cut it down to even 10 hours for things one would just want to have a familiarity with. It's surprising how much progress can you make in few initial hours of practice. I could never toss a coin without it landing in completely random places or hitting someone. After just 3-5 hours of practice total over span of few days I learned how to toss various coins and catch them with one (the same) hand, and I could even spin them in ways that make or don't make sound on demand. So my take is: apply 10-hour rule to random stuff you fancy, things that could make good party tricks, etc. Apply 100-hour rule to things you end up caring about enough that you want to be proficient in them.

noahl 12y ago
If we combine your rules of thumb with the original essay and the 10,000 hour rule, we get a rough order-of-magnitude scale of work and levels of ability: * 10 hours: familiar * 100 hours: proficient * 1000 hours: good * 10000 hours: expert Not perfect, of course, but it's sort of intriguing in its simplicity.
- NickPollard 12y ago
  I like this, I think as an aphorism it actually has a good bit of descriptive power. A while back I started learning the guitar - having learnt drums and (some) piano as a child with a teacher and structured learning, I decided to teach myself at a much slower process for 'fun'. I'm probably somewhere between the proficient and good categories now and I think this trajectory matches my experiences. What is an important take away for people is that you can learn something, and it doesn't take that long for you to get to a point where it is useful, enjoyable and satisfying. So many adults shy away from learning new skills unnecessarily. Learn to play guitar. Learn to code. Learn to paint, learn to speak Dutch, learn to write poetry, learn to bake, learn to woodwork. Your life will be richer for it.

king_jester 12y ago

Is the 10,000 hour rule even true? I know this was popularized by Gladwell's book 'Outliers' but I had heard the study referred to in the book might not be accurate. Is it that 10,000 of practice is common to experts or that there are no experts without 10,000 hours of practice?

swagasaurus-rex 12y ago
In my interpretation, 10,000 hours is the amount of time most other people are unwilling to spend on a skill, which places you as world-class.
kelukelugames 12y ago
I agree. It's a bit too catchy.
tbrownaw 12y ago
Being an expert means being noticeably better than non-experts. This will depend on how much you practice, how well you practice, and whatever relevant innate abilities you have (appropriate personality, IQ, extra-sensitive hearing, tetrachromacy or color-blindness, etc). And also, on how well/much other people practice. Apparently if you fudge things just right, you get most people either not practicing well or losing interest shortly before 10k hours.
Freeboots 12y ago
The original study by K. Anders Ericsson involved how top athletes became the very best in their highly specific field. Since then it has been diluted to say that you need 10000 hours to become an 'expert' (definition required); then that you need 10000 hrs to become proficient. So no, its not true.
thirdtruck 12y ago
Many people miss that the rule is supposed to predict world-class expertise, the kind that wins Olympic events. Raising yourself into, say, the top 5-10% requires an order of magnitude less effort. It's the difference between "The fastest possible version of this real-time algorithm" and "No longer doing it by hand."

diminoten 12y ago

10k hours rule is not general to a topic, and is quite specific -- 10,000 hours of a skill-based, feedback giving action in which productive practice takes place is different from, "spend 10k hours learning about history and you become a history master." And 1k hours is completely unsupported by experimentation. Why do people think they can just randomly throw nonsense at a wall and expect it to stick?

deleted 12y ago
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joeframbach 12y ago
Such a poor attitude! This isn't Science magazine. The entire article -- a hypothesis anyway -- is prefaced by "words I would have wanted to hear as a child". Were you expecting him to run experiments for this piece?
- diminoten 12y ago
  "This isn't Science magazine." Finish that thought. This isn't Science magazine so... we can just make things up and say whatever we want, even if it's blatantly and provably untrue?
  - joeframbach 12y ago
    This isn't Science magazine; an interesting or thought-provoking idea is just as valuable as a repeatable experiment.
    - diminoten 12y ago
      Yes, in the same way a good fiction story is. "Wouldn't it be nice if life were so simple as I'm about to describe?" But this doesn't present itself as a fiction, this presents itself as true, when it's clearly the case that the author has no idea if it's true or not, having not done the requisite legwork to verify.

sayemm 12y ago

"If people knew how hard I worked to get my mastery, it wouldn't seem so wonderful at all." - Michelangelo

mkhalil 12y ago

I consider myself a expert in .NET/C# development, and it did not take no where NEAR 10,000 hours. 3000 hours is a fair estimate. 4000 to be on the safe side. I was good after 1000 though, so I'd have to agree with this "rule".

af3 12y ago

This is what you are telling your grad students, OP ?

erikb 12y ago

This is exactly my plan with most of my hobbies. Just continuously do it now and then and you ought to get better at some point. It still needs dedicated practise, though. Just "doing" it is not enough.

zxcvvcxz 12y ago

Given the 10,000 hour rule as generally true (at least in spirit), what's very difficult and seldom discussed is just how hard it is to get there at anything worthwhile once you're passed a certain point in life. Why? Because job. Having gone through college and taken work terms between years, I saw this first-hand: after you're done 9 to 5 for that paycheck (+food, +commuting, +exercise, +social life), good luck finding 4 hours a day for building your skills at something meaningful - or starting a side project. You have to sacrifice a ton, or say goodbye to full-time work. While a lot of graduate students won't outright admit it, I get the feeling this is a big motivator for a lot of people "delaying the real world". (BTW, 4 hours a day means an actual 4 hours of high concentration and high output, which can take a full working day as anyone with a day job will attest.) And then you get people who look down on you for "delaying the real world", and so many people who do anything other than a 9-5 after basic college feel guilty for doing so. I used to look down on those people too quite frankly (lazy bums, you don't get to learn interesting things while I fix this bullshit Perl script). But now I get it. To me, this is the best argument for basic income, although I'm still not sold on it. How can we have a passionate society of master craftsmen and artisans when we're busy inventing bullshit jobs for people to fill, so they can support themselves? A big caveat is if somehow the stars align and your work contributes to mastery at your craft. The odds actually aren't nearly so bad if you're in tech. As I alluded to above, they didn't work out so great for me, at least initially. Web and app development, I found out, isn't my thing. As some final anecdotal data, it's fairly well-known that the Dutch have a disproportionately high amount of world-class DJs (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dutch_DJs http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Category:Dutch_DJs). In examining this anomaly, one finds out that the Dutch offer disproportionately more grants and funding for music and the arts. So people can take those years they would have otherwise spent in typical 9-5's and instead focus on DJ-ing. </rant from someone who would rather not be job hunting>

DanielStraight 12y ago
It's interesting you didn't mention family at all. Having kids is a huge commitment of time. I think a good take-away from your rant (plus the consideration of family) is that we need to be talking more about making time for things. Too often we talk a great deal about what can be done in a few hours a day, but when it comes to making that time, we just say, "If it's important to you, you'll make the time." We should be looking at ways to maximize the use of very small chunks of time. I may not be able to commit even a single hour of dedicated time per day... but I can certainly do something for a few minutes here and there throughout the day which adds up to an hour. How can we make that kind of practice more effective?

Freeboots 12y ago

How about 20 hours? https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY The 10k hours thing is based on how long it took athletes to become the very top of their field. The very top of their highly specific, highly competitive field. It doesnt even mean becoming an 'expert' (whatever that means), let alone just being good at it. Anyway, check the TED Talk above, 20 hours to proficiency.

systematical 12y ago
I first heard of it from Malcolm Gladwell: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outliers_(book)
silverbax88 12y ago
Actually, Gladwell has specifically said it does not really apply to sports.
- Freeboots 12y ago
  i was referring more to the original 10 000 hour rule proposed by K. Anders Ericsson & co. I would also say that in Outliers, Gladwell seems to implying that while 10 000 hours of practice is common in such 'outliers', simple luck is an equal if not greater part.

IvyMike 12y ago

I've been wondering if there's another level to be reached after another factor of 10--in other words, is there a "100,000 hour" rule? Which at 8 hours per day would take over 30 years, so there's not going to be a lot of them. Maybe Jiro from Jiro Dreams of Sushi?

kensai 12y ago
I had the same Master in mind. He is probably one of the few that matches or surpasses these needed hours. ;)
danelectro 12y ago
That's what I thought when I first started innovating in the mature technical field of petro/chemical analysis. It would require a lot of self-dedication. Since I was already a young performance leader, I stuck with it and avoided the institutional path where they only accomplish a few hours of progress a day, take breaks, have useless meetings, etc. Similar to a musical instrument, industrial instruments are never truly mastered, and proficiency declines once the hands are removed from regular use. This also worked to my advantage since gifted PhD's with high aptitudes seldom can keep their hands on the gear for even one whole decade before they are needed to fill a place on the corporate ladder. Now after 30+ years, I do not look at ordinary researchers as loafers, there are some brilliant workers and wonderful experts I can draw upon when needed. Normally you are only allowed to do a limited amount before you run the risk & woe of making co-workers look less productive. By comparison, I now have "60years" experience compared to what would have only been about half as many accomplishments if I had been employed by an oil or chemical company over the same 3 decades. Plus I own my own technology for decades now. Not trying to toot my own horn but it is an unfair advantage.

systematical 12y ago

10,000 hour rule is a bit strange. I've been programming for 8 years doing so at work and at home. Working full time there are roughly 2,080 work hours in a year. 2,080 * 8 = 16,640 hours of programming. Now there is also all of that time spent programming in classes, on homework, on hobbies, and doing freelance work. That easily brings the amount of hours spent programming to 18,000. To account for all the time spent on hacker news, reddit, etc... instead of actually programming I'll drop that number to 16,000 total hours programming. By all accounts I should be an expert. I'd imaging there are many on here with a similar hours, many with more. I don't feel like an expert though. Do you?

thedufer 12y ago
The 10,000 hour rule is often taken out of context. In Outliers, it is made clear that Gladwell means 10,000 hours of focused practice with the intent to improve. A small percentage of day-to-day programming fits that criteria (unless you're a researcher, or something along those lines). So you may have 16,000 hours of programming, but still be significantly short of the 10,000 hour rule.
- Mvandenbergh 12y ago
  If you're a CS researcher who actually codes as part of their research, much of the time you'll be banging out barely functional proof of concept code to get some results you can take to conference. I'm not sure there's any group that actually does focused practice coding for a significant number of hours on a regular basis.
flying_squirrel 12y ago
The 10 000 hour commitment only makes you an expert when you spend all those hours deliberately practicing and focusing on improving your performance. Just engaging in an activity for 10 000 hours does not guarantee expert performance, you need to spend those hours constantly looking for the rough edges in your performance and finding strategies to polish them off. http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice%28PsychologicalReview%29.pdf http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...

induscreep 12y ago

On a tangent: could you consider centering the content on your site? Right now I have to turn my head left by about 30 degrees to read your blog, on a widescreen monitor. margin-left in <body> of 25% makes it much better to read.

NDizzle 12y ago

This is a pretty solid rule. I've taken a similar approach with my kids, but they're not really old enough to report back any results. I didn't round down to 1k hours or look at 10k seriously. I've been trying to teach them that it's important to take the journey to get actually good at something. You pick up a lot of things on the way to becoming proficient. I let my oldest pick something to get good at this year. She went with fast pitch softball. (she's 8) She's threw about a thousand pitches the first month with me having her get out there. Since then (I thought that was too much) she's been the one to get me out there to catch her and that number has settled on about 500 a month. With how many pitches you get in a normal little league (farm league softball) game, she basically pitched about 5 years worth of seasons over summer. It'll be fun to watch this next season. I don't think anyone will expect a 4' 50 pound girl to throw as hard as she does.

tannerj 12y ago
I don't know about softball, but I played baseball from the time I was 4 until I was 19 and the biggest change in youth baseball has been monitoring pitch counts for youth pitchers. If I remember correctly, Softball pitchers usually have trouble with their knees while baseball pitchers have arm trouble. I still have arm trouble and I had parents who put my safety first and did the best they could to take care of my arm. Please do some research on the topic to make sure your daughter doesn't hurt herself. I only speak up because I saw it happen over and over again growing up. Youth sports are awesome, I got to travel all over the country playing, but I still have issues almost 10 years after quitting.
- NDizzle 12y ago
  Yeah, I cut back significantly after talking to a cousin of mine who played college ball. At first I was a bit frustrated because she was really interested in pitching, as was roughly half of her team. So when you play 3 games a week for a 4 month season, if you spread it around (like you should at a young age - give everyone a chance) you have each kid throwing about 2 innings a week. (6 inning games, ~8 kids who want to pitch on a 14 player team) What's your thoughts on the right amount? Maybe a game a week and really concentrate on form and technique? (No fancy pitches, just straight with accuracy.)

goshx 12y ago

I believe there are three factors to consider: - what you are trying to learn - your ability to learn things on that particular area - how you measure [familiar/proficient/good/expert/impress people] The time it takes to get to those levels can vary a lot and you can't really use the same rule for all. It is almost like saying that if a group of people spent 5 years in college together and by the end of it all of them have the same level of expertise. We all know it doesn't work this way. I think these X-hour rules are flawed unless they are very specific on the three factors I mentioned. The 10k hours probably works simply because it is a lot of time... not because everybody learns the same way. EDIT: formatting

tokenadult 12y ago

I like this submission a lot. It is consistent with the "expert performance" research literature pioneered by K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues in that it points out that lots of competent, gainfully employed adults are not "experts" (as rigorously defined in the expert performance research literature)[1] but are capable journeymen. We may as well all resolve ourselves, and all advise young people, to find something that we enjoy doing anyhow in our free time, something that is useful in solving problems other people experience, and practicing how to do it well enough to trade with other people for resources we can use to solve the problems we can't solve on our own. Better that we be competent journeymen rather than unknowingly incompetent.[2] I like too that he links to Paul Graham's essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known,"[3] which everyone should read before finishing high school. [1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice(PsychologicalReview).pdf http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D... [2] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201006/when-ignorance-begets-confidence-the-classic-dunning-kruger-effect http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201006/w... http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702783/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702783/ [3] http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

quaffapint 12y ago

I have the constant conversation with my kids of just finding an interest - any interest and trying it. It's great when your kids like sports, etc, but when you have one's that find it very hard to come up with any interest they want to explore, I'd be thrilled with even 2 hours worth. For now, it's us getting them trying things and they're middle/high school age, so they should be coming up with stuff on their own. I only hope someday it clicks and they find things they want to explore on their own.

elwell 12y ago

> http://www.pgbovine.net/oldpages/fourth.jpg http://www.pgbovine.net/oldpages/fourth.jpg Wow...

k2enemy 12y ago
That's actually really awesome that he has screenshots of all of his old homepages. I wish I had thought to do that.
pgbovine 12y ago
hey, that was state-of-the-art in 1998!
- agumonkey 12y ago
  I love it, it appaer cheesy in hindsight, but it was pure gold back then.

free2rhyme214 12y ago

The rule? Solid. In practicality how many will follow this? Few. It's like telling someone how to get rich. You can literally tell someone but few will do the action required to get the results. But then the few that do end up like Drew Houston or Aaron Levie when they apply their skills to business and if they fail they're more experienced than the average 20 something.

netcan 12y ago

I think the order of magnitude scale is a good guide for most things you can learn. Obviously these are rules of thumb. "Practice" can vary in quality, prerequisites and starting points matter. YMMV based on a huge number of factors. That said, the order of magnitude scale is usually a greta way of looking at things. 1,000 hours will get you to entry level "professional" level. 1,000 hours is also 20 hours per week (of deliberate practice) for one year. An hour will get you a definition (different keys play different notes. This is a note. A scale. A chord). 10 will get you an overview of a subject (This is what mean, median, variance and variance mean) and perhaps a usable tidbit. At 100 hours knowledge starts being functional in a limited way (write code that generates a sales report). 1000 hours is entry level professional. Learning to read 1 hr: Understand that letters represent sounds 10 hrs: practice reading and writing all the letters. read simple words like cat 100 hrs: know all letters, most common words and can sound out most words 1000 hrs: functionally fluent 10000: achieve your potential as a poet or novelist Judo 1 hr: Overview of that martial art's approach 10 hrs: Understand basic vocabulary of the style: stances, throws, etc 100 hrs: Can perform a limited number of techniques effectively. Would be advantageous in a self defense situation 1000 hrs: You are eying that black belt. Consistently overcome most untrained opponents. Very useful in a self defense situation. You can ref a match, teach Beginners or invent some moves. 10000: achieve your maximal potential as a competitor or instructor 10,000 hours in an interesting thinking tool. In my mind it represents the level of practice required to maximize your potential. 1,000 hours is another useful tool. To me, it's a more liberating concept because it's achievable without dedicating your life to a thing. Put in 1,000 hours and you will be able to code that app, play in a band or terrorize your husband with a flying triangle choke.

robert_tweed 12y ago
It should be noted that in the context of martial arts, especially Chinese ones, that the number 10,000 has special significance because it's a sort of colloquialism for "many" or "infinite". For instance the phrase commonly attributed to Bruce Lee: "Fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once. Fear him who has practiced one kick 10,000 times." In this case you could substitute any large number and the phrase retains its meaning. Similarly, "The Classics" (an important illustrated text in Tai Chi, also studied in several other Chinese martial arts) and Taoist texts will occasionally mention "the ten thousand things", which should actually be read as "everything in the universe". So in other words, when a translated Chinese text talks about practising something 10,000 times, it should generally not be interpreted literally as the number 10,000, but rather as "as much as is possible within a lifetime".

njharman 12y ago

Do people really need to be told "Find something that you enjoy doing and then keep doing it"? Really? I do the things I enjoy, um cause I enjoy them. I also don't (or try not to) do the things I don't enjoy. Nobody gave me that stunning advice. It's nature's built in reinforcement loop. How about; "Do something you suck at (but want not to) or are afraid of. Stick with it at least until you don't suck or are no longer afraid."

jonsen 12y ago

A detailed an well argumented framework to be found in Chapter 1: Five Steps from Novice to Expert Mind Over Machine by Hubert Dreyfus http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Over-Machine-Hubert-Dreyfus/dp/0029080614/ http://www.amazon.com/Mind-Over-Machine-Hubert-Dreyfus/dp/00...