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Your comment exasperates and frustrates me in much the same way as the original article does for you. The article is full of evidence for why the 10,000 hour "

Your comment exasperates and frustrates me in much the same way as the original article does for you. The article is full of evidence for why the 10,000 hour "rule" isn't really true at all. But you say you want people to believe it anyway. To me, there are few things more grating than pop science that isn't true, but gets repeated because it sounds good. And the "10,000 hour rule" is worse than just a trivial factoid. It is a recipe for disappointment. If you tell someone that, despite their initial lack of talent, they can be "superb" at anything they want, and 10,000 hours later they are still mediocre at best, don't you think it would be frustrating to have wasted that much time? I want people to dream, but also to know themselves and to be able to perceive the difference between what comes easily and what doesn't. Achieving mastery of something is a deeply satisfying experience; a person's best shot at that is becoming acquainted for their real talents. Judit Polgar is not "a product of the 10,000 hour rule." While it's true that she devoted an extreme amount of dedicated practice, she also showed extreme talents from a very early age. When she was five she defeated a family friend at chess without looking at the board. I doubt she had practiced 10,000 hours by then, or that most five year olds with a comparable level of instruction could have done that. Actually I would seriously wager that even with 10,000 hours of practice I would not be capable of doing what she did at 5.

tomsthumb 12y ago
> If you tell someone that, despite their initial lack of talent, they can be "superb" at anything they want, and 10,000 hours later they are still mediocre at best, don't you think it would be frustrating to have wasted that much time? Who are these mediocre people who have put in 10k hours of deliberate practice? I can't recall anyone I'd call mediocre who's put in more than a thousand hours at something.
- haberman 12y ago
  My observation as a musician is that most musicians plateau at a certain point, based on their inherent talents, and their gains after that point are much more marginal. Many people do continue to study in earnest (and invest a lot of time into "deliberate practice") after hitting this plateau, in an effort to make bigger gains. Though many will instead choose to make music a more recreational part of their life, and move onto other things as their life's primary focus. But I think it's severe confirmation bias to say "everyone who is good put in 10k hours, and few people make it to 10k hours without being really good." Because the only counterexample to that is someone who continues practicing intensely for 10k hours without seeing noticeable gains. And why would someone do that (unless they are chasing the siren of the 10k hour rule)?
facepalm 12y ago
What are the odds of a random child to become a chess prodigy? The thing about the Polgars is that they decided to raise chess prodigies before their kids were born. I think Polgar even advertised for a woman to carry out the experiment with him. It's strange how little is talked about that experiment. I think it holds an inconvenient truth for many. (I don't know how much she had trained by the age of 5, so I don't know it it has actual bearings on the 10000h rule. But it certainly shows that high skill is not necessarily inborn).
- haberman 12y ago
  > What are the odds of a random child to become a chess prodigy? Probably a lot better when the child is the genetic offspring of a chess teacher. It's also confirmation bias: we wouldn't have heard about the experiment if it had failed.
  - dllthomas 12y ago
    "It's also confirmation bias: we wouldn't have heard about the experiment if it had failed." That's not what confirmation bias is. You're thinking "reporting bias" or "selection bias", I think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporting_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporting_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
  - facepalm 12y ago
    Polgar wasn't a chess teacher before. He pickled chess for the experiment because it is easy to measure and then focused on teaching it.
selmnoo 12y ago
10,000 hour rule is a rule of thumb, a saying, and a wonderfully fantastic one at that. It's stunningly simple, I think that's what makes it so compelling. It's basically the phrase "practice makes perfect" modernized. Of course it's not 100% true, but for most people it's excellent advice. The advice is basically "keep practicing, keep pushing yourself, seek good instruction, try to get feedback from people who know what they're doing". My argument is that 10,000 hour rule has become the "practice makes perfect" of today. Just like a lot of sayings passed down from generation to generation it's not 100% true, but to nitpick it is beyond useless, it's harmful. Why not tell people to try really hard at whatever they'd like to be good at? What's the alternative... don't try hard, because there's a small chance you won't get good at it despite your best efforts? That's senseless. I'm sorry, I think your criticism is harmful. 10,000 hour rule as it is exchanged today between people, in the kind of Gladwell narrative (which may not be scientifically valid 100%), is advice that's easy to internalize, and motivates people to try hard really well. I hate to see it being shot down by this kind of bikeshedding. Because apparently, at least to me, the only other alternative is gutless, feckless defeatist, overly-cautious "be warned that even if you try, you're not going to succeed". Screw that, I'd rather fail after trying really hard than to not having tried at all.
- haberman 12y ago
  > 10,000 hour rule is a rule of thumb, a saying, and a wonderfully fantastic one at that. It's stunningly simple Yes, but is it true? There are plenty of platitudes that are "fastastic" and "simple," but aren't true. Maybe you get comfort from believing things even if they're not actually true, but I really deeply do not. > Why not tell people to try really hard at whatever they'd like to be good at? What's the alternative... don't try hard, because there's a small chance you won't get good at it despite your best efforts? Did you read my comment? I am arguing that if someone really wants to feel the satisfaction of success, they should become deeply acquainted with their talents, because pursuing things you are talented at gives you by far the best chance of success. I always wished I was better at drawing. I've put in some concerted effort at it multiple times (like not a ton, but enough to realize that I am frustratingly non-talented at it). If my parents had truly made me believe the 10k hour rule, I might still be trying to make that happen instead of following my true talents, which I've achieved a pretty high level of achievement at. I'm not saying you should steer kids away from things they are interested in, or tell them they can't succeed. I'm just saying: help them to know themselves, and don't plant in them the idea that 10k hours will magically make them awesome at anything.
JeremyReimer 12y ago
>And the "10,000 hour rule" is worse than just a trivial factoid. It is a recipe for disappointment. If you tell someone that, despite their initial lack of talent, they can be "superb" at anything they want, and 10,000 hours later they are still mediocre at best, don't you think it would be frustrating to have wasted that much time? Are there any real-world examples that we can point at of people who actually did spend 10,000 hours at something and did not become superb at it? In Malcolm Gladwell's book, he tried to find piano players who had spent 10,000 hours practicing and then given up (having never made it to the professional scene) but he couldn't find any.
- haberman 12y ago
  > Are there any real-world examples that we can point at of people who actually did spend 10,000 hours at something and did not become superb at it? This is confirmation bias. If people plateau in their skill at 1k hours and then stop such serious pursuit, the burden of proof is on you to say that their gains would have resumed as they approached 10k hours. I observe as a musician that most people plateau at some point.
  - JeremyReimer 12y ago
    > This is confirmation bias. If people plateau in their skill at 1k hours and then stop such serious pursuit, the burden of proof is on you to say that their gains would have resumed as they approached 10k hours. Surely, though, out of all the people who reached 1k hours and thought about quitting, there would be some who decided to plod through and keep practicing? These people, as few in number as they might be, would eventually hit 10,000 hours of practice. Why hasn't anyone found them and interviewed them? In any pursuit, people will plateau all the time. It's the nature of practice. You have to push through the plateau in order to get to the next level. Some people decide that it's not worth it, so they stop. Are you saying that every single one of these people wasn't genetically talented enough to continue?
- dragonwriter 12y ago
  > Are there any real-world examples that we can point at of people who actually did spend 10,000 hours at something and did not become superb at it? Are there any real-world examples that we can point at of people who actually completed 10,000 hours of deliberative practice that weren't already far ahead of the of their equally-practicing peers in terms of skill with, say, 2,000 hours of practice? Even if we assume that Malcolm Gladwell's inability to find people in one domain that had done 10,000 hours of deliberate practice but not become superb is accurate and generalizable [1], what evidence is there to suggest that the relation involved isn't "People who don't excel in a domain before long before 10,000 hours of deliberate practice tend to stop pushing themselves before reaching 10,000 hours of deliberate practice"? [1] And there is at least some reason to believe that the impact of deliberate practice on performance is strongly domain dependent, not general, e.g., http://www.businessinsider.com/new-study-destroys-malcolm-gladwells-10000-rule-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/new-study-destroys-malcolm-gl...
CocaKoala 12y ago
> the difference between what comes easily and what doesn't. This is a very telling phrase as well. Mastery doesn't come easy, pretty much as a general rule. If your definition of mastery includes "It has to be easy to get there", then obviously you're not going to master anything because you're going to quit as soon as it gets hard. If I teach my child to only focus on things which come easily to them, I will have failed absolutely as a parent.
ScottBurson 12y ago
Knowing oneself is certainly important. The problem is, when a lot of people hear the word "talent", they think of it as something they couldn't possibly have any of. I think there is a place for encouraging them to stretch themselves anyway. Maybe that's how they will discover their talent.
tedks 12y ago
Deliberate practice is a very specific category of activities that doesn't include most of what people think of as "practice." If you are a developer, having an open source side project does not count as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice for software development would be more like doing the hardest Project Euler problems in very constrained environments. ----- Personally, I think it is very, very dubious that there are significant genetic components in virtually any activity. While having a relative that is good at chess might bias your probability towards being good at chess, this is not evidence that people without relatives who are good at chess will be bad at chess. The human genome is ludicrously small compared to the space of human activities. It simply cannot encode the skills necessary to be a pilot, to be a chessmaster, to be a doctor, a lawyer, a software designer, a lover, a fighter, or even a small, tiny fraction of the things humans do every single day. It's perfectly possible that there is some cognitive process, like pattern recognition, that the Polgars were genetically predisposed to being good at. But since there are so few cognitive processes and so many skills, it's likely that there are huge swaths of talents that the Polgars would also be predisposed to as well as playing chess. That's not even taking into account neuroplasticity, which we now know to be far more prevalent than we previously thought. Only decades ago it was thought that brains only deteriorate after a certain age. We know that to be false now. Beyond even that, technology is only going to become better, and we are very close (certainly on the timescale of humanity's existence) to true intelligence amplification on a biological level. Further, the best way to find out if you're good at a thing is to do it. Self-fulfilling prophecies being what they are, it's best if you think you'll succeed going in, because otherwise you're literally sabotaging yourself. I think this is handled better by Cal Newport than by myself and I advise you to read his book So Good They Can't Ignore You for that handling. ----- Ultimately, at some point in this discussion, you need to decide whether we live in the world of Limitless, or in the world of Gattaca. Either you spread the meme, whether it's literally true or not, that humans can accomplish anything, or you spread the meme that there are a handful of things you can do, and your only hope in happiness lies in finding those things and doing them. Obviously I think it's better to live in the Limitless-world than the Gattaca-world. While I think that Gattaca is a woefully misinformed parody of genetic engineering on humans, it does a very good job of portraying a society where everybody thinks that they live in a caste and that's the end all and be all of their world. If humanity had decided it was good at endurance hunting and gathering, we would still be on the Savannah. The story of humanity is the story of rejecting that there is a set list of things one can do, and doing things that are utterly impossible. Humans are the only thing we know of that can do this. If we abandon this, as far as we are aware, that light is snuffed out for the whole universe. Until we know that is not the case, we need to be conservative, and guard that ingenuity with the utmost caution.

tomsthumb 12y ago

> If you tell someone that, despite their initial lack of talent, they can be "superb" at anything they want, and 10,000 hours later they are still mediocre at best, don't you think it would be frustrating to have wasted that much time? Who are these mediocre people who have put in 10k hours of deliberate practice? I can't recall anyone I'd call mediocre who's put in more than a thousand hours at something.

haberman 12y ago
My observation as a musician is that most musicians plateau at a certain point, based on their inherent talents, and their gains after that point are much more marginal. Many people do continue to study in earnest (and invest a lot of time into "deliberate practice") after hitting this plateau, in an effort to make bigger gains. Though many will instead choose to make music a more recreational part of their life, and move onto other things as their life's primary focus. But I think it's severe confirmation bias to say "everyone who is good put in 10k hours, and few people make it to 10k hours without being really good." Because the only counterexample to that is someone who continues practicing intensely for 10k hours without seeing noticeable gains. And why would someone do that (unless they are chasing the siren of the 10k hour rule)?

facepalm 12y ago

What are the odds of a random child to become a chess prodigy? The thing about the Polgars is that they decided to raise chess prodigies before their kids were born. I think Polgar even advertised for a woman to carry out the experiment with him. It's strange how little is talked about that experiment. I think it holds an inconvenient truth for many. (I don't know how much she had trained by the age of 5, so I don't know it it has actual bearings on the 10000h rule. But it certainly shows that high skill is not necessarily inborn).

haberman 12y ago
> What are the odds of a random child to become a chess prodigy? Probably a lot better when the child is the genetic offspring of a chess teacher. It's also confirmation bias: we wouldn't have heard about the experiment if it had failed.
- dllthomas 12y ago
  "It's also confirmation bias: we wouldn't have heard about the experiment if it had failed." That's not what confirmation bias is. You're thinking "reporting bias" or "selection bias", I think. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporting_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reporting_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Selection_bias
- facepalm 12y ago
  Polgar wasn't a chess teacher before. He pickled chess for the experiment because it is easy to measure and then focused on teaching it.

selmnoo 12y ago

10,000 hour rule is a rule of thumb, a saying, and a wonderfully fantastic one at that. It's stunningly simple, I think that's what makes it so compelling. It's basically the phrase "practice makes perfect" modernized. Of course it's not 100% true, but for most people it's excellent advice. The advice is basically "keep practicing, keep pushing yourself, seek good instruction, try to get feedback from people who know what they're doing". My argument is that 10,000 hour rule has become the "practice makes perfect" of today. Just like a lot of sayings passed down from generation to generation it's not 100% true, but to nitpick it is beyond useless, it's harmful. Why not tell people to try really hard at whatever they'd like to be good at? What's the alternative... don't try hard, because there's a small chance you won't get good at it despite your best efforts? That's senseless. I'm sorry, I think your criticism is harmful. 10,000 hour rule as it is exchanged today between people, in the kind of Gladwell narrative (which may not be scientifically valid 100%), is advice that's easy to internalize, and motivates people to try hard really well. I hate to see it being shot down by this kind of bikeshedding. Because apparently, at least to me, the only other alternative is gutless, feckless defeatist, overly-cautious "be warned that even if you try, you're not going to succeed". Screw that, I'd rather fail after trying really hard than to not having tried at all.

haberman 12y ago
> 10,000 hour rule is a rule of thumb, a saying, and a wonderfully fantastic one at that. It's stunningly simple Yes, but is it true? There are plenty of platitudes that are "fastastic" and "simple," but aren't true. Maybe you get comfort from believing things even if they're not actually true, but I really deeply do not. > Why not tell people to try really hard at whatever they'd like to be good at? What's the alternative... don't try hard, because there's a small chance you won't get good at it despite your best efforts? Did you read my comment? I am arguing that if someone really wants to feel the satisfaction of success, they should become deeply acquainted with their talents, because pursuing things you are talented at gives you by far the best chance of success. I always wished I was better at drawing. I've put in some concerted effort at it multiple times (like not a ton, but enough to realize that I am frustratingly non-talented at it). If my parents had truly made me believe the 10k hour rule, I might still be trying to make that happen instead of following my true talents, which I've achieved a pretty high level of achievement at. I'm not saying you should steer kids away from things they are interested in, or tell them they can't succeed. I'm just saying: help them to know themselves, and don't plant in them the idea that 10k hours will magically make them awesome at anything.

JeremyReimer 12y ago

>And the "10,000 hour rule" is worse than just a trivial factoid. It is a recipe for disappointment. If you tell someone that, despite their initial lack of talent, they can be "superb" at anything they want, and 10,000 hours later they are still mediocre at best, don't you think it would be frustrating to have wasted that much time? Are there any real-world examples that we can point at of people who actually did spend 10,000 hours at something and did not become superb at it? In Malcolm Gladwell's book, he tried to find piano players who had spent 10,000 hours practicing and then given up (having never made it to the professional scene) but he couldn't find any.

haberman 12y ago
> Are there any real-world examples that we can point at of people who actually did spend 10,000 hours at something and did not become superb at it? This is confirmation bias. If people plateau in their skill at 1k hours and then stop such serious pursuit, the burden of proof is on you to say that their gains would have resumed as they approached 10k hours. I observe as a musician that most people plateau at some point.
- JeremyReimer 12y ago
  > This is confirmation bias. If people plateau in their skill at 1k hours and then stop such serious pursuit, the burden of proof is on you to say that their gains would have resumed as they approached 10k hours. Surely, though, out of all the people who reached 1k hours and thought about quitting, there would be some who decided to plod through and keep practicing? These people, as few in number as they might be, would eventually hit 10,000 hours of practice. Why hasn't anyone found them and interviewed them? In any pursuit, people will plateau all the time. It's the nature of practice. You have to push through the plateau in order to get to the next level. Some people decide that it's not worth it, so they stop. Are you saying that every single one of these people wasn't genetically talented enough to continue?
dragonwriter 12y ago
> Are there any real-world examples that we can point at of people who actually did spend 10,000 hours at something and did not become superb at it? Are there any real-world examples that we can point at of people who actually completed 10,000 hours of deliberative practice that weren't already far ahead of the of their equally-practicing peers in terms of skill with, say, 2,000 hours of practice? Even if we assume that Malcolm Gladwell's inability to find people in one domain that had done 10,000 hours of deliberate practice but not become superb is accurate and generalizable [1], what evidence is there to suggest that the relation involved isn't "People who don't excel in a domain before long before 10,000 hours of deliberate practice tend to stop pushing themselves before reaching 10,000 hours of deliberate practice"? [1] And there is at least some reason to believe that the impact of deliberate practice on performance is strongly domain dependent, not general, e.g., http://www.businessinsider.com/new-study-destroys-malcolm-gladwells-10000-rule-2014-7 http://www.businessinsider.com/new-study-destroys-malcolm-gl...

CocaKoala 12y ago

> the difference between what comes easily and what doesn't. This is a very telling phrase as well. Mastery doesn't come easy, pretty much as a general rule. If your definition of mastery includes "It has to be easy to get there", then obviously you're not going to master anything because you're going to quit as soon as it gets hard. If I teach my child to only focus on things which come easily to them, I will have failed absolutely as a parent.

ScottBurson 12y ago

Knowing oneself is certainly important. The problem is, when a lot of people hear the word "talent", they think of it as something they couldn't possibly have any of. I think there is a place for encouraging them to stretch themselves anyway. Maybe that's how they will discover their talent.

tedks 12y ago

Deliberate practice is a very specific category of activities that doesn't include most of what people think of as "practice." If you are a developer, having an open source side project does not count as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice for software development would be more like doing the hardest Project Euler problems in very constrained environments. ----- Personally, I think it is very, very dubious that there are significant genetic components in virtually any activity. While having a relative that is good at chess might bias your probability towards being good at chess, this is not evidence that people without relatives who are good at chess will be bad at chess. The human genome is ludicrously small compared to the space of human activities. It simply cannot encode the skills necessary to be a pilot, to be a chessmaster, to be a doctor, a lawyer, a software designer, a lover, a fighter, or even a small, tiny fraction of the things humans do every single day. It's perfectly possible that there is some cognitive process, like pattern recognition, that the Polgars were genetically predisposed to being good at. But since there are so few cognitive processes and so many skills, it's likely that there are huge swaths of talents that the Polgars would also be predisposed to as well as playing chess. That's not even taking into account neuroplasticity, which we now know to be far more prevalent than we previously thought. Only decades ago it was thought that brains only deteriorate after a certain age. We know that to be false now. Beyond even that, technology is only going to become better, and we are very close (certainly on the timescale of humanity's existence) to true intelligence amplification on a biological level. Further, the best way to find out if you're good at a thing is to do it. Self-fulfilling prophecies being what they are, it's best if you think you'll succeed going in, because otherwise you're literally sabotaging yourself. I think this is handled better by Cal Newport than by myself and I advise you to read his book So Good They Can't Ignore You for that handling. ----- Ultimately, at some point in this discussion, you need to decide whether we live in the world of Limitless, or in the world of Gattaca. Either you spread the meme, whether it's literally true or not, that humans can accomplish anything, or you spread the meme that there are a handful of things you can do, and your only hope in happiness lies in finding those things and doing them. Obviously I think it's better to live in the Limitless-world than the Gattaca-world. While I think that Gattaca is a woefully misinformed parody of genetic engineering on humans, it does a very good job of portraying a society where everybody thinks that they live in a caste and that's the end all and be all of their world. If humanity had decided it was good at endurance hunting and gathering, we would still be on the Savannah. The story of humanity is the story of rejecting that there is a set list of things one can do, and doing things that are utterly impossible. Humans are the only thing we know of that can do this. If we abandon this, as far as we are aware, that light is snuffed out for the whole universe. Until we know that is not the case, we need to be conservative, and guard that ingenuity with the utmost caution.