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The Expert in a Year Challenge
- wodenokoto 12y agoReminds me of Moonwalking with Einstein. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_With_Einstein https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moonwalking_With_Einstein
- 3327 12y agoI have a tennis version of this. EVery day makes a huge difference.
- rickdale 12y agoYou do? Can you share a little bit of your experience. I just did something similar with tennis last summer and measured my improvement using the babolat play stats. If you get the chance, check out Jeff Salzenstein. I improved and learned more watching his videos and courses than I did in the last 7 years. Just for example, from the play stats I was hitting 1 out of 4 forehands in the center of my racket before I knew about Jeff Salzenstein, and in less than 1 month I was at 8 out 10 in the center. Would like to hear about your experience though.
- espinchi 12y agoDefinitely, an inspiring story. Comparing "how much of an expert" you can become after a full year of good training in different activities would be a great experiment. Anyone dares to create a ranking with some? (Say tennis, chess, web development, ice hockey, ...)
- anu_gupta 12y agoAnd of course, there's Dance in a Year http://danceinayear.com/ http://danceinayear.com/
- aidos 12y agoRelated is The Dan Plan in which a chap is trying to become a pro golfer by dedicating 10,000 hours to it (from zero experience) [1]. I seem to recall it was after Malcolm Gladwell claimed that it takes that long to achieve mastery in a discipline. Dan's almost at the 5 year mark now. I check back a couple of times a year to see how he's getting on. [1] http://www.thedanplan.com http://www.thedanplan.com
- taybin 12y agoIt will be interesting to see how well Gladwell's claim stands up to empirical testing.
- robinwarren 12y agoThis is a good read on the 10,000 hour myth. I can't remember where I originally heard that the idea as pushed by Gladwell has been debunked, probably the You are not so smart podcast. I've no personal insight to say whether this is a rule or a myth but the original researcher seems to disagree with the popsci understanding of it. http://changingthegameproject.com/the-10000-hour-myth/ http://changingthegameproject.com/the-10000-hour-myth/
- Plough_Jogger 12y agoA research paper authored last year cited a study which found that only 30% of the variation in performance could be attributed to deliberate practice. http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613000421 http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613...
- roadnottaken 12y agoVery interesting, thanks
- b_emery 12y agoWhich begs the question, what percent of the variation distinguishes the 'expert' from the non-expert?
- easytiger 12y agoSo flawed I don't know where to begin.
- kushti 12y agoReminds me "Balls of Fury" movie http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424823/ http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0424823/
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- dpark 12y agoWhat's your issue with the word "expert"? The guy was trying to land in the top 250 in a year. That would comfortably place him in the "expert" player category (had he succeeded).
- zotovas 12y agoMy issues is that top 250 in England doesn't make you an expert of table tennis. It makes ok at table tennis. It might give a privilege to say that I am an expert at table tennis in England but definitely not within the sport itself. Ben Larcombe, the author of this wonderful piece, is not an expert at table tennis either. Can he teach someone to be an expert? Maybe, he can, but as a player he is not. "My England ranking varies from about 150th – 200th depending on how I’m getting on at tournaments. My long-term goal is to get myself into the top 100 players in England." This quote means that he claims to be an expert at table tennis because reaching top 250 is an "expert" level. Out of 1000 people who are ranked.
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- dpark 12y agoWhat constitutes an expert in your opinion? There are some 2.4 million people playing table tennis in the UK[1], so the top 250 is pretty elite. Just looking at membership in Table Tennis England, there are nearly 25 thousand players[2], making 250 the top 1% of people who care enough about the sport to spend money becoming a member. I'd call that expert. It's certainly not just "ok at table tennis". [1] http://tabletennisengland.co.uk/news/table-tennis-facts/ http://tabletennisengland.co.uk/news/table-tennis-facts/ [2] http://tabletennisengland.co.uk/etta_website/annual_report/annual-report.pdf http://tabletennisengland.co.uk/etta_website/annual_report/a...
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- arca_vorago 12y ago“I fear not the man who has practiced 10,000 kicks once, but I fear the man who had practiced one kick 10,000 times.” - Bruce Lee I think that attitude is how you get 'expert'. In the military for example, you train your muscle memory such that in combat, when your adrenaline is at an all time high (no drug touches it IMO) your body just tends to do what it needs to do because you have trained it so. This also ties in with Bruce Lee's view on forms. You have to learn the form, and practice it, until you forget it... if that makes sense. The bottom line is that practice makes perfect. In todays world though, with athletes who have the ability to do nothing but train, I think it's harder and harder for a layman to compete. When I was a kid I went to the national junior olympics without even trying. If I that same kid today, I doubt I could make it past state.
- Sprezzaturianna 12y agoAlways sad to see this myth live on. It is simultaneously as self-evident as it is nonsensical. 1) Yes you get better with practice 2) Some faster than others 3) Some with a higher peak than others 4) It is neither necessary, nor sufficient with 10 000 hours effective practice (some win the world championship in high jump after less than a year [Donald Thomas 2007], others will never become chess champions, or even ranked among the top 10 000, after 30 000 hours' dedicated practice) 5) Even the original study just put 10k hours as the AVERAGE practice time for THOSE few that eventually became masters (i.e. were super-talented), with a range of 3k-30k hours needed. However, always good to see people wanting to expand their skill set through dedicated work - admirable (but has NOTHING to do with the fundamentally flawed 10k hr roule)
- tonystubblebine 12y ago10,000 hours has got to be the least interesting concept in the body of work around deliberate practice. But it is somehow the concept that is most widely known. I would love to know the psychology behind why that concept was so sticky given that it seems self-evidently worthless to know where the theoretical cap on self-improvement lies. I mean, how many things do we put 10k hours of practice in to? The much better concepts from this world are: * The deliberate part of deliberate practice. There are very different qualities of practice. Tim Ferriss is making a living on hunting down concepts around minimum effective doses of practice and his third book (Chef) is very good for this. These are all essentially finding more effective ways to practice so that you get more out of each hour. * The experienced non-expert as an explanation (and pejorative) for everyone who has 10,000 hours of experience but isn't very good. * Difficulty: the ideal practice difficulty is uncomfortable, falling between trivial and demoralizing.
- mfringel 12y agoThe 10k hour concept is sticky/durable because it holds out hope. The hope that you could be one of the best in the world if you just worked hard enough. The hope that it's not too late.
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- tokenadult 12y agoAs is typical in most threads about this perennial topic here on HN, the people who are most relaxed about putting in their hours of practice are the people who are most relaxed about their definition of expertise. To be indisputably an expert (to have, in K. Anders Ericsson's formulation, statistically reliable superior performance) is not the work of a moment, no matter how much "innate" ability one starts out with.
- brosky117 12y agoI love the idea of becoming an expert at something in an unusually short period of time. I felt like this article was entertaining and enjoyable. That being said, in regards to the 10,000 hours discussion being had here, I feel like the issue can be summed up as being a classic confusion of correlation and causation. It is obvious that a master will have practiced more than the apprentice but the practice itself is not the sole source of mastery.
- nopinsight 12y agoI believe the number of hours required to become an expert depends on both the nature of the field and the competition in it. Although there are a lot of table tennis players in Britain, probably not too many devote significant effort and time to master it. Thus, the effort required to be in the top echelon is not that great. The same cannot be said for, say, American Football in the US or soccer in many countries. The 500 hours or so he spent on table tennis is woefully inadequate to master mathematics as well, but for a different reason. (Mastering math requires knowledge and skills on a huge amount of materials accumulated over centuries.)
- igonvalue 12y agoOne of the most interesting things I've read (or listened to) about expertise is a podcast interview with the author of The Sports Gene[0]. > So in my second chapter I sort of tell a story I call the 'Tale of Two High Jumpers,' in which I sort of profile two high jumpers, one named Stefan Holm, who over the course of 20 years--and by his estimate, 20,000 hours--made incremental progress every year, to the point where he became one of the best high jumpers in the world. And then in 2007 he travels to the World Championships, and is met by a total unknown, a Bahamian jumper by the name of Donald Thomas, who just recently had started high jumping, basically because he had found out he was good at it on a lunchtime bet at his college. And so, Donald Thomas is closer to 0 hours, and Stefan Holm is closer to 20,000 hours. So they average 10,000 hours. But Donald Thomas actually wins that competition. And so I thought it was a good story to explain the fact that not only is there huge variation, but different athletes can get to the same place with both different biology and different training programs. [0] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/david_epstein_o.html http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/david_epstein_o.htm...
- rawnlq 12y agoOne public dataset that I think people should analyze is how competitive rating changes based on number of events you participated in. For example, in programming competitions the history ratings of everybody is public: http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank. One of the most well known competitive programmers is probably tourist: http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=22263204&tab=alg http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=222.... He started at a rating of about 1200 when he was 12yrs old but took him over 5 years to increase it by 2000 points. For everyone that kept at it for equally as long, you can see a similar trend in trajectory. The only difference is the slope at which their ratings increase. (The ratings probably mean nothing to you, so for some calibration, people with a rating of about 1500 can easily pass a google interview, and I think a fresh CS grad with no practice will probably start at around 1000. Which probably gives hope to the average CS grad since even for the world's best, it took them about 10 years to get to where they are.) I just thought this was a nice way to quantify growth vs practice.
- rawnlq 12y agoHere's a few more members from the top 10: http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=19849563&tab=alg http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=198... http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=22714443&tab=alg http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=227... http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=22689544&tab=alg http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=226... http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=22840511&tab=alg http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=228... http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=22709180&tab=alg http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=227... http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=22708534&tab=alg http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=227... They all started at a "green" or "blue" rating (i.e., no prior training) and it took all of them a bit of time to hit "red", which is the arbitrary point you can start calling them an expert.
- visakanv 12y agoThere's a writer from Esquire who's basically made a living doing experiments like this. He's written things like The Year Of Living Biblically [1] (self-explanatory), The Know-It-All (he read all of Encyclopedia Britannica) [2], and other experiments. There are a lot of others who have done similar things. Matt Cutts from Google does 30 day experiments. Karen X Cheng learned to dance in a year. There's something about contained experiments that are quite compelling. I'm doing my own version of this, as a writer. I'm working on writing 1,000,000 words [3]. I'm doing this in 1,000 sets of 1,000. I'm currently at 240. 760 to go. – [1] http://ajjacobs.com/books/the-year-of-living-biblically/ http://ajjacobs.com/books/the-year-of-living-biblically/ [2] http://ajjacobs.com/books/the-know-it-all/ http://ajjacobs.com/books/the-know-it-all/ [3] http://visakanv.com/1000/ http://visakanv.com/1000/