
Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert? - akandiah
http://www.bbc.com/news/magazine-26384712
======
tokenadult
The usual saying is that "the adjective is the enemy of the noun," but on this
issue, you shouldn't think about "practice" except in combination with the
word "deliberate." What Dan McLaughlin, the amateur golfer who is trying to
become an expert golfer, is doing is testing out the idea that sufficiently
structured and systematic practice with a coach can turn a moderately
interested, not particularly talented average performer into an expert
performer in the domain of playing golf.

The research base that developed the term "deliberate practice," (and, for
that matter, more rigorously defined "expertise") comes from K. Anders
Ericsson[1] and colleagues who contributed to the _The Cambridge Handbook of
Expertise and Expert Performance_ (2006), a book[2] summarizing research in
many domains of human performance.

There are a lot of popular books on these ideas, but only a few take care to
distinguish deliberate practice from playful engagement or routine performance
by an amateur, and only a few look carefully at the definition of "expert"
performance. What's rigorously defined as "deliberate practice" (with coaching
and monitoring of fine details of performance) is very hard to do long-term
for more than four hours per day, which is why the "ten-year rule" was the
original expression of some of the earliest findings on the development of
expertise. Your sleeping hours don't count (directly) for development of
expertise, nor eating nor hours spent on other daily activities, so it takes
years to accumulate 10,000 hours of deliberate practice with necessary rest
and play in between sessions of practice.

[1]
[http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html](http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html)

[2]
[http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/psychology/cog...](http://www.cambridge.org/us/academic/subjects/psychology/cognition/cambridge-
handbook-expertise-and-expert-performance)

~~~
read
From the article: _Maybe talented people just practise more and try harder at
the thing they 're already good at - because they enjoy it?_

There's a profound implication here: that you can train yourself to enjoy
something you originally didn't. And even if it's no less hard of a problem
than it is to make yourself a 10,000-hour expert in something, it's one with a
broader impact.

~~~
joshkaufman
I recently wrote a book on this topic[1][2], and you're quite right - most
people seem to get wrapped up in the status that surrounds the idea of
expertise when the real value of this research is what it tells us about how
to go about acquiring new skills for personal or professional use.

As you mentioned, practicing to the point of enjoying the skill is the most
effective strategy. If you can reach the point where practicing is fun, you're
much more likely to continue leveling up.

Adult learners typically find the first few hours of practicing a new skill
extremely frustrating, and a very low percentage will complete even 2-3 hours
of deliberate practice if the skill is complex, ambiguous, or challenging.
Somewhere around hours 3-10, however, you start to see clear improvements, and
pushing through frustration is much less of a factor. That's the point where
you start seeing clear results.

In my research/experience, the threshold for acquiring new skills for personal
or professional use is somewhere around 20 hours. That's not "expertise" \-
it's being able to produce a desired result or enjoy the experience. In the
vast majority of cases, you don't need to be an "expert" to derive value from
practicing new skills.

Since most people have a hard time pushing through the early frustration
barrier, 10-20 hours of strategic, deliberate practice will also give you a
surprising level of competence compared to other people. All it really takes
is having a smart strategy that ensures (1) you invest those early hours of
practice in acquiring the most commonly-used sub-skills, (2) you alter your
environment to make it as easy as possible to remove distractions, sit down,
and do the work.

[1] Book: [http://first20hours.com](http://first20hours.com)

[2] Overview:
[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5MgBikgcWnY)

------
skywhopper
10,000 hours (or thereabouts) of practice is one prerequisite. But you have to
practice the right things. And for most people that means there needs to be
some structure to their practice, some feedback from existing experts.
Otherwise, how will you know what needs improvement or re-adjustment.

In the fantastic book "Lessons on the Fundamentals of Go", Toshiro Kageyama
addresses this very topic in the introduction saying, "Of course one cannot
make progress in any discipline without effort. 'There is no pleasure without
pain.' Pleasure is progress, and pain the pain of effort. Study in the wrong
way, however, and the result may be just pain with no pleasure at all. One
must, without fail, learn the correct way to study."

~~~
pixl97
I think the saying goes

\--Practice does not make perfect. Only perfect practice makes perfect.

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Agreed. My musician son practices a new piece slowly, deliberately, speeding
up as he gets it down. Takes a day or two for a piece that way - no wasted
time unlearning/reworking early screw-ups that became routine.

------
summerdown2
Well, one of the best examples of "practice leads to excellence" is given by
the story of Lazlo Polgar:

[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r)

> László is an expert on chess theory and owns over 10,000 chess books. He is
> interested in the proper method of rearing children, believing that
> "geniuses are made, not born". Before he had any children, he wrote a book
> entitled Bring Up Genius!, and sought a wife to help him carry out his
> experiment. He found one in Klara, a schoolteacher, who lived in a
> Hungarian-speaking enclave in Ukraine. He married her in the USSR and
> brought her to Hungary. He home-schooled their three daughters, primarily in
> chess, and all three went on to become strong players.

Their three daughters:

Sofia:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zs%C3%B3fia_Polg%C3%A1r](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zs%C3%B3fia_Polg%C3%A1r)

> In 1989, at the age of 14, she stunned the chess world by her performance in
> a tournament in Rome, which became known as the "Sack of Rome". She won the
> tournament, which included several strong grandmasters, with a score of 8½
> out of 9. According to the Chessmetrics rating system, her performance
> rating was 2735;[3] one of the strongest performances in history by a
> 14-year-old.

Susan:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polgar](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Susan_Polgar)

> On the July 1984 FIDE Rating List, at the age of 15, she became the top-
> ranked woman player in the world, and remained ranked in the top three for
> the next 23 years. She was also the first woman in history to break the
> gender barrier by qualifying for the 1986 "Men's" World Championship

And Judit:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r)

> Judit Polgár (born 23 July 1976) is a Hungarian chess grandmaster. She is by
> far the strongest female chess player in history.[1] In 1991, Polgár
> achieved the title of Grandmaster at the age of 15 years and 4 months, the
> youngest person to do so until then.

~~~
skywhopper
Hard to separate nature from nurture when you school your kids on your own
area of expertise. Had he tried to make them into expert musicians or downhill
skiers, his experiment might have more weight.

~~~
1337biz
But isn't the idea behind the 10,000 hour idea that you need constant high
quality feedback and training?

~~~
JoeAltmaier
Nope; just that you've been at it, studying and trying. The (Gladwell)
examples are of folks in groups that learned together.

------
coldtea
Let's put it this way: people spend more than 10,000 of their lives talking
and writing (including hours spent at school), and the majority can hardly put
together a good sentense.

Heck, an awful lot cannot even distinguish between you're and your.

~~~
badman_ting
_Let 's put it this way: people spend more than 10,000 of their lives talking
and writing (including hours spent at school), and the majority can hardly put
together a good sentense.

Heck, an awful lot cannot even distinguish between you're and your._

I once wrote (coined? invented?) a law which says that one cannot point out
errors of grammar or spelling in another's writing, without committing
embarrassing errors of one's own.

~~~
krallja
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muphry%27s_law)

~~~
coldtea
Well, the situation he described is not really Murphy's law.

It might be a case of "something gone wrong" (and in that sense covered by
Murphy's law too), but that's overly generic, and he was going after something
far more specific.

------
tomphoolery
I've had mixed feelings on this.

On one hand, I believe that "practice" in this sense is greatly misunderstood.
This word normally implies a kind of deliberate action, that you _intend_ to
practice for an hour or so. In reality, most of our productive practice comes
from the times that you probably don't know you're practicing. For example,
when you sing in the shower, you are exercising your vocal chords and making
them stronger. That's practice. When you drum the beat of the song on your
desk, or even write a new one, and comprehend the rhythms...that's practice.
Simply _hearing_ a song could be considered "practice" for a composer. When I
was in school, and later in conservatory, the teachers always gave us hard
minimums for practice: 15 minutes, 30 minutes, 1 hour...every day. This seemed
like peanuts to me, because how could anyone really not practice for that
short of a time and still feel as though they are interested in music?

On the other hand, I do believe in what these people say. Talent is an
illusion. It's a way other people describe the long and arduous work you've
done to get to this point. In many ways, when people say I am "talented" at
something, I find it slightly demoralizing...because it rejects all of the
intense hard work and thousands of hours that I put into my craft in order to
get to _this_ point (and I don't even believe I'm really a good enough
programmer OR musician to be talking from any kind of pulpit). But I don't get
too bent out of shape, because I know that deep down, they do understand what
"talent" really means.

------
wingerlang
This guys [0] is trying this with gold. He should hit 10.000 hours at December
2016. I read about it a year or two ago and put it into my calendar.

[http://thedanplan.com/about/](http://thedanplan.com/about/)

~~~
igravious
Uh, that's the same guy the article mentions.

And it's not gold, it's golf.

And it's not guys, it's guy's.

But apart from that, you're spot on.

~~~
wingerlang
Oh, sorry about that. I just came home from a looong bus ride when writing
that.

------
rjzzleep
my experience has been that you can get pretty close to becoming an expert
with practicing on your own.

but a lot of times i reached a point where i needed support to break a certain
barrier. when i say support i mean an expert. someone that can help make
things better.

sometimes though, this is not true. sometimes too much invalid practice lead
to the expert saying i don't like to deal with this sort of stuff. "i have
make you unlearn a lot of the mistakes you learned before."

this is extremely true in society. while you might argue that the following is
not practice and expertise, it's classic case of mental practice from invalid
societal patterns
[https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302645](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7302645)

------
lotsofmangos
It can. 48 hours might also make you an expert, or a lifetime, or you may
never become an expert, or you might be born an expert. I was born an expert
in screaming very loudly and getting lost, for instance. It depends on who you
are and what you are trying to become an expert in.

------
bayesianhorse
You can't become an expert without staying in "the Beginner's mind" (as in the
Zen meaning of the phrase).

------
vlasev
You are a little over a year old 10000 hours into your life and you are hardly
and expert at that point :P

~~~
Blahah
At that age most babies are experts at getting their parents to do everything
for them...

------
ithkuil
"An expert is someone who's far away from home and gives advice"

    
    
      -- anonymous

------
thrill
There is a difference in practicing for 10,000 hours and practicing for 1 hour
10,000 times.

------
Codhisattva
Gladwell's over-simplification is a curse on us all.

------
_pmf_
I think that deliberate practice is both better and worse than actual
practice; you need both.

------
altero
This is kind of sexist. It suggest anyone can become expert in a few years,
yet women are clearly discriminated everywhere.

