
The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real - pif
http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not-real-180952410/
======
cge
I'd speculate that the 10,000 hour rule is a product of an American obsession
with the idea of hard work being the most important factor in success, with
the idea that everyone's abilities are reasonably equal, and determination and
diligence is what differentiates them. This satisfies a certain sense of
fairness and justice in life. I also think it's just not true, more the
product of wishful thinking than any evidence.

People have differing levels of talent in different areas, and this _does_
have significant effects on success and ability. There _are_ "super-brilliant
slackers," and there are very hard working failures. Talent, too, does not
necessarily correspond with interest and enjoyment. None of this is fair, but
life is not inherently fair.

The important thing here, more than practice, is figuring out what one is good
at doing, and what one enjoys doing, and coming up with things that are in
both sets.

~~~
qwerta
10K hours is about 3 years of training.

~~~
swimfar
That would be 9 hours per day, every single day of those three years. How many
people have even had just one day where they spent nine hours on the same
thing? That's not including breaks, and periods where you mind wanders or
you're not focused.

~~~
qwerta
Most people I know did it in college

~~~
endzone
clearly you had a remarkable college class...

------
dqdo
The reason that the 10,000 hour does not exist are: (1) different fields
require different amount of training and dedication, (2) it is difficult to
measure what "mastery" is because it is so hard to quantify, (3) some fields
are more competitive than others and therefore requires more practice to get
really good, (4) the way that one learns and practice can have a significant
effect on one's skill level, (5) at the highest level there is always a factor
of talent and luck. Overall, the 10,000 hour rule just means that it takes a
really really long time and dedication to be a world class at something. For
some it may take only 1,000 hours while others will not reach it no matter how
much they try. I think that this meme has gotten out of control and perhaps
people have focused more on the long hours than the joy of improving or
understanding what improvement means. It is not always better to spend more
time on something and in some sense the feeling that we should be working all
the time has lead people to become less productive.

~~~
abraxasz
I think the problem is more (6) deliberate practice is hard to define. Some
people believe that just sitting and doing problem sets is deliberate
practice. Some people believe that hacking on a side project is deliberate
practice of programming skills. I don't think that any of those two examples
would qualify as deliberate practice.

~~~
oatmeal_coffee
How would you define deliberate practice, then? I would agree that deliberate
practice may be hard to define across all skills, but it could be defined for
a specific skill.

For example in programing, I would consider problem sets and side projects
with functions and goals that are aligned but still outside of one's normal
scope of work to be deliberate practice. Working on Project Euler problem sets
could be considered deliberate practice. They are problems that can be done in
most any programming language, are known to be great for learning a new one,
but generally fall outside the usual work of handling data, transforming
content, etc.

I would consider Project Euler to be akin to practicing scales on a musical
instrument: playing scales is not necessarily music in a "having popular
appeal" sense, but it does enable new skills and depth of knowledge of the
instrument.

~~~
BSousa
Taking the Project Euler example, consistently doing the exercises, if they go
in difficulty for each done, is deliberate practise in (probably) algorithm
design, but does nothing for architecture. But redoing the same exercises over
and over, always improving the design of it in each iteration (examples:
reduce number of lines, apply DDD or hexagonal, etc, though the solutions in
Project Euler probably not the best for this kind of practise) improves
architecture skills.

The idea of deliberate practise is to always be improving in the tasks you are
doing, usually by taking more and more difficult tasks in progression, but
also analysing the past actions to identify where to improve. For example, I
always liked to play tennis (and have many years of competitive table tennis
behind me). Before I started working with a coach, my practises were mostly
playing the game, maybe having a few swings against a wall when I didn't have
a partner. When I started working with a coach, we practises my service over
and over and over again, changing targets in the field, the kind of spin, and
analysing most of the services to see what went right and wrong with my
service. I can only say my skills improved at more than 10x the speed than
when I was just having matches with other people.

------
fchollet
The 10,000 hour rule is a cultural meme that has spread and found believers
not because it is grounded in reality but because it is cognitively seductive.
In the first place it should seem highly suspect that something as poorly-
defined and multidimensional as "mastering" (how do you measure mastery?) a
"field" (as if every field had the same complexity and breadth) could always
be done by anyone (independently of the obvious issue of individual variations
in intelligence and talent) under a constant, conveniently round figure of
10,000 hours of practice.

As a cultural meme it works in a similar way to the myth that "humans are only
using 10% of their brains". I expect it to die a slow death over the next 50
years.

~~~
JonnieCache
I think its popular because 10,000 hours seems nicely out of reach for most
people, so it lets you off the hook for not being good at stuff. It's not my
fault I can't play the piano: my lifestyle precludes it. If only I didn't have
a job/kids/whatever, then people could see how creative I really am. Gladwell
allows one to continue doing nothing while still imagining oneself as a
thwarted hero. A great deal for just $16.99.

------
yungchin
Does this really contradict that 10000-hour rule? (Well, apart from the fact
that 10000 hours may well be an arbitrary number, and not as magical as
Gladwell made it out to be)

From what I remember from reading Outliers, the claim about the 10000 hours
was formulated more precisely than is posed here: it only said that _above a
certain level of innate talent_ (IIRC the particular level wasn't made a big
deal of), differences in talent were less significant than differences in
practice hours.

That's a much weaker claim, but a more credible one: if you're already blessed
with eg a high IQ, then it pays off to work hard on your homework, and you can
overtake the super-brilliant slacker in your class. But if you didn't have a
very high IQ to begin with, the rule doesn't promise you anything.

The data in the article just says there's a lot of other stuff that determines
the variance in performance - probably that includes "talent". It doesn't try
to find if such a "talent threshold" above which talent is less important
exists.

~~~
lutusp
> Does this really contradict that 10000-hour rule?

No, it contradicts the premise that there could be such a number with the
meaning attached to it. It's not about the value the number has, the issue is
the number itself -- the idea that the thing under discussion could be
assigned a specific value.

But the deeper problem is that it assigns a quantity to something no one
understands well enough to quantify. Scientists avoid attaching a number to
something until there's an explanation, a theory, that makes the number both
compelling and testable (i.e. falsifiable).

~~~
pbhjpbhj
> _Scientists avoid attaching a number to something until there 's an
> explanation, a theory, that makes the number both compelling and testable
> (i.e. falsifiable)._ //

Hubble seemingly ignored the outliers and drew a straight line through his
data to create his eponymous "constant". Making a mark to work from isn't
really unscientific it's just loose hypothesising -
[http://www.pnas.org/content/15/3/168.full.pdf+html](http://www.pnas.org/content/15/3/168.full.pdf+html).

Surely the fact that this meta-analysis has falsified the former claim
[hypothesis] shows that it was scientific [at least under a Popperian
formulation].

~~~
lutusp
> Hubble seemingly ignored the outliers and drew a straight line through his
> data to create his eponymous "constant".

That's a perfectly reasonable use of statistics in reducing observations. The
same method was used extensively in the recent hunt for the Higgs Boson, until
the uncertainties in the process fell below 5 sigma, at which point a
discovery was announced.

> Making a mark to work from isn't really unscientific it's just loose
> hypothesising ...

If it's not either derived from empirical observation or a reasonable
extrapolation from established theory, it's ipso facto unscientific.

> Surely the fact that this meta-analysis has falsified the former claim
> [hypothesis] shows that it was scientific ...

No, it only shows that one unscientific claim (based on no theory and no
evidence) can appear to unseat another. And it's not a "falsification",
because the original claim is unfalsifiable on the ground that it's not based
on a testable theory.

Group A says, "It takes 10,000 hours ..." without any basis. Group B says,
"Utter nonsense." This happens in astrology all the time. Does that mean
astrology is science? The difference between astrology and science is that
scientists won't make a prediction without an empirical basis and a theory
about _why_ it's so.

~~~
pbhjpbhj
Based on your formulation it seems all new "scientific" [null] hypotheses are
"ipso facto unscientific"?

For example c being constant is an axiomatic part of relativity. Ergo to you
it seems, as this is not empirical nor an extrapolation but a new hypothesis
that when postulated contradicts established science, this suggestion - and
presumably the ensuing formulation - was, um, unscientific?

Now I'm happy to go with that, call it a philosophical treatise and recognise
the axiomatic nature of relativity but at this point I think your definition
of science is too tight; theoretical physics to me is a part of science.
Indeed I'd say wild hypothesising can be (and is called) science depending
really on what you do with those hypotheses.

------
mkl
There's a really interesting episode of the _You Are Not So Smart_ podcast
that delves into this in some depth, particularly relating to sports, where
the idea has really taken off, and where there is good evidence the
specialisation it encourages actively harms performance:
[http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-
podcast-030-how...](http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-
podcast-030-how-practice-changes-the-brain-with-david-epstein/)

~~~
agumonkey
Nice talk, I wish to see more advanced idea on the same topic.

------
wellboy
The article states that only 12% of success is determined by practice, thus
the hypothesis of it taking 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill is
false.

Somehow that doesn't make any sense. >D

The author should maybe have read up more on the 10,000 hour rule, because the
rule means that if someone is extremely talented in a certain skill already,
it still takes them 10,000 hours to master that skill, such as Beethoven,
Gates etc.

------
jaimebuelta
A few weeks ago, the You Are Not So Smart podcast talked about this. I really
recommend it to anyone interested in this 10K hour thing

[http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-
podcast-030-how...](http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-
podcast-030-how-practice-changes-the-brain-with-david-epstein/)

------
aaronbasssett
I observed Escher. I love Basquiat. I watched Keith Haring, you see I study
art. The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint, the greats
were great cause they paint a lot.

~~~
pif
Doing a lot is not enough. Being critical towards yourself, striving to do
better, _understand_ what is better, looking for and listening to feedback,
those are as necessary.

~~~
simoncarter
In what appears to be the original paper on the 10,000 hour rule (The Role of
Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance:
[http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...](http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/DeliberatePractice%28PsychologicalReview%29.pdf)),
even the Authors state:

"It is important to note that our study shows only that the amount and
distribution of practice is related to the level of performance of adult
musicians. In fact, many additional factors consistent with the skill-
acquisition framework could attenuate the differences among our three groups.
Sosniak (1985) found that international-level pianists had spent considerable
efforts to seek out the very best musical teachers during their musical
development. Furthermore, it is likely that an analysis of the detailed
activities during practice alone would reveal qualitative differences between
violinists at different advanced levels of performance (Gruson, 1988;
Miklaszewski, 1989)."

But more recent research has demonstrated (though I don't know to what degree,
nor how many other papers have validated the following findings) that
"individual differences in accumulated amount of deliberate practice accounted
for about one-third of the reliable variance in performance in chess and
music, leaving the majority of the reliable variance unexplained and
potentially explainable by other factors". From
[http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614...](http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614000087),
sorry for the paywall.

In the end, I think it's important to spend time searching and finding
something you will be happy to do for the majority of your life. If you want
to progress at your chosen field, thought out and well planned
studying/practise is necessary, and will make you better, whether or not you
end up becoming the accepted world best. And if you enjoy it, it won't matter
how high you go.

------
minikites
Turns out, Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about pretty much everything he writes
about.

~~~
bshimmin
I wonder how many hours he's spent practising, too!

------
everettForth
This is the only person I know who is testing it empirically:
[http://thedanplan.com/](http://thedanplan.com/)

~~~
yungchin
Not sure if that's a properly thought through n=1 study :)

------
jimbokun
"So greatness is within virtually any person's grasp, so long as they can put
in the time to master their skill of choice."

Gladwell did not say that. It is an over simplification of his argument. He
concedes innate talent plays a role.

"For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in
a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been
settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate
talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January
ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do—the innately talented
ones."

[http://hardsci.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/what-did-malcolm-
gla...](http://hardsci.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/what-did-malcolm-gladwell-
actually-say-about-the-10000-hour-rule/)

------
sirwitti
I just returned from a jazz workshop where we talked a lot about practising.
The drum teacher said that it's not necessarily the amount of hours you put
into it, but also the frequency and how focussed you work on it.

~~~
ivanche
I remember reading once that best musicians actually worked less than the
average ones. But, the difference was that the best had 2 highly focused
1.5-2hrs practice sessions per day (deliberate practice) and rest for the
remaining of the day, while average had several shorter practice sessions
throughout the day.

------
avz
I'm skeptical about a specific number of 10,000 hours claimed to be valid
across multitude of skills and domains, but I think the spirit of the rule
makes a lot of sense.

I think the value of innate talents compared to training and exercise is
highly overstated given that almost all skills (hunting and archery possibly
being exceptions) are so new in evolutionary time scale that there could not
possibly have been any selection for them and so they must lack any specific
support in our hardware.

Somehow, nobody doubts the importance of exercise in physical fitness. Not
sure why mental fitness should be different.

~~~
yungchin

        ... given that almost all skills (hunting and archery 
        possibly being exceptions) are so new in evolutionary  
        time scale that there could not possibly have been any 
        selection for them ...
    

Couldn't you turn that evolutionary argument around, and say that exactly
_because_ there hasn't been any selection until recently, you'd expect a
larger population variance in those innate talents?

------
onion2k
The latest episode of the awesome You Are Not So Smart podcast is all about
exceptions to the 10,000 hour rule;

[http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-
podcast-030-how...](http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-
podcast-030-how-practice-changes-the-brain-with-david-epstein/)

------
skywhopper
IIRC, the 10,000 hour rule is for becoming "expert" at a skill, not for
becoming an Outlier, or for gaining "success". Those "best musicians" with an
average of 10,000 hours by age 20 are, by any reasonable definition, experts
at their craft.

~~~
lostcolony
But not those chumps who only have 9999 hours! They're not experts ~yet~!

Even if you redefine it not as 'mastery' but as 'expert(ise)', it's still
absurd.

------
weddpros
The conclusion, imho, remains the same: "put more work in what you love and
someday, it will pay". As I see it, the 10000h rule is about patience and
dedication.

The "10 times rule" is also interesting: it will take 10x more efforts than
you think...

~~~
thaumasiotes
> The "10 times rule" is also interesting: it will take 10x more efforts than
> you think...

You see this one all over the place:

90-90 law: the first 90% of the project takes 90% of the development time. The
last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the development time.

Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even after
accounting for Hofstadter's law.

~~~
ozim
First time I see 90-90 law, looks like someone made it up from Pareto
principle which is 80% - 20%. Besides I don't see application in this topic
for it.

~~~
weddpros
If I'm correct, there's more humour in the 90-90 law than in the Pareto
principle!

The 90-90 law predicts a 180% work load...

------
huangc10
Sure it might not be real. I believe, though, if you spend 10,000 hrs on
something, you'll have a higher chance of being better than someone who has
only spent 1000 hrs on that thing. Is this not a correct assumption or belief?

~~~
Broken_Hippo
I think such things depend on what exactly you are practicing. Chances are if
you deliberately practice a language that long, you'll likely be overly
fluent. That said, if your body is such that you cannot physically pronounce
that 'r' correctly, you'll never speak without some sort of lisp or accent.
Art and music are just as much luck as they are talent: Talent can very easily
overtake practice. People that practice art learn techniques, but after some
time, tend to become very good at emulating. Some people just _get_ art,
though, and intuitively know where to place things, where to shadow, what
marks to leave out. When the talented practice, they create and manipulate and
take whatever they've learned and they become more awesome. Alternatively,
formal and deliberate practice in art actually kills some natural talent with
overt rules. I've seen all things. Who actually makes it and is regarded as an
expert by society? Whoever gets lucky. Music is similar: Some practice and
become experts in a symphony, some practice and create symphonies, and others
yet, regardless of practice, still struggle to keep on beat.

In any case, though, I do think any person spending so many deliberate (or
even not so deliberate) hours on one subject winds up with a pretty amazing
knowledge base and probably knowledge of quite a few branches of knowledge.
Even if the original goal wasn't actually mastered, still worth it for
knowledge.

------
analog31
I propose a new study: The half-life of the 10000 hour rule, i.e., how many
years before belief in the 10000 rule among the general population (or among
certain specialized populations) is reduced to half of its present level.

------
lazyant
For anyone interested in the innate talent vs practice in sports I recommend
the book 'The Sports Gene' (spoiler: genes play a huge role).

------
Padding
So it's necessary but not sufficent? Or neither necessary nor sufficent?

------
xname
This is silly attack.

The 10,000 Hour Rule says you need 10,000 Hour practice to master a field. It
does not say 10,000 Hour practice is the only/most important factor in
performance. It has nothing to do with explanation of variances in
performance. It does not say 10,000 Hour practice will guarantee your success.
It does not say gene is irrelevant to learning. It only says, as a normal
person (not genius, not mentally disabled), you need 10,000 Hour practice to
master a field.

Straw-man attack.

------
lutusp
This is just another example of psychologists trying to sound like scientists.
Scientists quantify their claims, put forth physical rules and associated
mathematics, after which measurements confirm or refute the quantified
predictions.

Psychologists express opinions, most of which don't lead to empirical or
quantifiable predictions, but occasionally a psychologist, jealous of real
scientists, will try to quantify an opinion, as in this case where 10,000
hours was attached to someone's viewpoint. Then, later, inevitably, other
psychologists will argue against the earlier opinion, as thought the
refutation was anything more than another opinion.

What psychologists don't do is try to offer explanations, craft testable
theories, about their observations, then subject the theories to empirical
test. That would actually be science.

> The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real

On the contrary! It is exactly as real as psychology is.

~~~
TeMPOraL
Exactly. It's cargo-cult science. Attaching numbers and equations and
quantifying things to look more credible. Math is supposed to be used to help
focus and constrain thinking, not to make opinions sound More Serious.

Sadly, I know a lot of people (mostly wanna-be-rich entrepreneurs, whose only
skill seems to be the want to become rich) who buy into such psychology BS
without second thought. Things like "cone of learning" or 7-38-55 rule, which
sounds absurd if you think about it for more than a second.

(then there's another part of the equation, i.e. "journalists" and business
consultants stumbling over a paper with some numbers and specific claims, who
then throw out constrains, exaggerate the conclusions and make a run for it)

~~~
lutusp
> It's cargo-cult science.

Yep. Some younger readers may not know what this refers to, so here's a quote
from the original Feynman paper "Cargo Cult Science":

"I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of
what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a
cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good
materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to
imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to
make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like
headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he's the controller
— and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The
form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't
work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because
they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation,
but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."

Full text:

[http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm](http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm)

~~~
vacri
If you loathe psychology so much, why do you hang around on a site where
(until fairly recently) about a third of articles were about psychology in
some form? A/B testing, effective advertising, staff morale, avoiding
burnout... all these sorts of things are psychology, and plenty of them have
metrics.

~~~
TeMPOraL
I guess he (like myself) cares more about the other two thirds of articles.
Also good you mention that, because there's a lot of cargo-culting and
serious-sounding nonsense in the A/B testing/advertisement/metrics articles.

The point is, one has to be precise in what one's claiming. There's a lot of
good psychology out there; you can recognize it by being littered with
caveats, "maybes", and definitely _not_ full of numbers. My personal opinion
on the field (based on articles I read, books citing many a psychological
paper, and on talking and observing psychologists and psychology students I
know) is that there's _a lot_ of hard work being done to run in circles,
thanks mostly to not grokking statistics and not caring about rigour.

And pop-psychology industry, business consultants repeating everything they
read without giving it a second thought, and journalists overexaggerating
claims are not helping.

~~~
vacri
There is a definite irony in demanding that one has to be precise in what
one's claiming... right after dismissing an entire, very broad field as cargo-
culting. _" Exactly. It's cargo-cult science"_ in reference to a comment that
classifies psychology as just the poorly-done parts of psychiatry? Terrible
precision.

~~~
lutusp
> ... in reference to a comment that classifies psychology as just the poorly-
> done parts of psychiatry?

In sciences, because of the unifying nature of theory, there are no poorly
done parts. Both cosmology and particle physics would be independently weak
were it not for the other, and what unites them is ... scientific theory.

Psychiatrists don't listen to psychologists, who don't listen to clinical
psychologists, who don't listed to social psychologists. They're independent
entities. If psychology were a science, that would all change, as physics is
changed, as biology is changed -- all by tested, falsifiable, scientific
theories.

