
The Myth of 10,000 hours - senthil_rajasek
https://medium.com/@senthil/the-myth-of-10-000-hours-hard-work-success-e309128c3d63
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hirundo
I haven't read the book, but what I heard about it second hand is that 10k
hours is about mastery, not success. You can be a master without being
successful and visa versa. But mastery sure improves your odds of success.

Of course 10k hours doesn't guarantee mastery either. I've put in that much on
the golf course and still suck at it.

~~~
latencyloser
I've heard it's also important to distinguish _practice_ as separate form of
_doing_. Without knowing anything about your golf habits, so not intending to
criticize, but to use as an example: 10k hours of _playing_ golf is quite
different from 10k hours of _practicing_ golf and the latter would, from what
I understand of the distinction, have a more appreciable outcome. As you said
though, mastery and success are not necessarily correlated.

An example from my life being: I spent much of my youth "practicing" guitar
(guided lessons, learning theory, improving my abilities in different
techniques) while my peers simply "played" and the difference in our skill
levels (from a purely technical perspective) was noticeable. However, I still
never had a successful music career :) whereas I can think of at least one of
my peers who "merely played" that's since made a living off their abilities.

~~~
hirundo
I've probably also spent almost that many hours on the driving range. Some
people just don't have the talent for some things, and as far as golf, I seem
to be one of them. But I always hit at least one good shot that has me coming
back for more. Like an addiction.

I have a friend who hardly ever plays, but still beats the snot out of me on
the course. So in my humble opinion, trying to eliminate natural ability from
the equation is misguided.

~~~
imgabe
Another requirement is focused practice, which means having a coach who can
evaluate what you're doing and tell you where to improve.

Going to the driving range and hitting a bucket of balls isn't as helpful if
you don't know what you're doing wrong and how to fix it. You'll just keep
doing the same wrong thing.

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wallflower
For those who don’t know already, the “10,000 hours” to attain expert-level
mastery in any field or endeavor is false. The study that Malcolm Gladwell
cites by Anders Ericsson _only_ applied to violin performance, which is a
narrow field that has measurable and quantifiable performance levels and
hundreds of years of teaching history.

I repeat this comment almost every time because 10k is both discouraging for
the beginner and sometimes falsely encouraging for the “expert” who may have
put in a lot of hours but in reality has been repeating mistakes and not
really improving.

~~~
xurias
I don't see how it's discouraging. I find it far more discouraging and
depressing when people say the 10000 hours is a myth and deliberate practice
is a waste of time. What exactly am I supposed to do then if practice doesn't
make me better?

~~~
wallflower
Deliberate practice is most definitely not a waste of time! I hope you
continue to get better in your endeavors.

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mkong1
Grit by Angela Duckworth ([https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-
Angela-Duck...](https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-
Duckworth/dp/1501111116)) goes into deliberate practice quite a bit.

She talks about how deliberate practice is almost never enjoyable because
you're trying to improve specific things, but it is how you attain mastery.
The other side is "flow", when that mastery is display, and she mentions how
it can look so effortless for top athletes, when it's almost definitely the
result of hours and hours of deliberate practice.

~~~
nullandvoid
On the same trail of thought [https://www.amazon.ca/Talent-Code-Greatness-
Born-Grown/dp/05...](https://www.amazon.ca/Talent-Code-Greatness-Born-
Grown/dp/055380684X) is a great read.

Shows many examples of how deliberate practice on the edge of your current
ability is what equals mastery ( whilst also exploring the science behind it )

------
jartelt
The book doesn't simply say that practicing something for 10,000 hours will
make you a master. The point is that people who are masters at something (or
known as brilliant or experts in their field) didn't just magically get to
that point by having a particular talent. They got there by having a
particular talent, being born into particular circumstances, AND THEN putting
in a ton of work (hence the 10,000 hour reference).

Bill Gates wasn't born a great programmer and businessman. He was born smart
and into a situation where he had access to a computer and then he worked his
butt off to learn. Similarly, great athletes are both talented and work like
crazy to hone their craft.

The point I took from the book is that hard work and many, many hours of study
and/or practice is essential in order to get to the top of a field. Doing the
hard work will not automatically get you to the top since at some point lack
of talent or lack of resources may get in the way. But, you need to do the
hard work in order to give yourself a chance to make it to the top.

~~~
zantana
I agree. The whole point of the book was that there were outliers which gave
people certain edges which made their success more likely than one would
think.

The examples I recall were hockey players who were born at certain times so
during their formative years they were essentially a year older than the other
players which gave them a leg up during their formative years making them
better candidates to succeed later on. Looking around that appears to be
equally controversial.

While I often don't agree with Gladwell's conclusions I do think he, as well
as Michal Lewis, bring enough new information and insights that they are worth
reading.

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slowhand09
I think the author of the article is missing the point of the book. And
assuming everyone else is missing the point of 10,000 hours of intentional
practice.

~~~
ohduran
Agreed. So 10'000 hours of practice isn't just doing it, it's actually
becoming obsessed with doing it BETTER. I can make sandwiches all day long,
but only if I focus on how precise I am in the dose of mayonnaise, how
seamless my spreading it over the bread, and how exact is the time the
sandwich spends on which part of the refrigerator, then I'll improve.

Sorry I'm tremendously eager to eat a sandwich right now. A good follow up
book after reading Outliers is James P Catse's "Finite and Infinite Games":
[https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476731713/ref=as_li_tl?ie...](https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1476731713/ref=as_li_tl?ie=UTF8&camp=1789&creative=9325&creativeASIN=1476731713&linkCode=as2&tag=alvaroduran-20&linkId=8083958421b739785738a9ea98e334a1)

~~~
bluGill
I know a lot of people who have 6 months of practice, repeated dozens of
times. Most drivers for example have about that much, and it shows in how they
drive.

~~~
ohduran
Can't describe it better (unless it involves food). Good job!

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wccrawford
I'm not sure why "10,000 hours to mastery" pisses off so many people. Sane
people don't believe it's a hard number. They know it's a point of view that
should help them focus on their goal, instead of some magic fact.

It tells newbies that they'll need to spend time and work hard to master the
skill. It tells experienced people that they probably aren't the best they can
be yet. And it tells masters to stop expecting newbies to be great and to let
them have time to learn.

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helpPeople
The 10k rule got me started programming when I was 17.

I don't have a billion dollar app, but I use programming at work to increase
my value tremendously.

I want to challenge this with having a low value skill, like playing sports,
doing 10k hours, and seeing if the person could make 50k a year.

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Isamu
The observation is that mastery requires thousands of hours of deliberate
practice.

I find it remarkable that people seem to think that this implies a claim in
the opposite direction: that thousands of hours of (any) practice results in
mastery.

~~~
mc32
I think it’s because we all[1] like to think there’s an easy shortcut to
achieve a goal.

[1]Lots of people.

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j45
10k hours on anything will likely make you as good as you can be at something.

Whether or not that is enough to become success depends on one's own ego and
attachment to realizing if they're focusing on the better thing or not.

~~~
wccrawford
I'm sure many will argue, but I agree.

After 10,000 hours of doing something, I can't see _anyone_ not having tried
to improve themselves. I think it's basically impossible to do the same thing
for that long without basic human nature taking effect and forcing that person
to improve until they can't any more. At least, not organically. I'm sure you
could put a gun to their head and force them to improve more, but that's not
natural.

~~~
bluGill
I think you are missing a few things. There are a lot of things to learn,
someone who spends 10,000 hours on flat pick guitar will not be any good at
finger picking guitar without a few thousand more hours practice in a
different skill. There are a number of other ways to study guitar, before you
branch to base, violin, Piano, drums - that is all playing interments. There
is are completely different line of music you can go down: composition,
conducting. In short, there is always something more to learn even if you are
a master of something.

~~~
wccrawford
If you can flat pick a guitar for 10,000 hours without desiring to learn more
and better yourself, then I claim that you are already the best you can be.
You simply haven't the curiosity or drive to become better at it.

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imgabe
> Unfortunately “Work hard to succeed” is the message the world took away from
> it.

Is this unfortunate? Yeah, there are lots of random factors that might affect
your outcome. The only one you can reliably influence is how hard you work.
While you're lamenting about how you weren't born in the right time or the
right place or so and so had the lucky opportunity to get a break and the
right time, your competitors are working.

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ncmncm
It doesn't matter what the book says about mastery, success, or practice,
because Malcolm Gladwell isn't interested in the truth. "I don't write about
what is true, I write about what is interesting." Systematic distortion is his
stock in trade.

Even if he actually said something nominally true, it would still be wrong.
Studying successful people and finding it took them 10,000 hours to get there
(which he didn't) would not imply that anyone else could get there in the same
10,000 hours. I could practice basketball for 100,000 hours and never be able
to sink a half-court shot, blind.

What does seem true is that people who enjoy practicing a thing are the ones
who master it, probably because seeing progress makes practice enjoyable. When
you stop seeing improvement, you stop, and move on to something else. People
who master a thing are self-selected as those who could, for whatever reason.
No one else is counted.

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brodouevencode
I think there's an unaddressed point in the book that should include "for the
average person with average physical/emotional/intellectual capacity 10k hours
- give or take - of _deliberate_ practice should make you a master". This
intuitively makes sense to me, and what I took away from the book. I guess
others took away other things and if you want to fault the author for that I'm
not going to stop you. It's also fashionable to over-analyze everything these
days so some won't be satisfied unless there are exact data points involved it
should warrant throwing out the whole book and to which I would say to them
sometimes it's about the notion rather than it's exactness. In any way the
book is interesting and still worth a read.

------
tlackemann
I look at the hours and hardwork I put in as increasing my chances for
success.

I wholeheartedly agree that success is mostly based on luck. I believe that
the most successful business people were incredibly lucky in their journeys -
but most also worked incredibly hard. If you work harder, you increase your
chances at finding that luck.

If I gave up working hard a year ago, I would have never been found or funded.
If I stopped working hard today, I won't find the next source of luck I need.

Life is about luck. I don't think it's right to shame others for wanting to
work hard to create their own luck.

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everdrive
Well, obviously different tasks have differing levels of complexity and
difficulty. I'm sure no one seriously thought that exactly 10,000 hours were
needed for mastery of all tasks.

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rasengan
“Working hard does not guarantee you will be successful, but I guarantee all
successful people worked hard.” - Coach Kamogawa of Morikawa’s life novel,
Ippo.

~~~
dyarosla
In a similar vein,

‘Hard work beats talent when talent fails to work hard’

~~~
tonyedgecombe
Do you think Trump worked hard? Yet he is at the top of the tree right now.

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Voxoff
Whether mastery or success is the end, the rule emphasises quantity of time
over quality of time.

AFAIK 'quality of time' discussions are restricted to mentions of 'deliberate'
practice. That's critical, since if someone can (sorry..) 'work smarter, not
harder' then it devalues the 10k rule. Not even to mention luck

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Takizawa
What I think is interesting is how much emotion the 10k hour rule rouses in
general. The Freakonomics podcast mentioned the 10k rule as well. They posit
that given equally talented individuals, the person who puts in the requisite
hours of hard work through deliberate practice would obtain the higher level
of mastery.

~~~
ncmncm
Trivially. It doesn't take a book to say that.

Gladwell wants us to think that successful people earned it, that Bill Gates
deserves his $100B. Everything else bends to that goal. But Gates has $100B
not because he worked hard, but because he abused monopoly power, and
impoverished the world. The enduring legacy of Microsoft's dominance is that
people think computers working badly is both OK and unavoidable.

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kerng
The way I always understood it is that 10000 hours of focused and deliberate
practice and work gets you there.

I never interpreted it as: just do something for 10000 hours and you'll be a
master at it.

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skyhigh007
I read the book and I want my money back

