> 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.
Barely anything will be true the way you want it to be unless it belongs to a math closed world with axioms.
> 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).
Concerted effort how? Because that matters.
> 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.
Make WHAT happen? Are you comparing yourself to someone else? what kind of mastery are you seeking? How do you know that with enough practice you wouldn't have reached a sufficiently good level (where this is, is the key) at it?
> 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.
As a rule of thumb, enough practice will probably make you awesome at something, yes.
But you have to make those hours count. There needs to be PROGRESS.
Also, you might never catch up with the "greats" who had a head start for one reason or another but that doesn't mean that "practice makes perfect" as a vague general rule is true.
> As a rule of thumb, enough practice will probably make you awesome at something, yes. But you have to make those hours count. There needs to be PROGRESS.
This whole argument is like a weird combination of confirmation bias and "no true Scotsman."
Confirmation bias because yes, everyone who is good put in the time.
But "no true Scotsman" because if someone doesn't get good, you can just say they weren't practicing right.
> It's actually known, in many cases, which kinds of practice are most effective.
I certainly agree with that.
But that is not enough to say that anyone who engages in the right kind of practice will get better. My point is just that it's an easy out to say "oh the 10k rule didn't apply here because they weren't practicing right." For that to be an appropriate response, you would need to actually show that the person was capable of that kind of practice in that area but wasn't doing it.
In the form discussed upthread (that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is sufficient to mastery), its not only not true, its not even what Gladwell was saying, and is something Gladwell has explicitly disavowed. [1]
It appears to be working out so far for Dan McLaughlin. He was a professional photographer who quit his job in 2010 with the goal to get on the pro tour in the golf circuit. He's about 5000 hours in and has a handicap of 3[1], which (I believe) puts him in the top few percentage of golf players. He started from no experience with golf, and is working his way through the game pretty systematically.
He may not make the pro tour by the time the 10,000 hours are up, but he's definitely increased his mastery of the game pretty significantly over 5,000 hours of practice.
I'm a little unclear about your anecdote; you're saying that even with incredible amounts of focused practice, some people will never be good at some things, and then as evidence you say that you never really put in that much effort learning how to draw, but you could tell that you would never be any good. Those two situations aren't really the same at all, and I don't understand why you're comparing them.
There are definitely limitations to practice; I'm 5'6" and weigh 115; as a result, I'm never going to excel at something like football. My body just isn't cut out for it, and that's something I came to terms with a long time ago.
But for drawing, the pencil goes where you push it. Unless you're physically unable to control the pencil (and you may be! I have no idea), I have trouble understanding what ineffable quality one person may possess that would put their ability so far out of reach from somebody else who's simply willing to put in the work.
> There are definitely limitations to practice; I'm 5'6" and weigh 115; as a result, I'm never going to excel at something like football. My body just isn't cut out for it, and that's something I came to terms with a long time ago.
Ah, but how do you know if you haven't tried?
You seem to be saying that the kind of physical limitation you have in football could not possibly exist mentally. Why do you feel so sure of this?
I'm saying that the physical limitations present in football that keep me from reaching mastery of the sport are fundamentally different from the mental limitations which prevent you from giving up as soon as something stops being fun. This doesn't seem like a very strange idea, are you seriously asking me to justify it?
Edit: Seriously, by your own admission, you've put in "some concerted effort [...] a few times", but never very much. As soon as it gets hard, or frustrating, you give up. And you're convinced that because you give up easily, it's impossible for you to do well, and that this is somehow something utterly beyond your control. That's just baffling to me.
I'm not talking about mental limitations surrounding perseverance. I'm talking about mental limitations surrounding my talent at drawing.
Take music. It is documented that approximately 4% of the population suffers from what is described as "congenital amusia", commonly known as being tone deaf. From the Wikipedia article on the subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia#Congenital_amusia):
"Individuals who suffer from congenital amusia seem to lack the musical predispositions that most people are born with. They are unable to recognize or hum familiar tunes even though they have normal audiometry and above average intellectual and memory skills. Also, they do not show sensitivity to dissonant chords in a melodic context, which, as discussed earlier, is one of the musical predispositions exhibited by infants."
Now I'm really good at music. From an early age, the things that are hard for congenital amusiacs came easily to me. It was really obvious from an early age that I was good at it. As a result, I've spent at least 10k hours of my life doing music and achieved a high level.
It makes no sense to me to say "well how do congenital amusiacs know that they won't get better if they just give up?" Without some extraordinary evidence, it is not reasonable to claim that if a congenital amusiac just spends 10k hours, they will become superb at it.
The reason I didn't spend much time drawing is not because I generally lack perseverance, it is because it was extremely obvious that I am not talented at it. I know this because I know what it feels like to have talent at something.
As I said, it's probably not 100% true, but that doesn't matter. I care deeply about greater happiness and well-being of a society, I want people to be hopeful and diligent in acquiring skills, and as it happens, the 10,000 hour rule is an effectual guiding maxim to go by. Again, what's the alternative solution to motivate people to try hard? A tentative "go ahead and try, but just be aware you might not succeed" type advice doesn't work. It's not a solution that'll yield good results.
10,000 hour rule probably makes a lot of people try things that they never would have otherwise. I picked up the guitar with the intention of becoming a rockstar a la 10,000 hour rule. Of course I didn't reach rock stardom, but I certainly got good enough to be really happy with the few pieces I was able to play. 10,000 rule is a nice rule to have in our society's canons of unwritten rules. The cultural importance of the rule as it exists today, for the great results it can give, should rightly transcend its minutiae.
> As I said, it's probably not 100% true, but that doesn't matter.
It matters to me. If you were my parent and you told me the 10k hour rule even though it wasn't true, I would be really annoyed that I couldn't trust the adults in my life to tell me the truth.
I am sure that not everyone feels the way I do about this, but I feel this way very strongly, and you don't seem to acknowledge that anyone could possibly prefer a truth-based approach to this.
> Again, what's the alternative solution to motivate people to try hard?
Well one way would be: "Everyone who is good at this put in a lot of work. No one started out knowing everything."
That, unlike the promise that 10k hours promises anything, would actually be true.
If absolute truthfulness matters greatly to you, I would like advice from you about how to live life happily in face of the fact that we live in a deterministic universe that gives us no free will (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hard_determinism), and that we evolved from primates who kill and rape, and it's potentially in our nature to do the same. I'm serious in asking this, because I think you might have a good answer. These are truths (and I presume they are truths to you too) that are hard to reconcile with, at least for me. How do you reconcile with them? I apologize profusely for the digression, I don't think it's a ridiculous one though, as we're basically now talking about epistemological limits of truth anyway.
If you're really asking, I'd enjoy writing an answer; it's a good question/prompt.
I don't believe that lack of free will and hard determinism are conclusively established. To me they are tied up with what I consider one of the universe's greatest epistemic mysteries, which is where consciousness/sentience comes from. My own perception of my "free will" is that my mind/will have a default response in any situation, but that by spending some kind of mental energy I can override this default behavior. I believe that quantum mechanics leaves plenty of room for this self-perception of my mental process to have an actual basis in reality (though I also admit the truth could be something else entirely).
The idea that we have violent tendencies hard-wired, so-to-speak, doesn't bother me except in extreme cases of people who seem enslaved to them. If you want to know what does seriously trouble me, it's people who struggle internally with something like pedophilia, and are doing everything they can to resist it, but have to fight against it constantly.
I am really asking (as I've said elsewhere: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8382692 I find these truths very difficult to live with). If you can write an extended answer to this, I would enjoy reading it.
> To me they are tied up with what I consider one of the universe's greatest epistemic mysteries, which is where consciousness/sentience comes from.
Trend of recent findings from modern science increasingly seem to suggest of a pretty dispiriting answer, our consciousness is not so different from a dog's, and it's not as remarkable as we deem it to be, (somewhat relevant article from the times this week: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/god-darwin-... ).
> I believe that quantum mechanics leaves plenty of room for this self-perception of my mental process to have an actual basis in reality (though I also admit the truth could be something else entirely).
I'm similarly finding solace in the fact that a lot of these things don't seem to be falsifiable, and that QM suggest potentially of a non-deterministic universe. What you say about pedophilia is also a concern, it's also an immense struggle for me to deal with these unhappy truths about human nature. I'm finding it extremely hard to come up with comforting answers.
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.