Don't become an expert | Hacker News Reader

Don't become an expert

blog.asmartbear.com

118 pointsdmytton53 comments

I think what Jason is saying is don't FOCUS on being an expert, and don't obsess over it. I know that I personally feel like I never know enough, and often think things like "well, I'd like to do x or y, but I should probably learn more about z first". I think the important thing to realize is that there is always more to learn, and you shouldn't be killing yourself over not feeling like an expert. Of course there's lots you don't know; there always will be. You just have to accept that and realize that there's plenty you DO know, and taking on challenges that seem just a bit above where you're at is one of the greatest ways to grow and continue learning.

As a semi-related side note, when I first started reading HN (almost a year ago), I felt like 95% of the stuff that was on the front page didn't even MAKE SENSE to me (some would probably argue that HN has changed over the last year, and I think I came in to HN during one of those "let's push Erlang articles to the top to scare off the incoming swarm of n00bs" phases...didn't work on this n00b though :) ). Over the last year, I find that I at least have a general idea what most of the posts are about, even if I still don't totally grok everything that gets posted, and I've learned a ton. I'm happy with that, since I still feel like I learn something new everyday.

If you'd like to skip all the pundits (Gladwell included) and go straight to source of all this discussion about developing expertise, look no further than this book:

http://www.amazon.com/Cambridge-Expertise-Performance-Handbo...

It's a compilation of academic papers and was the basis for Gladwell's book. It is not lightweight entertainment reading, but it's the real deal.

I think he's arguing that you shouldn't wait until you have 10,000 hours before you go out to be successful, rather go out and pursue the thing you want to be successful at and that will give you the 10,000 hours.

In other words, don't set preconditions to your success, including the precondition of "being an expert"

Anyone I've seen advertise themselves as an expert in something (as opposed to being named or termed an expert by someone who's hired them to work/speak etc) seems to be a generalist with ego or confidence issues.

Developing expert-level skills in an area requires focus, talent, and time. These three variables are all present but vary in concentration in 'expert' folks I've met operating within various disciplines and niche sectors. Some are initially more talented, so their 'expertise' development takes less time. Some have less native talent so spend more time developing skills.

Unless you're a prodigy, the development of expert level skills requires persistence most of all, but persistence is not necessarily equivalent to time spent practicing.

To barnaby's point, everyone I consider an 'expert' doesn't feel like they're done learning - they remain voracious.

They remain voracious - and will probably never consider themselves experts - because they are passionate about what they are doing. They are passionate enough to not just 'practice' but to also know who the experts in their field are, know what those experts accomplished, and know what they themselves don't know. This 10,000 hours thing is an effect of expertise, not a cause.

Focused passion * (time+talent) = expertise

Stumbled on the author of Millionaire Next Door's website a while ago, proclaims himself an expert. I'm sure he is, but saying that rubbed me the wrong way. http://www.thomasjstanley.com

So, his two examples of people who weren't experts but succeeded were Larry and Sergey, two PhD students from Stanford studying search algorithms, and that doesn't qualify them as experts?

Or Joel, who was a program manager at one of the most successful and selective Software companies on the planet?

No, it DOES NOT qualify them as experts by the definition given by this latest 10k hours craze.

And no being a program manager at Excel DOES NOT qualify Joel as an expert on blogging or bug tracking.

My point is: Neither of those matter.

No, it DOES NOT qualify them as experts by the definition given by this latest 10k hours craze.

Sure it does. The computer science curriculum at top schools like Stanford probably requires about 30 hours a week of time devoted to computer science. At 52 weeks per year, this puts the number around 6.5 years. After 4 years undergraduate computer science and his master's degree and Page's statement that he got into programming/CS at around 12 years old, we can deduce that 10,000 hours is probably a completely reasonable amount of time.

You miss the OP's point that none of these hours were spent at advertising, the core of Google's business success.

I think the point is we should be questioning the field of expertise which lead a company to success. Google has become a success not because it introduced advertising, but because it was a a great and simple search engine (with ads at first, btw). Thus Larry and Sergey were experts and their example in the article is bad.

On the other hand there are probably other examples out there that may prove the point. So, like Forrest Gump said, I think maybe it's both.

I think he's missing the point.

So many people (Gladwell, Cohen, and apparently the Brazen Careerist person) have referenced this 10,000 hours claim, but no one has cited the actual research paper that came up with this notion. The paper actually addresses almost all of his points.[1]

"There are more high school swimmers than ever, therefore more opportunities to find and train great swimmers. They have access to diet, training, technology, and facilities that didn't exist years ago. That's all." Yes! That's the point! The authors of the research point out that "the fastest time for the marathon in the 1896 Olympic Games was just a minute faster than the required entry time in ... races such as the Boston Marathon," _because_ people now know the proper way to focus their efforts at practice.[2] 'Practice,' here, being training and diet. But it still takes 10 years or so of _deliberate practice_ to become world class. It's just that the bar for world class has been moved.

"I'm a case in point: I practiced the piano for an hour a day for more than ten years. I became good, but there were others who practiced twice as much who were worse, and still others who practiced less and are much better." Again, he is unwittingly supporting the 10,000 hours claim. The study points out that "the view that merely engaging in a sufficient amount of practice, regardless of the structure of that practice leads to maximal performance has a long and contested history."[3] It is not just 'putting in the hours' that matters (because then one falls into the trap of assembly-line-worker syndrome, where "improvement of performance was often arrested at less than maximal levels"), but rather what it calls "deliberate practice," which takes quite a bit of very hard work and practice tasks that are defined in a very specific way. (There's a good description of the characteristics of deliberate practice on p. 367 of the study). That is, people who just practice for hours without much thought as to what that practice should be and how it will challenge them in new ways are doomed to be less successful than those who are coached through a process of deliberate practice. It's quality, not quantity.

All that being said, I don't think being an entrepreneur actually has anything to do with being an expert. It's much more luck and hard work. Cohen gets around to saying this too. I agree with him. I'm just not sure why he felt the need to try to refute the current literature on becoming a domain expert to say, "Hey, becoming a domain expert probably isn't your goal. Your goal is to become an innovative entrepreneur."

[1] http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

[2] Ibid, p.366

[3] Ibid, p.365

--> Edit 1: matrix cited a more recent text by the same author I was describing: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1142983

--> Edit 2: Oops. The Harvard Business Review article that Penelope Trunk talks about was actually written by the same person who wrote the paper that I cited and the book that matrix referenced, so my "but no one has cited the actual research" claim was inaccurate: http://www.coachingmanagement.nl/The%20Making%20of%20an%20Ex...

Thanks for the excellent critique of my article!

You're right, the point I'm making is that becoming THAT KIND of so-called "expert" isn't the point of a company.

Actually I'm not refuting arguments about how to become an expert in the first place, I'm refuting the idea that you NEED to do that. I believe that theme is pretty clear throughout.

Finally, if it really does take 10k hours and ONLY if it's a special kind of dedication, then it's almost a tautology, and an irrelevant activity for almost anyone on Earth.

I think Jason is ignoring is the core of Ericsson's insight, the value of deliberate practice.

Jason highlights the value of getting started, that startups are a "come are you are party" but seems to suggest that passion can substitute for learning from your mistakes. This sounds like the "Little Engine That Could" model (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Little_Engine_That_Could ) of repeating "I think I can, I think I can,..." which is no substitute for learning from your mistakes.

What's the best way to learn from your mistakes? What Ericsson calls "deliberate practice." Here is a simple example that I think most entrepreneurs would find readily applicable, taken from an interview with Anders in Fast Company (see http://www.fastcompany.com/magazine/110/final-word.html ):

"Medical diagnosticians see a patient once or twice, make an assessment in an effort to solve a particularly difficult case, and then they move on. They may never see him or her again. I recently interviewed a highly successful diagnostician who works very differently. He spends a lot of his own time checking up on his patients, taking extensive notes on what he's thinking at the time of diagnosis, and checking back to see how accurate he is. This extra step he created gives him a significant advantage compared with his peers. It lets him better understand how and when he's improving. In general, elite performers utilize some technique that typically isn't well known or widely practiced."

This model is certainly directly applicable to both engineering and sales & marketing problems.

To me, "deliberate practice" is a cop-out. If you practice like crazy and still aren't good, it's because it wasn't the RIGHT practice?

It's like the horoscope saying "keep your eyes open for an opportunity today." If an opportunity doesn't appear, it's because I wasn't open enough.

You can't tell me Michael Phelps is fastest because no one else practiced as deliberately.

It sounds like an excuse to avoid admitting that there are also innate differences between people, and luck.

Well, it's rather obvious that 10,000 hours of practicing golfing strokes without spending any time learning how to aim would be a waste of time.

From what I can see, this doesn't inherently conflict with your claims about innate differences or luck, but it does indicate that there is value in practicing things correctly and potentially little value in practicing things incorrectly. Obviously a fully grown 4 foot individual won't become center for the basketball team, but only practicing 3 point shots won't help someone who is 7 feet tall do much better in the pocket (under the net).

Can you please explain what I am missing?

What you're missing: That many people do "deliberate practice" and yet there are large differences in skill.

Of course flailing around isn't practice. The notion that "perfect practice makes perfect" or "practices doesn't make perfect, it makes permanent" has been around forever, no need for special studies to explain that.

But everyone at the Olympics, for example, has done extreme, deliberate practice, and yet most of the competitors are so bad they don't even televise it.

Finally, the point of the article IS NOT about HOW to become an expert, it's questioning the notion that becoming an expert is necessarily the goal.

Or, saying that you become successful at [anything] as a by-product of your work, not because you become "an expert" and THEN do interesting work.

And further, that people (like Penelope) shouldn't get hung up on being "an expert" by some arbitrary definition when she's in fact quite successful and could be just focussed on what to do next.

I agree with the last 3 points, I was only responding to your previous post.

Take a look at the original studies, or the Scientific American article for a quicker read. (I read it in paper form, so you can probably find it as easily as I can).

As for deliberate practice, the idea sheds some light onto the right and wrong ways to do it. It seems to come back to the theme of "Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance". Deliberate practice is paying attention to the quality of the practice, and continuing to improve the quality. If this is accurate, then it should increase the differences in skill, as the individuals address their own various physical limits. It seems that the difference in the quality of the practice is one of the reasons people pay more for experts to teach them. I think the Olympics can just as easily be used to support the idea, as everyone's practice routines will vary.

Furthermore, studies of conventional wisdom often reveal conventional wisdom to be wrong, so I can't dismiss them. If the results make it easier for people to successfully perform "deliberate practice", then they will probably be well worth the money spent.

My answers are yes, yes (everyday gets opportunities every day, but as Edison observed "too often they are dressed in overalls and look like work"), mix of ability and practice, and I agree that people are different and different teams get different opportunities.

But it sounds like relying on luck and innate differences is an excuse for not learning from your mistakes. This is a "Random Walk" model for startup success where you begin at a random point (your innate abilities) and wander buffeted by luck in some kind of entrepreneurial Brownian motion.

Clearly luck plays a role, but I believe, like Pasteur, that "inspiration only favors the prepared mind." You have to know what you are looking for in advance. And it turns out this skill can be learned as well.

Reasonable men may differ, but I think there is considerable evidence that experience helps startups differentiate beyond naive ability or luck, and that deliberate practice prevents you from experiencing the same event over and over without learning from it.

For another take on this see Carol Dweck's mindset model at http://www.mindsetonline.com/ which documents research that folks who believe that effort makes a difference learn faster than those who trust to innate ability.

What's most pernicious about this belief is that it can lead you to manage people in a way that doesn't admit of their ability to improve.

I think this is an important question - do you "NEED" to become a 10,000 hour "expert" ?

I would never want to stereotype the entire population of earth and say that you're a failure if you're not an expert at something. Is it good to be an expert? Of course. But it's not required - there are many paths to life.

"All that being said, I don't think being an entrepreneur actually has anything to do with being an expert. It's much more luck and hard work."

Isn't that kind of the unifying theme between the 10k hour domain expert and the innovative entrepreneur? That both require the ability to work and persevere through setbacks beyond what most people care to do in order to be successful?

In short: becoming world-class is getting to the top N percent and depends on the number of people willing to practice for being world-class.

It seems that currently we've settled to 10 000 hours because 10 000 hours seems to reduce the number of candidates enough to make each "survivor" a real expert.

If suddenly more people started to practice 10 000 hours, you would possibly need 15 000 hours to distinguish yourself back to the top N percent among the horde of damn good (by our current standards) piano players, programmers, or whatever.

Being world-class also depends on the subject: the world can take only so many world-class piano players because the audience is somewhat limited, but it can absorb many more programmers because there are roughly infinite number of interesting and useful project to be done.

> It is not just 'putting in the hours' that matters (because then one falls into the trap of assembly-line-worker syndrome, where "improvement of performance was often arrested at less than maximal levels"), but rather what it calls "deliberate practice," which takes quite a bit of very hard work and practice tasks that are defined in a very specific way.

As my wrestling coach always told us, "practice doesn't make perfect, perfect practice makes perfect."

That and genetics.

Yup. Missed the point. Entrepreneur ship ends up being a very subjective experience, where the measure of success doesn't always end in profit.

The 10k hour rule tends to apply to subjective accomplishments with little variable reward. The reward for practice is very linear (depending on the person), you usually get better and improve the more time spent. Someone could spend 10k hours being an entrepreneur and fail depending on the context.

What? After reading that, all I got was "You can't be an expert when innovating". Ok, I can buy that. I don't, however, understand where on Earth he got the idea that the blogger is any different from the other people he listed at the end. Unless there's something I'm missing, no one ever said you should wait until you were an "expert" in something before you tried to be successful at it. The focus of this "expert" movement, if you can call it that, is to strive to become an expert in something, rather than being a jack of all trades, so to speak.

It's trivially true that being an expert and being successful are different things. Being successful generally means being a key part of a value chain that comes together at a certain time/place in society. Some experts do this. Some non-experts do this. Some non-experts become experts in the course of doing this. So what? A lot of people naturally put in 10,000+ hours doing the things they love the most anyway, and I'd bet they like being successful experts. This looks suspiciously like trying to console yourself, saying "there, there. you done alright in your own way". That's perfectly valid, but doesn't require rejecting other conceptions of what's desirable for personal growth. Certainly not publicly.

A minor aside: I don't know anything about the person Penelope, but one key to popular characters is to be relatable. This also applies to the persona one projects. A person with a very popular blog is likely an expert at being relatable - part of that is being an everyman/woman, and sharing the trials and difficulties, the foolishnesses and mistakes that many people can relate to and feel comfortable around. i.e. not being an "expert".

A blog might also include explicit expertise, in the form of a secondary character: a mentor. But that's not the entry point for the reader; it's not who you relate to.

I think the 10,000 hour rule is more applicable to skills that are somewhat stationary. Technology is a moving target, as new technologies are introduced some of the skills in which you were an expert become obsolete. On the other hand, something like playing Piano is a stationary target - if an expert in playing Piano travelled 30 years into the future, they would still be an expert in playing the Piano. So I think you have to be constantly learning and the most important skills of all are learning how to learn efficiently and having the ability to teach yourself.

Well, you cited music performance, but so did the guy who did the research everyone who talks about "10,000 hours" is referencing:

"Even in music there is evidence for improved skill. When Tchaikovsky asked two of the greatest violinists of his day to play his violin concerto, they refused, deeming the score unplayable (Platt, 1966). Today, elite violinists consider this concerto part of the standard repertory. The improvement in music training is so great that according to Roth (1982) the violin virtuoso Paganini "would indeed cut a sorry figure is placed upon the modern concert stage" (p. 23)." [1] There are no stationary targets.

He uses this as evidence that the notion that "a sufficient amount of experience or practice leads to maximal performance appears to be incorrect" [2]

[1] http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti... p.366

[2] Ibid.

But the actual task and skills haven't changed, just the elite performance level.

What kind of tech related skills that makes one obsolete pretty quickly?

Take Rails and Merb as examples. Both are using the well known enterprise patterns (despite the crowds hatred against the word enterprise, the ActiveRecord and DataMapper patterns came from Fowler's Enterprise Pattern book). These enterprise patterns dated back since early 2000. Unfortunately there are many developers who do not want to take their time to read books and decided to write their own frameworks.

Java is a 15 years old platform and these days it is still relevant. Hadoop, HBase, Cassandra, Hudson, and other infrastructure stuffs are being written in Java. Scala, Clojure and Groovy are written on top of JVM (and the idea of VM, which is roughly 15 years old or more, is still around).

LISP has been around since late 1950 yet these days some "elite" still considered the best language out there (or at least the paradigm of functional programming is considered the best one out there).

Object Oriented Programming has been around since early 1980 and I don't see it to be obsolete anytime soon.

The practice of data structure and algorithms (list, binary search, sorting, tree, graphs and so on) are still relevant until today.

The concept of distributed VCS has been around since early 2000 (probably even earlier than that) except that it's not F/OSS. (Remember BitKeeper?). The concept of VCS itself has been around since 1990 or maybe even earlier than that.

C and VHDL are still the strong players in embedded/system programming. Yes, there's "Go", but it's a newcomer/niche right now. People who program in C are still programming in C if they are in the embedded world.

Linear Algebra and Statistics which have been around since probably forever are still relevant today and I don't view them as a moving target.

Though I do understand your point of view of certain technologies that are considered as moving targets. Here are a few examples: .NET related frameworks (WinForms to WPF, WCF, WF, Silverlight), C# from OOP to mixed with functional, Flash to Flex/Air, Windows specific development, JS/HTML/CSS.

Though one could argue that since 1996-1998, there aren't too many changes in the HTML/CSS specs except between HTML4 to HTML5.

Another point of view as to why Technology is a moving target is that if a programmer/developer is moving from one ecosystems to another: Embedded to Web development, Desktop App to Embedded, etc. But one could argue that it's like a Pianist decided one day that Guitar is his/her next playground.

Yes you put it much better than me. I agree that many of the underlying abstract aspects are largely unchanging, it's just the technologies that shift.

If I were the best piano player in the world today, I'd probably still be one of the best in the world if I time travelled to 2030. On the other hand, if I were to have brain surgery in 2030 I probably wouldn't want the world's best surgeon from 2010 to time travel and do it.

On the other hand, if I were to have brain surgery in 2030 I probably wouldn't want the world's best surgeon from 2010 to time travel and do it.

I agree with your broader point, but your specific example is unfortunate. Surgery, and brain surgery in particular, has a lot more in common with the 19th century than the 21st. A disturbingly large amount of brain surgery is still accomplished via drill and very tiny ice cream scoops. I'd be surprised if that changes very much even in 20 years.

> On the other hand, if I were to have brain surgery in 2030 I probably wouldn't want the world's best surgeon from 2010 to time travel and do it.

Or even, would you rather by a book on Java written 15 years ago, or written yesterday ?

An interesting question might be: I decide I want to be an expert racing driver and I know in order to achieve that I need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. So I look at the controls and I see that I have a clutch, an accelerator, a brake pedal and a steering wheel - I decide to spend 2500 hours of deliberate practice on each. After 10,000 hours I am an expert in accelerating as hard as possible without spinning the wheels (accelerator), heel and toe gear changes (clutch), braking as hard as possible without locking the wheels (brake) and following the optimum racing line (steering). The next day they introduce semi-automatic gearboxes, anti-lock brakes and traction control. Some of my 10,000 hours were spent on obsolete skills. Am I still an expert?

Touche; If you are racing manuals (or your codebase is jdk 1.0 er.. what it was 15 years ago), then no.

I'll only like to be an expert, like Asimov, in sounding like an expert.

Meaning that I could learn and understand the stuff I need very fast and be able to explain it to others easily.

You chose an interesting example. And yet we can argue Asimov was expert at writing, he probably had more practice at it than any other human being that I know.(or heard of)

I have to agree with the author.

In fact I'd go so far as to say luck has more to do with success than being an expert–especially with regards to financial success.

I disagree. Luck may play a role in one's success, but it's not the deciding factor. The problem is that people like to play off their success as just "being lucky". Why? Because this answer is a lot quicker and sexier than explaining to someone how they spent countless hours working their ass off to get where they are.

Have you read Warren Buffett's biography, The Snowball? Sure, Buffett caught some lucky breaks, but the man has essentially spent his entire life completely engrossed in investing. Anyone who claims Buffett is just the luckiest investor alive should really take a closer look at how the man has accomplished what he has.

The nice thing about expertise is anticipating mistakes that would otherwise cost time and energy. With emerging best practices in continuous deployment and customer development, those costs are on the decline. Furthermore, with the mentorship opportunities emerging from the wealth of angel networks and seed funds, you can replicate some of those gains without the prohibitive time investment.

While Gladwell makes a compelling argument for the 10,000 hour rule, I just can't buy that. It can't be that simple.

Simple? It's not like you're sit around eating snacks and thinking about a topic for 10,000 hours - that's 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, which is hard work.

Two people can play 10,000 hours of golf, and one of them becomes Tiger Woods, and the other one becomes a course pro teaching lessons for $45/hr. Tiger Woods was amazing at age 5 on "That's Incredible," long before his 10,000 hours.

Similarly it's obvious that Steve Jobs is expert at what he does, but what is that, exactly? What did he practice for 10,000 hours?

Talent, expert level preparation, and success are related but the interaction between them is still mysterious.

It's not just playing 10000 hours of golf, it's actively and effectively practicing golf for 10000 hours. There is huge difference between the two. Sure innate talent and physical attributes make a difference, but exactly how you spend your 10000 hours probably makes a much bigger difference.

I couldn't agree more. To add slightly, I think the intensity and novelty of what you are doing are probably the biggest factors in how you spend your 10000 hours.

I know I learn more from spending 1 hour trying to solve a new problem I have never tackled before than spending 10 writing yet another CRUD procedure or yeat another GUI for the database. Similarly, I improved my running faster (back when I was still running regularly) with runs that challenged me and on varied terrain more than I did from yet another tread mill run at a regular pace.

"Simple" is not the same thing as "easy."

But I think the point the poster is trying to make is that it isn't simple. The actual task of carrying out 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is complicated. You have to be constantly revising your strategy, measuring your progress, determining what, when and how to practice, and the actual tasks that comprise the practice may be complicated (as the poster said - you can't sit there eating snacks).

Simple, but easier said then done.

Or maybe - Simple, but complicated to do.

Someone could ask me "How do I make the perfect search engine?"

and I might reply "For any user and query make it return the most relevant results."

That is a simple instruction but actually complicated to do.

the op points out one end of the spectrum. i'm far more concerned with the other end, where people think that writing a program, or worse, achieving some general credential, makes them an expert. it's refreshing to interact with folks who see themselves and others making continuous progress towards mastery. such folks tend to have a stable foundation of confidence and a more open attitude when speaking with others. the thought that some people are magically and suddenly experts is damaging to collaboration and progress.

You don't have to be an expert marksman to shoot yourself some food.

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