The Myth of 10,000 hours | Hacker News Reader

The Myth of 10,000 hours

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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.

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.

It’s even more specific than that: it’s deliberate practice. Going to the driving range, getting a bucket, and hitting a bunch of balls likely doesn’t count. You need to be focusing on improving a specific thing. Are you working on your swing path, club face angle, hip rotation, etc? Or are you just hitting balls?

I was fascinated by The Dan Plan. He went from having never played golf to a 3.1 handicap, but ultimately injury appears to have stopped him after ~6000 hours.

>On April 5th, 2010, Dan quit his day job as a commercial photographer and began The Dan Plan. Having never played 18 holes of golf in his life, Dan started the 10,000 hour journey with just a putter. After five months of putting, he received his second club, a pitching wedge. Just before the first anniversary of The Dan Plan dan took his first full-swing lesson. After 18 months he swung a driver for the first time. On December 28, 2011 he played his first full round with a full set of clubs. Since then it has been off to the races.

http://thedanplan.com/about/

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.

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.

>You can be a master without being successful and visa versa.

There's an awful lot of skill-less, successful people out there, more than everyone would like, I'm sure.

I'm sure that's true, but there are also a lot of "soft" skills that many HN readers wouldn't necessarily recognize as such.

I'm reminded of Poul Anderson's short story The Man Who Counts.

Soft skills needn't be generally beneficial either, of course, any more than hard skills.

I read the book years ago in college, and that's exactly what 10k hours is about. The whole point of the book, as I recall, is that you can master anything, but being successful is a horse of an entirely different stripe

It's the same whenever a medical research paper says theres a slight correlation to eating something and cancer rate.

Like people who eat berries are like 10% less likely to get cancer. That gets interpreted as berries cure cancer.

People love blowing things out of proportion.

Actually someone did try to apply the 10k rule to learn golf from scratch.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dan_McLaughlin_(golfer)

I remember seeing his blog post about his first hole in one. Even if I don't really believe the 10k rule, I was rooting for him to enter the PGA, just to prove that it was possible.

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

You might have put that much time into the skill of walking around a golf course, which is not a part of the mastery of the game. I don't know if 10k hour of striking a ball would provide mastery, but I would be ready to assume that it would help your skill.

Reading it should be important, or one may fall prey to interpretations of someone else's interpretations.

I never understood much I heard about golf until I tried it and realized what worked about it for me: it's something to do outside while going for a good walk and talk.

IIRC, the book talks about "deliberate" practice being the key.

Sorry no, ironically Outliers never once mentions "deliberate" ( I checked the index) but refers to the paper by K. Anders Ericsson et al., The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. http://projects.ict.usc.edu/itw/gel/EricssonDeliberatePracti...

Ericsson wrote a book to correct the record. The book's lede is essentially "Gladwell bastardized my research to fit a narrative that would sell books."

https://www.amazon.com/Peak-Secrets-New-Science-Expertise-eb...

It's a good read.

Another way to think about it, is practicing at the edge of your skill / knowledge. If you can already do x, then you are at a good position to learn to do x + i (where i is an incremental improvement over x), by practicing x + i until you can do x + i. Rinse, repeat.

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.

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?

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

Yet Gladwell goes on to apply the 10K hour observation to Bill Gates, the Beatles, etc. demonstrating that each of these did indeed have 10,000 hours of experience before they hit it big.

Grit by Angela Duckworth (https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-Duck...) 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.

For the past several years I've been exploring deliberate practice in a number of different categories of sport, movement and musicality.

I have become convinced that the idea that deliberate practice is not enjoyable is entirely mistaken and results from incorrect framing and insufficient focus on the task. One must discard all notions of the greater goal or sport and design a new game around the simplest aspect which requires improvement.

By practicing meditation and mindfulness, you slowly learn to find skillful movement in all activity. When you can derive pleasure from the mundane - when all movement becomes a dance, you eliminate the distinction between plateaus and play, between practice and performance.

I reject outright the notion that my personality is innately autotelic. It is a skill and a mindset that I've cultivated slowly and intentionally, and it's the difference between sticking with a goal and loving the journey.

On the same trail of thought https://www.amazon.ca/Talent-Code-Greatness-Born-Grown/dp/05... 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 )

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.

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.

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.

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...

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.

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

I agree with you. It might be helpful to share the point with those who might not immediately get it.

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.

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.

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.

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

[1]Lots of people.

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.

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.

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.

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.

I certainly did not argue arguing that you’d be done at 10,000 hours, only much better than being at hour 1.

Whether it’s playing an instrument one way or another.. doesn’t seem super contrary to this.

> 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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

“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.

In a similar vein,

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

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

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

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.

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.

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.

I read the book and I want my money back

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