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Comment by hirundo | Hacker News Reader

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.

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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.

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