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Comment by SilverRed | Hacker News Reader

IMO the 10,000 hours thing is more of a truism based on the definition of what we call an expert. Its based on the human lifespan more than anything. If we lived twice as long, we would have professionals with much higher times spent practicing on average.

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The 10,000 hours is how much solitary deliberate practice the students who were accepted into some acknowledged music conservatory had put in by the age of 18 (or some such). They aren't considered experts. But for the ones that make it through the ordeal of that school, some of them will be what we consider experts some day in the future.

I disagree, an expert isn’t a master. Compare applicants and graduates of these elite conservatory’s and there is real improvement, but most people off the street would have trouble distinguishing the before and after simply by ear.

Part of the point was that you have to be quite rich to be able to afford to spend 10,000 hours on something, you require other people to take up the slack of things you're not doing because you're practisting things, pay for lessons, drive you to practise.

Look, there it is again! You’re implying that 100% of their practice is deliberate practice. Which is, I think extremely unlikely. People like Wayne Goretsky, Michael Jordan, or Dan Gable, likely approached high ratios of deliberate practice in addition to high practice volumes, it’s rare.

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