10,000 hours | Hacker News Reader

10,000 hours

sethgodin.typepad.com

35 pointsbdfh4228 comments

There isn't a magical threshold of hours one must reach to be a "superstar" or "extremely good". There also isn't much substance in the claim of people bailing even before 5,000 hours. It seems like the crux of this argument is just throwing 'numbers' and 'hours' out there with disregard to other factors that come into play when someone makes a time commitment this large. Things like efficiency, pre-disposition, and teaching others are all factors.

So, even if someone invests 3750 hours they can be just as good. This all seems besides the point though, when you are investing thousands of hours into something your not keeping track of 'hours put in' or 'exactly how good you are', its a passion and you're just into it. If success follows then great, if not then that wouldn't stop someone from continuing on.

The sad thing is, people want a magical bite sized formula they can cling to. It makes them buy the book. "Ooooh it's as simple as the number 10,000".

All the self help people use the same tactic. Often making the formula something that is counter intuitive - eg "How to work less and get more done".

There is actually some good research behind the number, which is just given as a rule of thumb. The other rule of thumb figure is 10 years, which is much easier to conceptualize. 1000 of productive hours per year.

Basically it encompasses a jumble of things that includes passion, patience, practice, and persistence. The 4 Ps is a coincidence.

Of course it's not a magical threshold, but when you can do something (in a focused and conscious manner) for 10 years, it's not hard to imagine that you have reached mastery.

The crime of fluffy writing (dunno about Gladwell's new book; didn't read it) is taking rule of thumb numbers and citing them as precision numbers as a way to seem exacting and scientific.

or, we could all just continue to say "Practice makes perfect" to each other.

It seems to me that the reviewer read the first 50 pages of the book then put it down and wrote the review. On the whole, I think Gladwell did a decent job arguing that it is a confluence of factors -- base intelligence, hard work, opportunity and savviness, which contribute to success. The 10,000 hour "rule" is just one point among many to basically illustrate that hard work is part of the equation which is sometimes overlooked.

In our TA pedagogy class, I read a study that found international-level performers in chess, tennis, and violin all put in somewhere around 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in childhood. It stated that this requirement didn't necessarily apply to new fields, as Seth proposed. However, it was fairly consistent for well-established endeavors.

In other words, this isn't exactly something Gladwell made up. Practice does matter.

>"So, even if someone invests 3750 hours they can be just as good."

There is no evidence of this.

I wish I had a link, but it was in a non-free journal. I can look up the citation if anybody cares enough.

the question I would ask you is who are these phenoms who achieved great success without a 10,000 time investment. I agree it is somewhat arbitrary, but it seems like a huge number of non-fluke successes have hit that and there aren't many stories of those who haven't.

I think Seth's main point here, is that the 10,000 hours is BS for new fields. If you are inventing and creating markets, you don't even have 10,000 hours to do it. It's not about being just as good, in an absolute sense, with less practice, it's just that if no one else has done something before, you don't need 10,000 hours to be the best, in a relative sense. Since the Dip is about figuring out what you can be the best at (narrowing the market), it shortcuts the whole idea of needing 10,000 hours.

Godin, or maybe Gladwell (haven't read the book), is missing the point of the "10,000 hours" theory. It is about being "good" at a subject, not being famous for it.

Tiger Woods has spent thousands of hours practicing and is one of the best in his field (and is famous for that). Miley Cyrus is (afaik) not considered among the best actors in the world - she's just famous for landing a disney role.

"Miley Cyrus is (afaik) not considered among the best actors in the world - she's just famous for landing a disney role."

I have to call you out on this point. Miley Cyrus isn't famous because she acted for Disney. There are plenty of child actors who did the same and went nowhere. Miley Cyrus is famous because she is the face of the Hannah Montana brand run by the Disney marketing machine. A brand that has net Disney revenues in the tens of millions of dollars.

You can't deny she is a talented actress, has a great voice, and is generally 'star quality'. A lot of it's just in the breeding and growing up around it all. She's probably done 10,000 hours of watching other people acting + singing while she grew up.

Disclaimer: Sure, I'm a Miley Cirus fan. Admission is first step to recovery + all that.

I don't think she's particularly talented. She's decent in a field where everybody else is worse, but I've seen young actors that blow her away.

Her voice, too, is good but not great. Again: there are young singers who are incredibly better than her.

She's not terrible. But she isn't exactly good, either.

What about the song writing that's sold millions of albums? For a 16 year old that's reasonably impressive no?

But then does the impressiveness rest with the Disney Marketing Machine for Hannah Montana. In part it seems like she would be replaceable (or at least - another could havew been picked) with probably no detriment to the result.

The same doesn't work for Tiger Woods or Bill Gates.

> In part it seems like she would be replaceable (or at least - another could havew been picked) with probably no detriment to the result.

Disney doesn't think so - she turned the role down and Disney put the show on hold for over a year while they tried to convince her to do it.

While there's no doubt that that show wouldn't have been nearly as popular without Disney pushing it, it doesn't follow that any cute kid would have been as successful given the Disney push. Disney is constantly pushing kids and only a few make it big.

If you're better than Disney at picking child stars, big bucks await.

Are you kidding? Disney very frequently makes kids this huge. When the kid's a singer/actress, especially so: they've done a good job of marketing her in both directions.

If you write a show entirely around one person, then yeah. You'll put the show on hold to wait for them. That doesn't mean she's particularly brilliant. Just that she's not entirely awful.

> Are you kidding? Disney very frequently makes kids this huge.

"Very frequently"? I don't see enough "kids this huge" to justify "frequently".

And they didn't write the show for Cyrus. They created the show and she auditioned. They offered. She declined. They waited.

If Disney can create hits at will, why don't they?

Instead, they ride the hits that they have. They try a lot of things. When something works small, they go bigger. If it still works, they hit the gas.

Like I said, if you can do better, big bucks await.

Here's the thing: talented song writing very rarely matters in terms of sales. There've been a ton of studies that look at how songs become popular. To some degree it's a matter of being in the right place at the right time.

If Miley Cyrus wasn't part of the Disney machine, she would not have sold millions of albums. She probably would not have gotten a record deal with anybody but Disney. If she did, she'd fizzle out pretty quickly. I've listened to her stuff: it's incredibly bland.

Yeah, props to her for actually releasing an album at 16 - though, again, with Billy Ray Cyrus as a father and Disney as a corporate overlord that's far less impressive than her doing it with no roots at all. But don't mistake that for songwriting talent in the larger sense. Look at the history of young songwriters who made an impact in the past, and you'll see there's a radical difference. They innovated. They made something new. Miley is just recycling old things.

As I said: it's totally fine that you like her. She seems like a sweet and nice girl, unlike, say, Katy Perry, who's worse and more calculating. But don't let your like for something elevate it above what it actually is, which in her case is pretty bland pop music.

This is exactly right, and I had written a comment ripping into Godin's post for that reason.

But then I checked Gladwell's book and he argues that 10,000 hours is the rule for "successful" people rather than the exception (that is, "successful" -> 10K, not 10K -> "successful"), and now I'm wondering if that's really true. Of course, he never really defines what he means by "successful", but by picking Bill Gates and The Beatles, he's probably got his sights set a little higher than The Doors and Miley Cyrus.

Also, quotes from at least one of the researchers who advocate the 10K theory assume that you need 10K to be a "world-class expert" in any discipline. That's a claim that probably needs to be heavily qualified to retain validity, since some of Godin's examples would seem to refute that.

The Ericsson's research was aimed at fields that were not changing a lot: athletic performance, chess, classical music instruments. I think what it's documenting is how much deliberate practice is required to re-wire your brain to allow for unconsciously expert perceptions and performance. That's the inference I make reading http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=409696 and these two sentences from the concluding paragraph in http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson/ericsson.exp.perf.ht...

"...the difference between experts and less skilled subjects is not merely a matter of the amount and complexity of the accumulated knowledge; it also reflects qualitative differences in the organization of knowledge and its representation (Chi, Glaser & Rees, 1982). Experts' knowledge is encoded around key domain-related concepts and solution procedures that allow rapid and reliable retrieval whenever stored information is relevant."

I don't see this as a repudiation of the 10K hours theory. Hannah Montana's fame is due to the Disney machine as teej mentioned. I'm sure the brand managers, agents, marketers and other pros responsible for her success have logged that kind of time individually and she is the product rather than the producer. I'm not a Doors fan, but maybe they had a stellar agent who spent countless hours developing relationships and promotional skills. Godin's better point is that it may take far less time to become successful in emerging media rather than mature businesses since there are no established benchmarks.

Sorry, but I disagree. Of course it helps to be under the Disney name/brand. But to say she's a "product rather than the producer" is plain wrong.

"She wrote eight of the ten songs, credited by her birth name Destiny Hope Cyrus." (wikipedia)

People generally don't blindly buy music that sounds rubbish just because it has the Disney name on it. Give her some credit at least... Perhaps you dislike the particular genre of music, but that doesn't mean there isn't a large amount of talent there. Especially for a 16 year old.

Axod, I agree the Disney name alone isn't going to ensure success, but I also don't think she rose to the top because of native talent. She has 1) famous father in the business 2) the backing of the most impressive youth marketing organization in the world. Can she sing and write music? absolutely, but I find it hard to believe her success is due to her song writing rather than the push of the amazing organization around her. Again no judgment on her I just think she has the benefit of superior promotion.

"In some ways, this is a restatement of the Dip. Being the best in the world brings extraordinary benefits, but it's not easy to get there."

Not The Dip... ... the devil's in the details, which The Dip has nothing to do with. If you cast a wide and fuzzy net you can claim you said a lot by saying a little.

/I read that book and am not entirely unabashed about it. If anybody wants that book, just to find out why, let me know. Geographic constraints apply. But don't shell out howevermany dollars it is at the bookstore. -_-

He makes the mistake of assuming quality and success are directly related. Miley Cyrus may have been popular before 10,000 hours, but that doesn't mean she was good at whatever it was she succeeded at, which I don't even know. Same with The Bee Gees.

Not that I buy the 10k hours thing anyway, but just wanted to point out that skill and success are not the same thing. There are a million musicians more skilled than Britney Spears or 'N Sync, there are very, very few who've been more successful.

I like the 10,000 hours concept as a motivating factor. It shows that practice pays off. Even the most gifted people still need to put in those hours to get to that high level of achievement. So rather than see it as "I need to put in X hours this year to succeed", I see it as an exaltation of hard work.

> Bill Gates, the Beatles

Bill Gates didn't get rich as a programmer. He got rich as a business man and negotiator (QDOS, IBM). He got stinking rich as a monopolist. (Interesting note: Bill G's father was an anti-trust defense attorney.)

The Beatles did not get rich as live musicians and were never considered a great live act. They made it big as a studio band. I fail to see how cranking out the same songs over and over again for 10,000 hours in Hamburg builds your studio composition chops. Especially when it didn't even seem to lead to great live performance ability.

Haven't read gladwell's book, but it smells like a sloppy pile of misleading anecdotes from here.

What original arguments Gladwell makes are clearly speculative, but it's inherently sloppier to attempt to refute an argument whose reasoning you can only speculate about.

Your arguments about Bill Gates and The Beatles are themselves flawed and classically oversimplistic. Bill Gates didn't get rich as a business man / negotiator / monopolist: he got rich as a programmer business man / negotiator / monopolist. Hard to believe a regular on HN could fail to see how Gates' having serious technical chops was essential to his success.

As for The Beatles, I'll leave it to you to actually read the book.

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