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Comment by cowls | Hacker News Reader

I think there is a difference between being an expert and being "successful" (In the context of that article success = lots of money).

I think the idea is that if I spend 10000 hours coding, I would most likely be an expert coder. It does not mean I will be rich like Bill Gates :(

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I think this is precisely right. There are many more folks who could be claimed experts, who have not become wealthy like Buffet, or Gates. I treat the 10000-hours/10year milestone as more of an indicator of when you should have sufficiently absorbed a great deal of the subject matter -- indeed it would be hard not to spend so much time and not become intimately familiar with the thing. Of course, those 10000 hours need to be spent practicing and learning, not just screwing around.

I think it's more that some people just aren't wired up that way.

I am great at coding and analytics, but naturally quite bad at music. I tried really hard and put in a tremendous amount of time learning music and I was us mediocre at it, no matter how much I loved it and how hard I tried.

You might be the exception, but I'd wager to bet that over 90% of cases of "I'm bad at X" is caused by self-image, self-sabotage and/or underestimating the amount of time 'naturals' had to put in to get to where they were/are.

When you're told as a kid you're bad at X, most of the time it's because you haven't spent much time doing X. When you're told you're good at Y that's usually because you spent more time doing Y.

>put in a tremendous amount of time how much hours overall (< 10 000)? would be interesting for this discussion

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