The 10,000 Hour Rule for deliberate practice is wrong
slate.com
slate.com
Just one more thing: for the article to open up with something about chess masters (Magnus), and then not mention Judit Polgar [1](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Judit_Polg%C3%A1r) -- the strongest female chess player by a large margin, who is kind of a product of the 10,000 hour rule (see wiki), is very strange. I want to disregard the article almost entirely just because of this.
[1]: Polgár was born on 23 July 1976 in Budapest, to a Hungarian Jewish family. Polgár and her two older sisters, Grandmaster Susan and International Master Sofia, were part of an educational experiment carried out by their father László Polgár, in an attempt to prove that children could make exceptional achievements if trained in a specialist subject from a very early age. "Geniuses are made, not born", was László's thesis. He and his wife Klára educated their three daughters at home, with chess as the specialist subject. She is the first, and to date, only woman to have surpassed the 2700 Elo rating barrier, reaching a career peak rating of 2735 and peak world ranking of #8, both achieved in 2005. She has been the #1 rated woman in the world since 1989 (when she was 12 years old).
Also sort of similar is the story of eight-time World Memory Champion, Dominic O'Brien - http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dominic_O%27Brien
http://www.real-memory-improvement.com/dominic-obrien.html
He never had superior intelligence growing up, it's something he trained really hard for. And I actually read his books and audio CDs a few years ago, and competed in one of these memory championships myself. At the peak of my training, I was able to memorize a pack of cards in order in under 2 minutes.
How long did that last? A week later, how much of the deck did you remember?
The article is full of evidence for why the 10,000 hour "rule" isn't really true at all. But you say you want people to believe it anyway. To me, there are few things more grating than pop science that isn't true, but gets repeated because it sounds good.
And the "10,000 hour rule" is worse than just a trivial factoid. It is a recipe for disappointment. If you tell someone that, despite their initial lack of talent, they can be "superb" at anything they want, and 10,000 hours later they are still mediocre at best, don't you think it would be frustrating to have wasted that much time?
I want people to dream, but also to know themselves and to be able to perceive the difference between what comes easily and what doesn't. Achieving mastery of something is a deeply satisfying experience; a person's best shot at that is becoming acquainted for their real talents.
Judit Polgar is not "a product of the 10,000 hour rule." While it's true that she devoted an extreme amount of dedicated practice, she also showed extreme talents from a very early age. When she was five she defeated a family friend at chess without looking at the board. I doubt she had practiced 10,000 hours by then, or that most five year olds with a comparable level of instruction could have done that. Actually I would seriously wager that even with 10,000 hours of practice I would not be capable of doing what she did at 5.
Who are these mediocre people who have put in 10k hours of deliberate practice? I can't recall anyone I'd call mediocre who's put in more than a thousand hours at something.
Many people do continue to study in earnest (and invest a lot of time into "deliberate practice") after hitting this plateau, in an effort to make bigger gains. Though many will instead choose to make music a more recreational part of their life, and move onto other things as their life's primary focus.
But I think it's severe confirmation bias to say "everyone who is good put in 10k hours, and few people make it to 10k hours without being really good." Because the only counterexample to that is someone who continues practicing intensely for 10k hours without seeing noticeable gains. And why would someone do that (unless they are chasing the siren of the 10k hour rule)?
It's strange how little is talked about that experiment. I think it holds an inconvenient truth for many.
(I don't know how much she had trained by the age of 5, so I don't know it it has actual bearings on the 10000h rule. But it certainly shows that high skill is not necessarily inborn).
Probably a lot better when the child is the genetic offspring of a chess teacher.
It's also confirmation bias: we wouldn't have heard about the experiment if it had failed.
That's not what confirmation bias is. You're thinking "reporting bias" or "selection bias", I think.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confirmation_bias
My argument is that 10,000 hour rule has become the "practice makes perfect" of today. Just like a lot of sayings passed down from generation to generation it's not 100% true, but to nitpick it is beyond useless, it's harmful. Why not tell people to try really hard at whatever they'd like to be good at? What's the alternative... don't try hard, because there's a small chance you won't get good at it despite your best efforts? That's senseless. I'm sorry, I think your criticism is harmful. 10,000 hour rule as it is exchanged today between people, in the kind of Gladwell narrative (which may not be scientifically valid 100%), is advice that's easy to internalize, and motivates people to try hard really well. I hate to see it being shot down by this kind of bikeshedding. Because apparently, at least to me, the only other alternative is gutless, feckless defeatist, overly-cautious "be warned that even if you try, you're not going to succeed". Screw that, I'd rather fail after trying really hard than to not having tried at all.
Yes, but is it true?
There are plenty of platitudes that are "fastastic" and "simple," but aren't true. Maybe you get comfort from believing things even if they're not actually true, but I really deeply do not.
> Why not tell people to try really hard at whatever they'd like to be good at? What's the alternative... don't try hard, because there's a small chance you won't get good at it despite your best efforts?
Did you read my comment? I am arguing that if someone really wants to feel the satisfaction of success, they should become deeply acquainted with their talents, because pursuing things you are talented at gives you by far the best chance of success.
I always wished I was better at drawing. I've put in some concerted effort at it multiple times (like not a ton, but enough to realize that I am frustratingly non-talented at it). If my parents had truly made me believe the 10k hour rule, I might still be trying to make that happen instead of following my true talents, which I've achieved a pretty high level of achievement at.
I'm not saying you should steer kids away from things they are interested in, or tell them they can't succeed. I'm just saying: help them to know themselves, and don't plant in them the idea that 10k hours will magically make them awesome at anything.
As I said, it's probably not 100% true, but that doesn't matter. I care deeply about greater happiness and well-being of a society, I want people to be hopeful and diligent in acquiring skills, and as it happens, the 10,000 hour rule is an effectual guiding maxim to go by. Again, what's the alternative solution to motivate people to try hard? A tentative "go ahead and try, but just be aware you might not succeed" type advice doesn't work. It's not a solution that'll yield good results.
10,000 hour rule probably makes a lot of people try things that they never would have otherwise. I picked up the guitar with the intention of becoming a rockstar a la 10,000 hour rule. Of course I didn't reach rock stardom, but I certainly got good enough to be really happy with the few pieces I was able to play. 10,000 rule is a nice rule to have in our society's canons of unwritten rules. The cultural importance of the rule as it exists today, for the great results it can give, should rightly transcend its minutiae.
It matters to me. If you were my parent and you told me the 10k hour rule even though it wasn't true, I would be really annoyed that I couldn't trust the adults in my life to tell me the truth.
I am sure that not everyone feels the way I do about this, but I feel this way very strongly, and you don't seem to acknowledge that anyone could possibly prefer a truth-based approach to this.
> Again, what's the alternative solution to motivate people to try hard?
Well one way would be: "Everyone who is good at this put in a lot of work. No one started out knowing everything."
That, unlike the promise that 10k hours promises anything, would actually be true.
I don't believe that lack of free will and hard determinism are conclusively established. To me they are tied up with what I consider one of the universe's greatest epistemic mysteries, which is where consciousness/sentience comes from. My own perception of my "free will" is that my mind/will have a default response in any situation, but that by spending some kind of mental energy I can override this default behavior. I believe that quantum mechanics leaves plenty of room for this self-perception of my mental process to have an actual basis in reality (though I also admit the truth could be something else entirely).
The idea that we have violent tendencies hard-wired, so-to-speak, doesn't bother me except in extreme cases of people who seem enslaved to them. If you want to know what does seriously trouble me, it's people who struggle internally with something like pedophilia, and are doing everything they can to resist it, but have to fight against it constantly.
> To me they are tied up with what I consider one of the universe's greatest epistemic mysteries, which is where consciousness/sentience comes from.
Trend of recent findings from modern science increasingly seem to suggest of a pretty dispiriting answer, our consciousness is not so different from a dog's, and it's not as remarkable as we deem it to be, (somewhat relevant article from the times this week: http://www.nytimes.com/2014/09/28/opinion/sunday/god-darwin-... ).
> I believe that quantum mechanics leaves plenty of room for this self-perception of my mental process to have an actual basis in reality (though I also admit the truth could be something else entirely).
I'm similarly finding solace in the fact that a lot of these things don't seem to be falsifiable, and that QM suggest potentially of a non-deterministic universe. What you say about pedophilia is also a concern, it's also an immense struggle for me to deal with these unhappy truths about human nature. I'm finding it extremely hard to come up with comforting answers.
> I always wished I was better at drawing. I've put in some concerted effort at it multiple times (like not a ton, but enough to realize that I am frustratingly non-talented at it).
Concerted effort how? Because that matters.
> If my parents had truly made me believe the 10k hour rule, I might still be trying to make that happen instead of following my true talents, which I've achieved a pretty high level of achievement at.
Make WHAT happen? Are you comparing yourself to someone else? what kind of mastery are you seeking? How do you know that with enough practice you wouldn't have reached a sufficiently good level (where this is, is the key) at it?
> I'm not saying you should steer kids away from things they are interested in, or tell them they can't succeed. I'm just saying: help them to know themselves, and don't plant in them the idea that 10k hours will magically make them awesome at anything.
As a rule of thumb, enough practice will probably make you awesome at something, yes.
But you have to make those hours count. There needs to be PROGRESS.
Also, you might never catch up with the "greats" who had a head start for one reason or another but that doesn't mean that "practice makes perfect" as a vague general rule is true.
This whole argument is like a weird combination of confirmation bias and "no true Scotsman."
Confirmation bias because yes, everyone who is good put in the time.
But "no true Scotsman" because if someone doesn't get good, you can just say they weren't practicing right.
So if you want to learn something, it helps to find someone who is good at teaching it at the level you want to reach.
I certainly agree with that.
But that is not enough to say that anyone who engages in the right kind of practice will get better. My point is just that it's an easy out to say "oh the 10k rule didn't apply here because they weren't practicing right." For that to be an appropriate response, you would need to actually show that the person was capable of that kind of practice in that area but wasn't doing it.
It appears to be working out so far for Dan McLaughlin. He was a professional photographer who quit his job in 2010 with the goal to get on the pro tour in the golf circuit. He's about 5000 hours in and has a handicap of 3[1], which (I believe) puts him in the top few percentage of golf players. He started from no experience with golf, and is working his way through the game pretty systematically.
He may not make the pro tour by the time the 10,000 hours are up, but he's definitely increased his mastery of the game pretty significantly over 5,000 hours of practice.
I'm a little unclear about your anecdote; you're saying that even with incredible amounts of focused practice, some people will never be good at some things, and then as evidence you say that you never really put in that much effort learning how to draw, but you could tell that you would never be any good. Those two situations aren't really the same at all, and I don't understand why you're comparing them.
There are definitely limitations to practice; I'm 5'6" and weigh 115; as a result, I'm never going to excel at something like football. My body just isn't cut out for it, and that's something I came to terms with a long time ago.
But for drawing, the pencil goes where you push it. Unless you're physically unable to control the pencil (and you may be! I have no idea), I have trouble understanding what ineffable quality one person may possess that would put their ability so far out of reach from somebody else who's simply willing to put in the work.
[1]: http://www.columbian.com/news/2014/jun/07/dan-plan-mclaughli...
Ah, but how do you know if you haven't tried?
You seem to be saying that the kind of physical limitation you have in football could not possibly exist mentally. Why do you feel so sure of this?
Edit: Seriously, by your own admission, you've put in "some concerted effort [...] a few times", but never very much. As soon as it gets hard, or frustrating, you give up. And you're convinced that because you give up easily, it's impossible for you to do well, and that this is somehow something utterly beyond your control. That's just baffling to me.
Take music. It is documented that approximately 4% of the population suffers from what is described as "congenital amusia", commonly known as being tone deaf. From the Wikipedia article on the subject (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Amusia#Congenital_amusia):
"Individuals who suffer from congenital amusia seem to lack the musical predispositions that most people are born with. They are unable to recognize or hum familiar tunes even though they have normal audiometry and above average intellectual and memory skills. Also, they do not show sensitivity to dissonant chords in a melodic context, which, as discussed earlier, is one of the musical predispositions exhibited by infants."
Now I'm really good at music. From an early age, the things that are hard for congenital amusiacs came easily to me. It was really obvious from an early age that I was good at it. As a result, I've spent at least 10k hours of my life doing music and achieved a high level.
It makes no sense to me to say "well how do congenital amusiacs know that they won't get better if they just give up?" Without some extraordinary evidence, it is not reasonable to claim that if a congenital amusiac just spends 10k hours, they will become superb at it.
The reason I didn't spend much time drawing is not because I generally lack perseverance, it is because it was extremely obvious that I am not talented at it. I know this because I know what it feels like to have talent at something.
In the form discussed upthread (that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is sufficient to mastery), its not only not true, its not even what Gladwell was saying, and is something Gladwell has explicitly disavowed. [1]
[1] http://www.businessinsider.com/malcolm-gladwell-explains-the...
Are there any real-world examples that we can point at of people who actually did spend 10,000 hours at something and did not become superb at it?
In Malcolm Gladwell's book, he tried to find piano players who had spent 10,000 hours practicing and then given up (having never made it to the professional scene) but he couldn't find any.
This is confirmation bias. If people plateau in their skill at 1k hours and then stop such serious pursuit, the burden of proof is on you to say that their gains would have resumed as they approached 10k hours.
I observe as a musician that most people plateau at some point.
Surely, though, out of all the people who reached 1k hours and thought about quitting, there would be some who decided to plod through and keep practicing?
These people, as few in number as they might be, would eventually hit 10,000 hours of practice.
Why hasn't anyone found them and interviewed them?
In any pursuit, people will plateau all the time. It's the nature of practice. You have to push through the plateau in order to get to the next level. Some people decide that it's not worth it, so they stop. Are you saying that every single one of these people wasn't genetically talented enough to continue?
Are there any real-world examples that we can point at of people who actually completed 10,000 hours of deliberative practice that weren't already far ahead of the of their equally-practicing peers in terms of skill with, say, 2,000 hours of practice? Even if we assume that Malcolm Gladwell's inability to find people in one domain that had done 10,000 hours of deliberate practice but not become superb is accurate and generalizable [1], what evidence is there to suggest that the relation involved isn't "People who don't excel in a domain before long before 10,000 hours of deliberate practice tend to stop pushing themselves before reaching 10,000 hours of deliberate practice"?
[1] And there is at least some reason to believe that the impact of deliberate practice on performance is strongly domain dependent, not general, e.g., http://www.businessinsider.com/new-study-destroys-malcolm-gl...
This is a very telling phrase as well. Mastery doesn't come easy, pretty much as a general rule. If your definition of mastery includes "It has to be easy to get there", then obviously you're not going to master anything because you're going to quit as soon as it gets hard. If I teach my child to only focus on things which come easily to them, I will have failed absolutely as a parent.
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Personally, I think it is very, very dubious that there are significant genetic components in virtually any activity. While having a relative that is good at chess might bias your probability towards being good at chess, this is not evidence that people without relatives who are good at chess will be bad at chess. The human genome is ludicrously small compared to the space of human activities. It simply cannot encode the skills necessary to be a pilot, to be a chessmaster, to be a doctor, a lawyer, a software designer, a lover, a fighter, or even a small, tiny fraction of the things humans do every single day.
It's perfectly possible that there is some cognitive process, like pattern recognition, that the Polgars were genetically predisposed to being good at. But since there are so few cognitive processes and so many skills, it's likely that there are huge swaths of talents that the Polgars would also be predisposed to as well as playing chess.
That's not even taking into account neuroplasticity, which we now know to be far more prevalent than we previously thought. Only decades ago it was thought that brains only deteriorate after a certain age. We know that to be false now. Beyond even that, technology is only going to become better, and we are very close (certainly on the timescale of humanity's existence) to true intelligence amplification on a biological level.
Further, the best way to find out if you're good at a thing is to do it. Self-fulfilling prophecies being what they are, it's best if you think you'll succeed going in, because otherwise you're literally sabotaging yourself. I think this is handled better by Cal Newport than by myself and I advise you to read his book So Good They Can't Ignore You for that handling.
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Ultimately, at some point in this discussion, you need to decide whether we live in the world of Limitless, or in the world of Gattaca. Either you spread the meme, whether it's literally true or not, that humans can accomplish anything, or you spread the meme that there are a handful of things you can do, and your only hope in happiness lies in finding those things and doing them.
Obviously I think it's better to live in the Limitless-world than the Gattaca-world. While I think that Gattaca is a woefully misinformed parody of genetic engineering on humans, it does a very good job of portraying a society where everybody thinks that they live in a caste and that's the end all and be all of their world.
If humanity had decided it was good at endurance hunting and gathering, we would still be on the Savannah. The story of humanity is the story of rejecting that there is a set list of things one can do, and doing things that are utterly impossible. Humans are the only thing we know of that can do this. If we abandon this, as far as we are aware, that light is snuffed out for the whole universe.
Until we know that is not the case, we need to be conservative, and guard that ingenuity with the utmost caution.
Eh, the granularity of the measurement tends to indicate the confidence of the possible deviation from the given measurement. Giving a so-called rule in hours sounds much more hard and fast than simply giving it in the form of something like years.
Unfortunately, since the Polgar sisters were all full siblings, it is possible that they were born geniuses, not made geniuses. Laszlo Polgar wanted to try the experiment again, this time with three boys adopted from a developing nation, but his wife talked him out of it.
For the sake of argument, let's assume that many or most kids would, if given the Polgar treatment in a field become world class in that field. Then an important and interesting question is how early do you have to start? The Polgars started at 4.
The problem I see with starting that young is that it is before the child has a chance to figure out what they are interested in. If you can wait until the child has developed definite interests, and then give the Polgar treatment in one of those, you might have a better chance of the child actually sticking with that as a career.
That's kind of how it was with Carlsen. His parents did not thrust it upon him. He was taught the game at 5, and showed little interest in it. Later, he developed an interest on his own, studied on his own, and started doing well. His parents then provided good support so that he could develop that interest.
[1] http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200506/the-grandmast...
Everyone (non-piano-players too) should read C. Chang's book "Fundamentals of Piano Practice".
http://www.pianofundamentals.com/book
There is a free PDF here:
It is quite fascinating reading. One of the main points is that to practice effectively, do not waste your time playing pieces over and over again. A 50 bar piece might contain only one bar that gives you trouble. If you play the piece over and over again, you will only encounter that bar 1 in 50 times. If you just play that bar, you will be practicing the difficult part nearly 50X faster.
You can use a metronome to identify "stress points". These show up when you gradually increase tempo. Perhaps at 80 beats per minute, you can get through the piece, but around 95 b.p.m. there are places where you start to fumble. Those are the stress points to focus on.
Another fascinating observation or insight of the author is about speed. You can play a run of several notes infinitely fast with ease: namely, just strike them at the same time as a chord. There, infinitely fast! So it's actually the in-between speeds that are troublesome; it's not true that difficulty strictly increases with speed.
In fact, insanely fast phrases are actually played as chords, with staggered timing. The hand comes down to play all the notes, but they are offset so they start at different times.
He regards this backwards: start at infinite speed (playing the chord) and then it's just a matter of slowing it down from there: stagger the notes so they sound individually.
Pure genius!
The 10k hour rule says that 10k is necessary. The article says the rule is wrong because clearly 10k is not sufficient. What a waste of time and words.
10,000 hours does not mean you will be world class. 10,000 hours does not even mean you will be excellent.
If you are world class, you almost certainly have put in your 10,000 hours. Not the other way around.
Of course, nothing in the article refuted the study Gladwell cited, among a group of talented musicians, those who practiced more were superior. I'm fairly sure no one took away from that the notion that people with no musical talent could become concert musicians if they practiced for 10K hours. The debate is silly, but the studies cited were interesting; would that they had been presented less sensationally.
Any one datum is questionable: How were the 728 hours tracked? Were some forms of practice excluded? Is the master designation in chess equivalent to the elite mastery the 10k rule describes? Is this measurement for an extreme talent outlier?
Neither the insufficiency argument nor the existence of outliers argument have merit against the 10k hour rule, properly understood. One number cannot possibly cover the range of fields, the range of talent, and the range of practice measurements (hour tracking, practice quality). Might this single number still be a broadly useful heuristic? I'm not sure, but this article tilts at windmills unhelpfully.
This seems like an absurd conclusion. It is so generic. This issue with abilities only really makes sense when you have a specific goal that requires a specific ability or set of abilities to achieve. Generically concluding that people cannot help themselves by trying harder is crazy. Sure, there are specific cases but this conclusion is generic and therefore incorrect.
It seems that either I or the author really misunderstand this 10,000 rule. My understanding was always that I cannot truly master something without 10,000 hours of practice. This is very, VERY different than saying I can master anything with 10,000 hours. I believe my understanding is the popular take?
I always think of Harrison Bergeron when I read things like this.
As for the "rule" itself, the 10,000 hour statement is not about perfection or being the best. It is an estimation of the effort required to master a trade or discipline.
> These findings filtered their way into pop culture. They were the inspiration for what Malcolm Gladwell termed the “10,000 Hour Rule” in his book Outliers, which in turn was the inspiration for the song “Ten Thousand Hours” by the hip-hop duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis, the opening track on their Grammy-award winning album The Heist.
But the article does mention the 10,000 hour rule.
>These findings filtered their way into pop culture. They were the inspiration for what Malcolm Gladwell termed the “10,000 Hour Rule” in his book Outliers, which in turn was the inspiration for the song “Ten Thousand Hours” by the hip-hop duo Macklemore and Ryan Lewis
And on top of that the entirety of the article is framed as a rebuttal to the 10,000 hour rule. Don't know what article you read.
The 10,000 Hour Rule is Wrong and Perpetuates a Cruel Myth
The <title> tag reads thusly:
Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hour Rule for deliberate practice is wrong: Genes for music, IQ, drawing ability, and other skills.
I think that underneath it we all hope that there is one thing everyone can be truly world class at. And we hope we will find that thing for us. And that it will be cool.
And yet with 7 billion of us, we shall have to niche down a lot to get good. To be in the top 1000 globally, we will have to choose between 7 million skill sets. And with only 27,000 of job types in Soc2010 ( for example " 9244 Warden, patrol, crossing, school") I think we are going to have some problems.
Look at athletics. Here genetics plays an enormous part (Usain Bolt was born to excel at sport) but deliberate practise also makes him fast. Yet there are millions of people each year who complete intensive running regiemes, either for formal marathons or just as "jogging".
These people achieve "mastery" of running - improved aerobic fitness, stretched and improved muscles, an understanding of race conditions, of weather and environment, awareness of traffic, a better understanding of their own body as well. I have experienced all these things as runner and cyclist.
I am not "world class". But I am easily beyond merely competent in cycling.
And so I think we are setting the wrong goals. 10,000 hours of deliberate practise sounds too pat too simplistic, but the idea that you can be world class in anything without years of practise is almost oxymoronic.
So is "world class" what we mean by "mastery of a skill"? Perhaps we would be better off with "beyond competent". The multiplication of genes and practise is a powerful formula - but to be the very best is a near psychotic desire. To be in the peloton is a good aim - but I simply think completing the course without shame is a skill we can all learn with practise and one to be proud of.
http://tedxtalks.ted.com/video/The-First-20-Hours-How-to-Lea...
In short it says that you just need 20 hours to become "proficient" (not master) at something, anything. It's really worth watching.
For most of us, we are balancing jobs and real world responsibilities, and can't afford to put in 40 hours a week for 5 years on the long-shot hopes that we would one day be playing our instrument of choice in front of sell out crowds in Carnegie Hall. Realistically, I could afford maybe 1 hour/day of practice (and even that would be a bit of a stretch, probably closer to 3-4 hours/week) which would mean Carnegie Hall wouldn't happen for another 27 years. I think more than anything, the proliferation of the '10,000 hour rule' was very depressing for me, as a small part of the enjoyment of practicing my various hobbies comes from dreaming about the possibilities, and when you break down the numbers, those dreams become highly improbable (i.e. impossible).
I think a better 'rule' would be as follows, largely from my own anecdotal experience and observations with a number of instruments, sports, programming, and other hobbies:
10's of hours = functional; 100's of hours = proficient; 1000's of hours = professional level; 10000's of hours = world class;
As is noted elsewhere in this thread, these numbers are highly variable and dependent on genetics, previous experience, and practice strategies. But I think this is a better way to frame skill acquisition, its a bit more friendly and realistic. I would like to think that after a couple hundred hours of practicing a new instrument, I would be good enough to jam out in front of a small crowd in a shitty bar. And from my previous experience, that has generally been the case.