The Expert in a Year Challenge
experttabletennis.com
experttabletennis.com
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289613...
From what I remember, the claim is that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice work best when:
1. You get immediate feedback on success and failure
2. The thing you are trying to master has a skill set that can be improved, and that improving that skill is sufficient.
That #2 is tricky -- a counter example is stock picking. We have no evidence that there is a skill that can be learned that will make you better at picking stocks, so 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, even with immediate feedback, won't help.
I think that Dan is following a reasonable deliberate practice plan with experts and that he does get fast feedback. What we don't know is if Golf is something that is primarily/mostly/all skill based. For example, what if there was a physical body type that made you better and Dan didn't have it -- then 10,000 hours might not help.
Also, the point of the 10,000 hours is to train your intuitive mind (System 1, the fast thinker) to be as correct as your deliberate mind would be (System 2, the slow thinker) if you had time and attention. This whole thing is much better for thinking-based activities, like say, programming. I don't remember if the studies looked at physical activities and "muscle-memory".
Caveat: this is all from memory -- read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" if you have interest in this.
His basic strategy:
1. Write insurance: that gives you tons of cash up front. Get good at setting the price right so you can make money on the float (using money in near term, paying it back in the future)
2. Now with all of this cash, invest in things (like utilities) that need big cash investment, but then pay-back forever (basic rent collecting). He likes things with big barriers to entry (moats)
He does not care if his company stock goes up or down, all he cares about is intrinsic value: the cash generated (now and in the future) and time value of money. His benchmark is the S&P 500 -- he wants to beat their intrinsic value.
But, read the letters -- they are awesome: http://www.berkshirehathaway.com/letters/letters.html
Because he's repudiated the idea that he or any other informed researcher claimed 10,000 hours was some magic number, or that practice alone is a substitute for talent: http://www.newyorker.com/news/sporting-scene/complexity-and-...
It would have been more accurate to say "It will be interesting to see how well a gross mischaracterisation of Gladwell's claim stands up to empirical testing".
That Gladwell later wrote a much, much less popular article for the New Yorker in which he walked back that totally outlandish claim doesn't justify indignation at people remembering what he wrote.
In any discussion about mastery, people who have never read Outliers will attribute Gladwell with the idea of the 10,000 Hour Rule, take it out of context, and argue with it as if it were the main point of the book, or as if it was presented as a hard and fast rule.
The 10,000-hour-rule seems like more of an observation that people who are really good at things are likely to have spent a lot of time doing them.
My anecdotal observation: The people I know who are masters of things, were very good at those things early on and that encouraged them to practice more and more.
UPDATE: Wow there seems to be a lot of information in previous HN threads such as https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7323837 or https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8197102 and a response to my question in https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8197467
I think that attitude is how you get 'expert'. In the military for example, you train your muscle memory such that in combat, when your adrenaline is at an all time high (no drug touches it IMO) your body just tends to do what it needs to do because you have trained it so. This also ties in with Bruce Lee's view on forms. You have to learn the form, and practice it, until you forget it... if that makes sense.
The bottom line is that practice makes perfect. In todays world though, with athletes who have the ability to do nothing but train, I think it's harder and harder for a layman to compete. When I was a kid I went to the national junior olympics without even trying. If I that same kid today, I doubt I could make it past state.
1) Yes you get better with practice 2) Some faster than others 3) Some with a higher peak than others 4) It is neither necessary, nor sufficient with 10 000 hours effective practice (some win the world championship in high jump after less than a year [Donald Thomas 2007], others will never become chess champions, or even ranked among the top 10 000, after 30 000 hours' dedicated practice) 5) Even the original study just put 10k hours as the AVERAGE practice time for THOSE few that eventually became masters (i.e. were super-talented), with a range of 3k-30k hours needed.
However, always good to see people wanting to expand their skill set through dedicated work - admirable
(but has NOTHING to do with the fundamentally flawed 10k hr roule)
I would love to know the psychology behind why that concept was so sticky given that it seems self-evidently worthless to know where the theoretical cap on self-improvement lies. I mean, how many things do we put 10k hours of practice in to?
The much better concepts from this world are:
* The deliberate part of deliberate practice. There are very different qualities of practice. Tim Ferriss is making a living on hunting down concepts around minimum effective doses of practice and his third book (Chef) is very good for this. These are all essentially finding more effective ways to practice so that you get more out of each hour.
* The experienced non-expert as an explanation (and pejorative) for everyone who has 10,000 hours of experience but isn't very good.
* Difficulty: the ideal practice difficulty is uncomfortable, falling between trivial and demoralizing.
The hope that you could be one of the best in the world if you just worked hard enough.
The hope that it's not too late.
1. Actionable - As demonstrated in the blog post, there is a step-by-step set of actions to be carried out.
2. Authentic/Believable - No one doubts (without serious consideration) that any expert hasn't spent 10,000 hours on their craft.
3. Concrete/Measurable - It's a very specific amount.
4. Relevant - It's known that it takes a lot of work to become an expert and who doesn't want to become an expert?
5. Simple
Will practice make someone better than the average person? Definitely. But to be the best in the world, you have to have some genetic advantage - be it your body composition or the way your mind works.
I always like to point out the ice hockey player Ed Jovanovski. He didn't start playing hockey until he was 11 (which is pretty late) but was drafted 1st overall into the NHL just 7 years later. However, his dad was a semi-professional soccer player so his genes probably gave him an advantage over others who started playing much earlier but didn't make it.
There are some skills that just come more easily to a person, and this is demonstrated by the case where you have the same person doing very similar things for similar lengths of time but in one case they become legitimately expert and in another they get better, but fall well short of true expertise. I'm a brilliant poet (if I do say so myself) but while I've invested at least as much time in prose I know I'll never be as good.
This doesn't mean practice isn't important, but it does mean that talent matters, both for how fast you improve and the ultimate capability you reach.
> So in my second chapter I sort of tell a story I call the 'Tale of Two High Jumpers,' in which I sort of profile two high jumpers, one named Stefan Holm, who over the course of 20 years--and by his estimate, 20,000 hours--made incremental progress every year, to the point where he became one of the best high jumpers in the world. And then in 2007 he travels to the World Championships, and is met by a total unknown, a Bahamian jumper by the name of Donald Thomas, who just recently had started high jumping, basically because he had found out he was good at it on a lunchtime bet at his college. And so, Donald Thomas is closer to 0 hours, and Stefan Holm is closer to 20,000 hours. So they average 10,000 hours. But Donald Thomas actually wins that competition. And so I thought it was a good story to explain the fact that not only is there huge variation, but different athletes can get to the same place with both different biology and different training programs.
[0] http://www.econtalk.org/archives/2013/09/david_epstein_o.htm...
There are a lot of others who have done similar things. Matt Cutts from Google does 30 day experiments. Karen X Cheng learned to dance in a year. There's something about contained experiments that are quite compelling.
I'm doing my own version of this, as a writer. I'm working on writing 1,000,000 words [3]. I'm doing this in 1,000 sets of 1,000. I'm currently at 240.
760 to go.
–
[1] http://ajjacobs.com/books/the-year-of-living-biblically/
Comparing "how much of an expert" you can become after a full year of good training in different activities would be a great experiment.
Anyone dares to create a ranking with some? (Say tennis, chess, web development, ice hockey, ...)
For example, in programming competitions the history ratings of everybody is public: http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=AlgoRank.
One of the most well known competitive programmers is probably tourist: http://community.topcoder.com/tc?module=MemberProfile&cr=222.... He started at a rating of about 1200 when he was 12yrs old but took him over 5 years to increase it by 2000 points. For everyone that kept at it for equally as long, you can see a similar trend in trajectory. The only difference is the slope at which their ratings increase.
(The ratings probably mean nothing to you, so for some calibration, people with a rating of about 1500 can easily pass a google interview, and I think a fresh CS grad with no practice will probably start at around 1000. Which probably gives hope to the average CS grad since even for the world's best, it took them about 10 years to get to where they are.)
I just thought this was a nice way to quantify growth vs practice.
They all started at a "green" or "blue" rating (i.e., no prior training) and it took all of them a bit of time to hit "red", which is the arbitrary point you can start calling them an expert.
Although there are a lot of table tennis players in Britain, probably not too many devote significant effort and time to master it. Thus, the effort required to be in the top echelon is not that great. The same cannot be said for, say, American Football in the US or soccer in many countries.
The 500 hours or so he spent on table tennis is woefully inadequate to master mathematics as well, but for a different reason. (Mastering math requires knowledge and skills on a huge amount of materials accumulated over centuries.)
That being said, in regards to the 10,000 hours discussion being had here, I feel like the issue can be summed up as being a classic confusion of correlation and causation. It is obvious that a master will have practiced more than the apprentice but the practice itself is not the sole source of mastery.