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Comment by Sprezzaturianna | Hacker News Reader

Always sad to see this myth live on. It is simultaneously as self-evident as it is nonsensical.

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)

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10,000 hours has got to be the least interesting concept in the body of work around deliberate practice. But it is somehow the concept that is most widely known.

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 10k hour concept is sticky/durable because it holds out hope.

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.

Further, the reason the concept of 10,000 hrs is sticky/durable is because it is:

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

It's also politically correct and fits in with the current generation's thinking of "you can be anything you want." This comes up now and again on HN as well about whether everyone should/can learn to program.

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 is also the interesting case of people with multiple areas of expertise. This is an understudied phenomenon, but I think it can shed light on the issue.

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.

Where in this project do you see any myths being propagated? I followed the project all last year, and it is extremely reasonable and not in any way based on any myth I'm aware of.

The key to greatness is not making the same mistake twice.

this goes double (or half?) for test pilots

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