The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real

http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/10000-hour-rule-not-real-180952410/

by pif • 12 years ago

68 92 12 years ago

fchollet• 12 years ago

The 10,000 hour rule is a cultural meme that has spread and found believers not because it is grounded in reality but because it is cognitively seductive. In the first place it should seem highly suspect that something as poorly-defined and multidimensional as "mastering" (how do you measure mastery?) a "field" (as if every field had the same complexity and breadth) could always be done by anyone (independently of the obvious issue of individual variations in intelligence and talent) under a constant, conveniently round figure of 10,000 hours of practice.

As a cultural meme it works in a similar way to the myth that "humans are only using 10% of their brains". I expect it to die a slow death over the next 50 years.

JonnieCache• 12 years ago

I think its popular because 10,000 hours seems nicely out of reach for most people, so it lets you off the hook for not being good at stuff. It's not my fault I can't play the piano: my lifestyle precludes it. If only I didn't have a job/kids/whatever, then people could see how creative I really am. Gladwell allows one to continue doing nothing while still imagining oneself as a thwarted hero. A great deal for just $16.99.

PhasmaFelis• 12 years ago

I'd always understood it as figurative for "a whole lot of time." I think it works as both an encouragement and a warning: if you think you can become a master in a few weeks, think again. But if you've been practicing for a year and you feel like you're never going to get there, keep at it! You're making real progress even if it doesn't seem like it.

Spooky23• 12 years ago

Malcolm Gladwell is a tool, but the idea makes sense on some level because he borrowed it from other areas.

If you've been focused exclusively and passionately on a specific field of study for the equivalent of 5 full time years, you will be an expert/master at that thing. The scope or meaning of that mastery is going to depend on what it is. If you're a plumber, you're going to be adept at using your tools and be an expert in the codes for plumbing systems and maybe some specific sub-domain (like industrial cooling).

I use a blue collar example here because there is an actual process to be designated a "master" in a trade. Usually it requires a minimum of 5 years of practicing your craft at the journeyman level. (Along with training and alot of study) Assuming a 2,000 hour work year... that's pretty much your magical 10,000 hour benchmark.

aaronbasssett• 12 years ago

I observed Escher. I love Basquiat. I watched Keith Haring, you see I study art. The greats weren't great because at birth they could paint, the greats were great cause they paint a lot.

pif• 12 years ago

Doing a lot is not enough. Being critical towards yourself, striving to do better, understand what is better, looking for and listening to feedback, those are as necessary.

simoncarter• 12 years ago

In what appears to be the original paper on the 10,000 hour rule (The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance: http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...), even the Authors state:

"It is important to note that our study shows only that the amount and distribution of practice is related to the level of performance of adult musicians. In fact, many additional factors consistent with the skill-acquisition framework could attenuate the differences among our three groups. Sosniak (1985) found that international-level pianists had spent considerable efforts to seek out the very best musical teachers during their musical development. Furthermore, it is likely that an analysis of the detailed activities during practice alone would reveal qualitative differences between violinists at different advanced levels of performance (Gruson, 1988; Miklaszewski, 1989)."

But more recent research has demonstrated (though I don't know to what degree, nor how many other papers have validated the following findings) that "individual differences in accumulated amount of deliberate practice accounted for about one-third of the reliable variance in performance in chess and music, leaving the majority of the reliable variance unexplained and potentially explainable by other factors". From http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0160289614..., sorry for the paywall.

In the end, I think it's important to spend time searching and finding something you will be happy to do for the majority of your life. If you want to progress at your chosen field, thought out and well planned studying/practise is necessary, and will make you better, whether or not you end up becoming the accepted world best. And if you enjoy it, it won't matter how high you go.

simonbarker87• 12 years ago

For those wondering, this is a few of lines from Macklemore and Ryan Lewis's song "10,000 hours"

weddpros3• 12 years ago

The conclusion, imho, remains the same: "put more work in what you love and someday, it will pay". As I see it, the 10000h rule is about patience and dedication.

The "10 times rule" is also interesting: it will take 10x more efforts than you think...

thaumasiotes• 12 years ago

The "10 times rule" is also interesting: it will take 10x more efforts than you think...

You see this one all over the place:

90-90 law: the first 90% of the project takes 90% of the development time. The last 10% of the project takes the other 90% of the development time.

Hofstadter's law: It always takes longer than you expect, even after accounting for Hofstadter's law.

ozim• 12 years ago

First time I see 90-90 law, looks like someone made it up from Pareto principle which is 80% - 20%. Besides I don't see application in this topic for it.

cge2• 12 years ago

Why is that the conclusion? As much as I am skeptical of meta-analyses and the scientific soundness of most psychological research, the paper really does suggest that dedication has relatively little to do with performance. Patience and dedication toward something one isn't talented in may well not pay.

Anecdotally, when I was an undergrad, I also figure skated very diligently, far more so than studying, and spent thousands of hours diligently and efficiently practicing with excellent coaches, which was probably significantly more time than I spent studying. I graduated with accolades and admission to an excellent university for my graduate work, while unable to reliably do even a single axel.

weddpros3• 12 years ago

Dedication and patience may not be enough, it doesn't mean it's not required... I think "dedication and patience" is not enough if you don't account for some efficiency.

I think it could be either "don't expect fantastic results before 10000h" or "see if you're ready to engage a 10000h challenge to know if you can do it" or "commit to 10000h or choose something else"...

I'm not sure this rule was meant to be the n-th principle of thermodynamics, ie. checking its scientific validity may be a good way to waste 10000 hours.

dqdo• 12 years ago

The reason that the 10,000 hour does not exist are: (1) different fields require different amount of training and dedication, (2) it is difficult to measure what "mastery" is because it is so hard to quantify, (3) some fields are more competitive than others and therefore requires more practice to get really good, (4) the way that one learns and practice can have a significant effect on one's skill level, (5) at the highest level there is always a factor of talent and luck. Overall, the 10,000 hour rule just means that it takes a really really long time and dedication to be a world class at something. For some it may take only 1,000 hours while others will not reach it no matter how much they try. I think that this meme has gotten out of control and perhaps people have focused more on the long hours than the joy of improving or understanding what improvement means. It is not always better to spend more time on something and in some sense the feeling that we should be working all the time has lead people to become less productive.

abraxasz• 12 years ago

I think the problem is more (6) deliberate practice is hard to define. Some people believe that just sitting and doing problem sets is deliberate practice. Some people believe that hacking on a side project is deliberate practice of programming skills. I don't think that any of those two examples would qualify as deliberate practice.

k__• 12 years ago

THIS.

I know many people who do stuff for ages now, but they aren't someone you would ask for advice, because they're so bad at it.

I know two photographs, one is mediocre and does this stuff for over 6 years now (professionally for money) and one is superb and does it for 2 years (for fun).

Most people who get involved with a specific thing never get to the practice part. They just read a bunch of stuff, do a bit of it and think they know everything...

oatmeal_coffee• 12 years ago

How would you define deliberate practice, then? I would agree that deliberate practice may be hard to define across all skills, but it could be defined for a specific skill.

For example in programing, I would consider problem sets and side projects with functions and goals that are aligned but still outside of one's normal scope of work to be deliberate practice. Working on Project Euler problem sets could be considered deliberate practice. They are problems that can be done in most any programming language, are known to be great for learning a new one, but generally fall outside the usual work of handling data, transforming content, etc.

I would consider Project Euler to be akin to practicing scales on a musical instrument: playing scales is not necessarily music in a "having popular appeal" sense, but it does enable new skills and depth of knowledge of the instrument.

JacobAldridge• 12 years ago

Possibly linked to luck, but I would add another important element: inate ability.

No amount of practice - 10,000 hours, 20,000 hours, or every waking moment for the rest of my life, is going to give me Michael Phelps' shoulder size or ability to process lactic acid.

analog313• 12 years ago

There may be a (7) having to do with the age at which you start. Something like a 10k h rule would correlate with those who started earlier. To have any practical chance of actually putting in 10k h on the violin, it sure helps to start at age six.

It also helps if formal practice is the same thing as having fun for you.

lutusp16• 12 years ago

This is just another example of psychologists trying to sound like scientists. Scientists quantify their claims, put forth physical rules and associated mathematics, after which measurements confirm or refute the quantified predictions.

Psychologists express opinions, most of which don't lead to empirical or quantifiable predictions, but occasionally a psychologist, jealous of real scientists, will try to quantify an opinion, as in this case where 10,000 hours was attached to someone's viewpoint. Then, later, inevitably, other psychologists will argue against the earlier opinion, as thought the refutation was anything more than another opinion.

What psychologists don't do is try to offer explanations, craft testable theories, about their observations, then subject the theories to empirical test. That would actually be science.

The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real

On the contrary! It is exactly as real as psychology is.

sirwitti2• 12 years ago

You talk about quantifying claims and at the same time separate all psychologists from scientists.

Maybe read again what you just posted...

lutusp16• 12 years ago

You talk about quantifying claims and at the same time separate all psychologists from scientists.

Think about your argument. If I separate all psychologists from scientists, I'm not quantifying. If instead I say 50% of psychologists don't meet minimal scientific standards, that would be a quantification.

Also, surely you realize what I'm saying is now the majority view on this topic, yes? Even with the highest-ranking psychiatrist in the country:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

TeMPOraL2• 12 years ago

Exactly. It's cargo-cult science. Attaching numbers and equations and quantifying things to look more credible. Math is supposed to be used to help focus and constrain thinking, not to make opinions sound More Serious.

Sadly, I know a lot of people (mostly wanna-be-rich entrepreneurs, whose only skill seems to be the want to become rich) who buy into such psychology BS without second thought. Things like "cone of learning" or 7-38-55 rule, which sounds absurd if you think about it for more than a second.

(then there's another part of the equation, i.e. "journalists" and business consultants stumbling over a paper with some numbers and specific claims, who then throw out constrains, exaggerate the conclusions and make a run for it)

lutusp16• 12 years ago

It's cargo-cult science.

Yep. Some younger readers may not know what this refers to, so here's a quote from the original Feynman paper "Cargo Cult Science":

"I think the educational and psychological studies I mentioned are examples of what I would like to call cargo cult science. In the South Seas there is a cargo cult of people. During the war they saw airplanes land with lots of good materials, and they want the same thing to happen now. So they've arranged to imitate things like runways, to put fires along the sides of the runways, to make a wooden hut for a man to sit in, with two wooden pieces on his head like headphones and bars of bamboo sticking out like antennas — he's the controller — and they wait for the airplanes to land. They're doing everything right. The form is perfect. It looks exactly the way it looked before. But it doesn't work. No airplanes land. So I call these things cargo cult science, because they follow all the apparent precepts and forms of scientific investigation, but they're missing something essential, because the planes don't land."

Full text:

http://www.lhup.edu/~DSIMANEK/cargocul.htm

anbende5• 12 years ago

Alright, the 7-38-55 rule was created in the 1960s and is not given any credit by modern psychologists. Studies since have shown that while tone of voice and body language convey a lot of meaning and in many cases more meaning than the semantic meaning of words, the ratio itself is an artifact of the artificiality of the setting in the original experiments.

The cone of learning was created in the early part of this century by a scholar of education (not a psychologist) and was never tested psychologically.

Are you really going to criticize a whole field by cherry-picking junk scientific claims made 50-100 years ago in some cases by non-psychologists?

Mvandenbergh• 12 years ago

It was a writer of popular entertainment who reduced a huge amount of research on expert performance to "it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert", that's then been further reduced by the filter of popular culture until all the caveats about deliberate practice and minimum talent levels have been stripped out.

Psychologists absolutely try to offer explanations and craft testable theories, whether the nature of their work makes it quite as amenable to the methods of the hard sciences is of course a legitimate question.

lutusp16• 12 years ago

Psychologists absolutely try to offer explanations and craft testable theories ...

This is absolutely false, contradicted by the history of psychology. In fact, the reason the DSM has been abandoned is specifically because it contains only descriptions (symptoms), no theories (explanations). Here's how the chairman of the NIMH explains his recent decision to refuse to accept the DSM as the basis for scientific research proposals:

http://www.nimh.nih.gov/about/director/2013/transforming-dia...

This doesn't mean psychologists are abandoning the DSM. Why should they? After all, they're still handing out Asperger Syndrome diagnoses, a year after this bogus condition was dropped from the DSM by their peers. This kind of guidance from the top, based on evidence or the lack of it, just doesn't matter in psychology, compared to what's popular with the clients.

If a theoretical basis was required for a given practice, as you suggest, of course things would be different -- clinical practice would have to await the discovery of an established cause for any treated condition. But that is never true in psychology.

anbende5• 12 years ago

Wow. That's a rather bold claim to levy against an entire field without any evidence to back it up.

The 10,000 rule was created by Malcom Gladwell a writer who has received wide criticism within psychology for making claims that go far beyond the empirical evidence. The linked article talks specifically about how the 10,000-rule was mis-attributed to a current psychologist's theory.

While it's true that there are a lot of psychologists out there who are not doing good science, it's quite unfair to say that psychology doesn't "offer explanations" or "craft testable theories". Much of the work done in psychology is quite rigorous. Remember, cognitive psychology (brain imaging and reaction time data) and neuropsychology (brain imaging, rat and primate studies) are psychology too, and even personality and social psychology can be done with rigor and an eye toward the limits of what can be claimed based on the evidence collected.

I know that psychology has been getting hammered in the popular press lately, but like most of what comes out of the popular press, the real situation is much more nuanced than what they report.

lutusp16• 12 years ago

That's a rather bold claim to levy against an entire field without any evidence to back it up.

As to evidence, it's copious. The NIMH has recently abandoned the DSM as a basis for scientific research proposals for the simple reasons that it has no scientific content. Also, you need to understand that psychologists have the burden of evidence to produce positive evidence of robust scientific theories backed by empirical observations, not on their critics to prove a negative, which is what you're proposing. Proving a negative is an impossible burden (example: try disproving the existence of Bigfoot), and here it's misplaced in any case.

While it's true that there are a lot of psychologists out there who are not doing good science, it's quite unfair to say that psychology doesn't "offer explanations" or "craft testable theories".

That's a simple fact, it's hardly controversial. Count the number of explanations (theories) offered by psychologists over the years that were empirical and testable, and that survived the subsequent tests -- or, for that matter, that were conclusively falsified using empirical evidence. There aren't any.

Remember, cognitive psychology (brain imaging and reaction time data) and neuropsychology ...

"Neuropsychology" is a desperate attempt to conflate mind studies and brain studies. Psychology's subject is the mind. Neuroscience's subject is the brain and nervous system. There's no common ground. Many psychologists are calling themselves neuropsychologists now, aware that mind studies have been discredited on the basis that it's impossible to empirically study something that has no empirical existence, and that science requires empirical observations.

To those who say that the mind is a manifestation of the brain's activity, that's an interesting philosophical position, but it can't be verified (or refuted) empirically, because the mind is not an empirical entity. This means all this talk about the life of the mind is philosophy, not science. It's certainly too soon to be offering mind treatments and claiming it as science, without any empirical evidence. This is how and why recovered memory therapy went off the rails -- there was no empirical basis to falsify any claim, which meant that any claim could be -- and was -- made:

http://arachnoid.com/trouble_with_psychology/

sirwitti2• 12 years ago

I just returned from a jazz workshop where we talked a lot about practising. The drum teacher said that it's not necessarily the amount of hours you put into it, but also the frequency and how focussed you work on it.

ivanche• 12 years ago

I remember reading once that best musicians actually worked less than the average ones. But, the difference was that the best had 2 highly focused 1.5-2hrs practice sessions per day (deliberate practice) and rest for the remaining of the day, while average had several shorter practice sessions throughout the day.

mkl• 12 years ago

There's a really interesting episode of the You Are Not So Smart podcast that delves into this in some depth, particularly relating to sports, where the idea has really taken off, and where there is good evidence the specialisation it encourages actively harms performance: http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-podcast-030-how...

agumonkey• 12 years ago

Nice talk, I wish to see more advanced idea on the same topic.

onion2k• 12 years ago

The latest episode of the awesome You Are Not So Smart podcast is all about exceptions to the 10,000 hour rule;

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-podcast-030-how...

yungchin4• 12 years ago

Does this really contradict that 10000-hour rule? (Well, apart from the fact that 10000 hours may well be an arbitrary number, and not as magical as Gladwell made it out to be)

From what I remember from reading Outliers, the claim about the 10000 hours was formulated more precisely than is posed here: it only said that above a certain level of innate talent (IIRC the particular level wasn't made a big deal of), differences in talent were less significant than differences in practice hours.

That's a much weaker claim, but a more credible one: if you're already blessed with eg a high IQ, then it pays off to work hard on your homework, and you can overtake the super-brilliant slacker in your class. But if you didn't have a very high IQ to begin with, the rule doesn't promise you anything.

The data in the article just says there's a lot of other stuff that determines the variance in performance - probably that includes "talent". It doesn't try to find if such a "talent threshold" above which talent is less important exists.

lutusp16• 12 years ago

Does this really contradict that 10000-hour rule?

No, it contradicts the premise that there could be such a number with the meaning attached to it. It's not about the value the number has, the issue is the number itself -- the idea that the thing under discussion could be assigned a specific value.

But the deeper problem is that it assigns a quantity to something no one understands well enough to quantify. Scientists avoid attaching a number to something until there's an explanation, a theory, that makes the number both compelling and testable (i.e. falsifiable).

pbhjpbhj2• 12 years ago

Scientists avoid attaching a number to something until there's an explanation, a theory, that makes the number both compelling and testable (i.e. falsifiable). //

Hubble seemingly ignored the outliers and drew a straight line through his data to create his eponymous "constant". Making a mark to work from isn't really unscientific it's just loose hypothesising - http://www.pnas.org/content/15/3/168.full.pdf+html.

Surely the fact that this meta-analysis has falsified the former claim [hypothesis] shows that it was scientific [at least under a Popperian formulation].

Brashman2• 12 years ago

I thought that the original study was just showing a correlation. That is, that experts typically had 10,000 hours of practice into their field of expertise. People have claimed causation since then (i.e., 10,000 hours guarantees expertise). The weaker claim that 10,000 hours of practice is necessary (but not sufficient) in order to become an expert seems reasonable to me.

yungchin4• 12 years ago

Thanks, yes, that's the other important point: you can't turn it around and expect a guarantee of success. I believe the original study didn't even claim any magical threshold of hours either - Gladwell probably just introduced that as a literary device: "10000 hours", and the added suggestion of some mystical threshold, make for much better storytelling than "oh you know, on the order of tens of thousands of hours" :)

And then if you add the other caveat too, it becomes too underwhelming to make for inspiring bedtime reading: "on the order of tens of thousands of hours, provided that you were quite great to begin with"!

wellboy• 12 years ago

The article states that only 12% of success is determined by practice, thus the hypothesis of it taking 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill is false.

Somehow that doesn't make any sense. >D

The author should maybe have read up more on the 10,000 hour rule, because the rule means that if someone is extremely talented in a certain skill already, it still takes them 10,000 hours to master that skill, such as Beethoven, Gates etc.

everettForth• 12 years ago

This is the only person I know who is testing it empirically: http://thedanplan.com/

yungchin4• 12 years ago

Not sure if that's a properly thought through n=1 study :)

minikites• 12 years ago

Turns out, Malcolm Gladwell is wrong about pretty much everything he writes about.

bshimmin• 12 years ago

I wonder how many hours he's spent practising, too!

cge2• 12 years ago

I'd speculate that the 10,000 hour rule is a product of an American obsession with the idea of hard work being the most important factor in success, with the idea that everyone's abilities are reasonably equal, and determination and diligence is what differentiates them. This satisfies a certain sense of fairness and justice in life. I also think it's just not true, more the product of wishful thinking than any evidence.

People have differing levels of talent in different areas, and this does have significant effects on success and ability. There are "super-brilliant slackers," and there are very hard working failures. Talent, too, does not necessarily correspond with interest and enjoyment. None of this is fair, but life is not inherently fair.

The important thing here, more than practice, is figuring out what one is good at doing, and what one enjoys doing, and coming up with things that are in both sets.

qwerta2• 12 years ago

10K hours is about 3 years of training.

swimfar• 12 years ago

That would be 9 hours per day, every single day of those three years. How many people have even had just one day where they spent nine hours on the same thing? That's not including breaks, and periods where you mind wanders or you're not focused.

durzagott• 12 years ago

More realistically: it's about 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, for 10 years.

jedc• 12 years ago

Anyone remember "The Dan Plan"? http://thedanplan.com/a-summary-of-the-dan-plan/

A guy (30-year-old photographer) who never really played golf before is trying to reach the PGA Tour through 10k hours and deliberate practice. (ie, Not just mindlessly spending time on the driving/putting range).

In the last four years he's practiced about 5500 hours and gone to a handicap of 3.3.

seunosewa• 12 years ago

Is his handicap of 3.3 impressive or disappointing?

jaimebuelta• 12 years ago

A few weeks ago, the You Are Not So Smart podcast talked about this. I really recommend it to anyone interested in this 10K hour thing

http://youarenotsosmart.com/2014/08/14/yanss-podcast-030-how...

avz• 12 years ago

I'm skeptical about a specific number of 10,000 hours claimed to be valid across multitude of skills and domains, but I think the spirit of the rule makes a lot of sense.

I think the value of innate talents compared to training and exercise is highly overstated given that almost all skills (hunting and archery possibly being exceptions) are so new in evolutionary time scale that there could not possibly have been any selection for them and so they must lack any specific support in our hardware.

Somehow, nobody doubts the importance of exercise in physical fitness. Not sure why mental fitness should be different.

yungchin4• 12 years ago

    ... given that almost all skills (hunting and archery 
    possibly being exceptions) are so new in evolutionary  
    time scale that there could not possibly have been any 
    selection for them ...

Couldn't you turn that evolutionary argument around, and say that exactly because there hasn't been any selection until recently, you'd expect a larger population variance in those innate talents?

skywhopper• 12 years ago

IIRC, the 10,000 hour rule is for becoming "expert" at a skill, not for becoming an Outlier, or for gaining "success". Those "best musicians" with an average of 10,000 hours by age 20 are, by any reasonable definition, experts at their craft.

lostcolony• 12 years ago

But not those chumps who only have 9999 hours! They're not experts ~yet~!

Even if you redefine it not as 'mastery' but as 'expert(ise)', it's still absurd.

analog313• 12 years ago

I propose a new study: The half-life of the 10000 hour rule, i.e., how many years before belief in the 10000 rule among the general population (or among certain specialized populations) is reduced to half of its present level.

huangc10• 12 years ago

Sure it might not be real. I believe, though, if you spend 10,000 hrs on something, you'll have a higher chance of being better than someone who has only spent 1000 hrs on that thing. Is this not a correct assumption or belief?

Broken_Hippo• 12 years ago

I think such things depend on what exactly you are practicing. Chances are if you deliberately practice a language that long, you'll likely be overly fluent. That said, if your body is such that you cannot physically pronounce that 'r' correctly, you'll never speak without some sort of lisp or accent. Art and music are just as much luck as they are talent: Talent can very easily overtake practice. People that practice art learn techniques, but after some time, tend to become very good at emulating. Some people just get art, though, and intuitively know where to place things, where to shadow, what marks to leave out. When the talented practice, they create and manipulate and take whatever they've learned and they become more awesome. Alternatively, formal and deliberate practice in art actually kills some natural talent with overt rules. I've seen all things. Who actually makes it and is regarded as an expert by society? Whoever gets lucky. Music is similar: Some practice and become experts in a symphony, some practice and create symphonies, and others yet, regardless of practice, still struggle to keep on beat.

In any case, though, I do think any person spending so many deliberate (or even not so deliberate) hours on one subject winds up with a pretty amazing knowledge base and probably knowledge of quite a few branches of knowledge. Even if the original goal wasn't actually mastered, still worth it for knowledge.

jimbokun• 12 years ago

"So greatness is within virtually any person's grasp, so long as they can put in the time to master their skill of choice."

Gladwell did not say that. It is an over simplification of his argument. He concedes innate talent plays a role.

"For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago. The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent? The obvious answer is yes. Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do—the innately talented ones."

http://hardsci.wordpress.com/2014/03/25/what-did-malcolm-gla...

Padding• 12 years ago

So it's necessary but not sufficent? Or neither necessary nor sufficent?

lazyant• 12 years ago

For anyone interested in the innate talent vs practice in sports I recommend the book 'The Sports Gene' (spoiler: genes play a huge role).

xname• 12 years ago

This is silly attack.

The 10,000 Hour Rule says you need 10,000 Hour practice to master a field. It does not say 10,000 Hour practice is the only/most important factor in performance. It has nothing to do with explanation of variances in performance. It does not say 10,000 Hour practice will guarantee your success. It does not say gene is irrelevant to learning. It only says, as a normal person (not genius, not mentally disabled), you need 10,000 Hour practice to master a field.

Straw-man attack.

The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real

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