The 10,000 Hour Rule for deliberate practice is wrong

http://www.slate.com/articles/health_and_science/science/2014/09/malcolm_gladwell_s_10_000_hour_rule_for_deliberate_practice_is_wrong_genes.single.html

by prostoalex • 12 years ago

57 62 12 years ago

slate.com

selmnoo5• 12 years ago

Oh my goodness this is the worst kind of bikeshedding imaginable. Mostly people who know of the 10,000 hours rule don't embody it as being the cold, hard, dry truth, everything is very complicated when you get really down and dirty. But for most practical purposes, you bet that deliberate practice over 10,000 hours, instantaneous feedback, and expert instruction will bring you to superb mastery for most skillsets. Of course, this is not the whole story, genes undeniably matter -- but the reason we should ignore that is we cannot control our genes. 10,000 hours rule is about us becoming really good at something, it's pointless in this context to be nitpicky about the details that don't help us. Please don't waste time muddying up 10,000 hour rule -- a lot of people are starting to believe in it, that's so great, I want it to remain this way.

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).

Oculus• 12 years ago

Thank you, I came here to express the same disappointment with the article. People who attempt to discredit the 10,000 hour rule need to realize it describes a mindset more then anything else.

kmkemp• 12 years ago

I don't think that's what the author was trying to say. The point of the 10,000 hours rule lies in it being the largest factor towards success... not in it being the only factor. This article doesn't misrepresent that position... instead, it tries to show that there are factors larger than practice for many skills. Given the entire body of evidence from Outliers and some of the studies mentioned in the article, though, I would come to the conclusion that the magnitude to which various factors matter differ by the skill being measured.

sayemm2• 12 years ago

Wow... that's very fascinating, thanks for that reference.

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.

spott• 12 years ago

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?

haberman11• 12 years ago

Your comment exasperates and frustrates me in much the same way as the original article does for you.

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.

tomsthumb2• 12 years ago

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?

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.

facepalm2• 12 years ago

What are the odds of a random child to become a chess prodigy? The thing about the Polgars is that they decided to raise chess prodigies before their kids were born. I think Polgar even advertised for a woman to carry out the experiment with him.

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).

selmnoo5• 12 years ago

10,000 hour rule is a rule of thumb, a saying, and a wonderfully fantastic one at that. It's stunningly simple, I think that's what makes it so compelling. It's basically the phrase "practice makes perfect" modernized. Of course it's not 100% true, but for most people it's excellent advice. The advice is basically "keep practicing, keep pushing yourself, seek good instruction, try to get feedback from people who know what they're doing".

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.

JeremyReimer2• 12 years ago

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?

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.

CocaKoala3• 12 years ago

the difference between what comes easily and what doesn't.

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.

ScottBurson2• 12 years ago

Knowing oneself is certainly important. The problem is, when a lot of people hear the word "talent", they think of it as something they couldn't possibly have any of. I think there is a place for encouraging them to stretch themselves anyway. Maybe that's how they will discover their talent.

tedks• 12 years ago

Deliberate practice is a very specific category of activities that doesn't include most of what people think of as "practice." If you are a developer, having an open source side project does not count as deliberate practice. Deliberate practice for software development would be more like doing the hardest Project Euler problems in very constrained environments.

-----

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.

-----

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.

Dewie• 12 years ago

Mostly people who know of the 10,000 hours rule don't embody it as being the cold, hard, dry truth,

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.

tzs• 12 years ago

Here is a longer, more detailed article on the Polgar experiment [1].

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...

flint2• 12 years ago

Well, learning what bikeshedding was made the click worth it. Thank you.

liquidise• 12 years ago

Hyperbolic submission title, as the article never references the 10,000 hour rule.

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.

tortoises• 12 years ago

The author does reference the 10,000 hour rule here...

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.

ld00d• 12 years ago

also, from the url: malcolm_gladwell_s_10_000_hour_rule_for_deliberate_practice_is_wrong_genes

gph• 12 years ago

I agree that the title is a bit hyperbolic and should be changed to the real article title.

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.

mga226• 12 years ago

If you scroll down, a fixed position bar slides down with the following "alternate title"(?):

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.

RickHull2• 12 years ago

I really wish people in general, and journalists specifically, had an appreciation for the difference between what is necessary and what is sufficient.

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.

astrodust• 12 years ago

Maybe the author is still a long ways off from 10,000 hours of writing.

trjordan• 12 years ago

Yes, 100%.

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.

warmfuzzykitten• 12 years ago

Actually, the article gave examples, e.g., "the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours," where 10k was not necessary.

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.

michas• 12 years ago

You also need to take into account QUALITY of practice. 10k hours won't do much good if you don't have really good teacher, if you are not challanged enough (e.g. by not having money/time/parent's support to join country-level or international junior competitions)

wuliwong2• 12 years ago

This is exactly what I commented, though much clearer and more succinct. :)

m_i_s_t2• 12 years ago

Err... no? "chess players differed greatly in the amount of deliberate practice they needed to reach a given skill level in chess. For example, the number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach “master” status (a very high level of skill) ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours." The article implies at several points that the rule is neither necessary nor sufficient.

RickHull2• 12 years ago

The article argues only against sufficiency. Only if you believe that the 10k hour rule is without exception -- that it's not a broad statement about what is necessary for mastery in a broad range of fields across a broad range of talent but instead a precise, ironclad threshold with no other determining factors -- does the article imply anything about the necessity of a certain number of hours.

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.

bluker• 12 years ago

A more accurate title: Genetics could play a part in mastering things...

StandardFuture• 12 years ago

The numbers behind the 10,000 hour rule are kind of funny. If you worked 2 hours EVERY day on doing something (e.g. practice an instrument) it would take you over 13 1/2 years to meet the 10,000 hour rule. But, the thing is (from someone who plays multiple instruments), if you were to TRULY practice EVERY day for 2 hours at piano you would gain tremendous mastery over the instrument in less than half that time (e.g. 5-6 years). So, in my opinion, 10,000 hours is actually excessive.

tomsthumb2• 12 years ago

The study with the maternal vs. paternal twins addresses this somewhat, but it still seems there is the unanswered question of whether or not "deliberate practice" means the same thing for everyone.

kazinator• 12 years ago

There is also the problem that not all 10,000 hour blocks of time are equal, because there are efficient ways to practice and there are inefficient ways.

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:

http://www.pianopractice.org/

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!

oAlbe• 12 years ago

Here is a TEDx talk right about this topic.

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.

pyoung• 12 years ago

Thanks for this, I think this a really good antidote for the misconceptions surrounding the 10,000 hour rule. Granted, this is still more 'pop science' than actual science/research. And I think calling him 'proficient' with the Uke, is a stretch, I think 'functional' is a better description.

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.

wuliwong2• 12 years ago

Pretending we have the same abilities perpetuates the myth that people can help themselves if they just try hard enough.

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.

flint2• 12 years ago

Duh. Clickbait.

lifeisstillgood• 12 years ago

I am trying to wrap my head round this debate.

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.

The 10,000 Hour Rule for deliberate practice is wrong

Related Stories