What Is The 10,000-Hour Rule?

What Is The 10,000-Hour Rule?

there's a really popular misconception about something really important to human development and that that's what led to range I mean I was at Sports Illustrated the 10,000 hours rule work was the most famous science in human development perhaps ever in terms of popular consumption and I said well I want to write about it and then I started reading the research and saying this is wrong it's the most popular finding in our field it's maybe the most popular skill acquisition human development research ever done and it is not right and so those you know these things kind of stick in my brain and I  have to do something about it 10,000 hours what is that for someone that's never heard about it before yeah and 

what people think about it probably depends where they have heard of it if they've heard of it but it's the idea and scientists call it the deliberate practice framework but it's this idea that the only route to True expertise is through 10,000 hours of so-called deliberate practice which is this effortful cognitively engaged like not just swatting balls at the driving range you're focusing on correcting errors kind of practice and that there is no such thing as Talent differences it's really just the manifestation uh of 10,000 hours of you know of differences in your amount of hours of delivered practice so you should start as early as possible and there's something underlying it this is a little nerdy but called the monotonic benefits assumption 

I know scientists not going to win any marketing competitions but that basically means that the idea that two people at the same level of performance will progress the same amount for the same unit of deliberate practice also false and it's one of the underlying premises of 10,000 hour rule yeah because I've always I've always heard that I mean it's become a bit of a colloquial phrase to say you've not put your 10,000 hours

in which means you've not put enough practice to become a master I I I mean I mean I was told that if you do 10,000 hours in anything you become a master in it that's the kind of narrative right well to take some chess research for example there's uh people have been tracked and it takes about 11,053 hours on average to reach International Master status in chess so that's one level down from Grandmas so first of all 10,000 hours in that case would be a little low

but some people made it in 3,000 hours because they learn a little bit more quickly other people were continuing to be tracked past 20,000 hours and they still hadn't made it so you can have 11,053 hours rule on the average doesn't actually tell you anything about the breadth of human skill development so why why is that so important for me to understand how does that liberate me from from wasting my time or aiming at the wrong thing well fit turns out to be

really important so people learn at different rates and different things so finding where you learn better is really important if you want to maximize your advantages and I think that goes back to one of the reasons why people need to try a bunch of different things CU

you're insight into yourself is really like limited by your roster of experiences right um and so you kind of need to figure out where you have comparative advantages but for a lot of people that's so-called skill stacking where instead of doing the one thing for

10,000 hours you get proficient at a number of things and overlap them in a way that makes you very unique and so I think this idea of just head down doing the same thing I mean we can should we go back all the way and talk about the research underlying the 10,000 hour Ru because that's where I first got onto this I wanted to so I was a walk-on

meaning I wasn't good enough to get recruited as an 800 meter runner in college and I ended up being part of a university record holding relay so I went from being uh you know a nobody to being quite good and so I was inclined

to believe this 10,000 hours like yeah just you know just my hard work and then when I started reading the research and

I'm looking through the original paper written in 1993 and the original paper was done on 30 violinists 30 violinists at a world-class Music Academy okay so let's let's start dissecting the the problems here the first problem was

what's called a restriction of range these people were already in a world-class Music Academy already highly pre-selected pre-selected for something again for the stat heads here that is correlated with your dependent variable which is skill that's a problem if you're trying to develop a general skill development framework that would be like to give an analogy if I did a study of what causes basketball skill and I used it as my subject's only centers in the NBA and I said well height has no effect on skill in the NBA because they're all 7 feet tall so I've squashed the variation in that variable so in in my first book actually did an analytics project where I took height among American male adults and height in the NBA as you might imagine there's a very high positive correlation between a height of an American male and 

their chance of scoring points in the NBA but if you restrict the range to only players already in the NBA the correlation turns negative because guards score more points than other positions mhm so if you didn't know that if you just did that study with only NBA players you would tell parents to have shorter children to have them score more points in the NBA so when you don't bring some sense of what's going on to your research and you rest strict range that way you can end up with the wrong message aside from that Gods score more points or less points they score more points and they're shorter ah okay right so if you if you don't look at the whole population and you just look at people

who are so highly pre-screened they're already at the top you can end up with these sort of backward advice the other issue that caught my eye when I first read the study was that there was they only reported the average

10,000 hours was the average number of hours of deliberate practice by the the 10 best violinists by the age of 20 and then there was a second group and a lower group and they said there was complete correspondence meaning nobody

who had practiced fewer hours was better than anyone who had practiced more hours but they only included the average so I couldn't tell that so I said oh I would like to know if that's true can I see the data to see if that's true and I so I contacted the you know Andre Ericson a wonderful guy who was the so father of the 10,000 hour rule although he hated that moniker actually and I said you know can I see the data or the measures of variance to know how much variation there was between individuals and he said well you know people were inconsistent on their repeated accounts of their practice so we don't think that's important 

I said well everyone has trouble with getting good data that doesn't mean they don't report the measure variance so after I started criticizing This research 20 years after the study came out they did a paper updating it with some of the actual data and you could see the original conclusion was wrong there was not complete correspondence

some people who had practiced less were better than some people who had practice more some people had gone way over 10,000 hours some people were way under and had done better there were all sorts of other factors that mattered right like I like to call it the 625,000 hoursof sleep study because the top tier group got a lot more sleep they were sleeping like 60 hours a week on average compared to lower groups and that was a a huge difference in the study how much they were sleeping so it could have just been sleep sleep or but there was just tremendous individual variation yeah so this idea of an average completely obscured the real story which was that there were actually people who were practicing less and doing better than

people who practiced more so there were all one problem after another I just said you know I'm getting Youth Sports pitches I'm getting investment pitches like citing the 10,000 hours rule it's not right and it's giving the wrong impression of how hum devel and this idea that you need to just Pi something and with it and that's sampling to try to figure out where you have your best shot is worthless and that's wrong and so I became kind of obsessed with getting after that I really want to become successful

in the things that I'm applying myself to in the season of my life so whether that's podcasting or starting businesses my business portfolio is quite varied of