Does the 10,000-hour rule work?

In 2008, journalist Malcolm Gladwell published his famous book, "Outliers," . Gladwell evaluated a rule of thumb establishedin a  study,  of the  growing skill of international cellists [Ericsson, K.A. et al. (1993). "The Role of Intentional Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance." Psychological Review 100(3): 363].  The heuristic observed by this study was the 10,000-hour rule. It states that to achieve an expert level in any discipline, you must devote ten thousand hours of practice in your chosen field. This view gained wide popularity,but often the problem analysis showed that the reality is more complicated!

First, in a study of cellists, it was indeed revealed that, globally, 10,000 hours of training was expected  to reach the international level. But, this value was merely the AVERAGE, one bracketed by great variabilty.! Someone owns more time for this, someone less. There was nothing magical about 10,000 hours.

Second. it takes significantly amounts of time and practice the top level in other fields. For example, playing the piano requires 20-25 thousand hours of meaningful training to win prestigious international competitions! And for mnemonic events (memorizing random long numbers, etc.), two-thousand hours are sufficient [Ericsson, K.A. and R. Pool (2016). Peak: Secrets of the New Science of Expertise. Boston, Houghton-Mifflin-Harcourt].

Indeed, the great pianist Martha Argerich started at the age of three, but she did not break into onto world stage until she was 24 when she won the International Chopin Piano Competition (image taken from www.merriammusic.com)

Third, many have taken the 10,000-hour rule as a promise that if you do something for a very long time, you will undoubtedly become an expert in your chosen field. But from Anders Eriksson's research, investigation of a completely different level and scale is required for such a conclusion. In the original 1993 article, it was revealed that the highest number of hours were found among cellists who reached the world-class level but those who only remained music students did not invest the same amount of time practicing.  

Fourth, Gladwell never figured out the difference between training and meaningful training. This is a big deal!  It is not just practice that is important, but practical training. These are specially designed workouts for skill development (usually under the guidance of an experienced teacher). In this case, you can play tennis with a friend in the evenings for an arbitrarily long time or play the piano, but for the rest of your life, you will not advance in true mastery. In particular, this applies to paid work in a wide area - if a programmer always uses the same set of libraries and algorithms in his career or a coach resorts to one template of training plans for her athletes, then their skills will remain at a constant level for years!

But what is meaningful training, and how can practical training be applied in everyday life, sports, and work? We will discuss thus in later posts.