The actual rule is badly misinterpreted. It's not 10,000 hours of practice: it's 10,000 hours of practice at the appropriate level of difficulty -> You need to be taking on tasks that are just slightly beyond what you can do now for most of this time to achieve success. I also think genetics are not nearly as big a factor as the author makes out to be: there can be plenty of barriers that make it impossible for you to do something, but most of those barriers make it impossible to put 10,000 hours of practice in as well. There is also a self-fulfilling prophecy in the works here though: 10,000 hours is inevitable if you succeed at something, but most of those who don't succeed will drop the hours (searching for fallback careers, getting jobs, etc..) they dedicate to something along the way and are quite unlikely to reach the number.
This. It amazes me the number of people that think "I work 8 hours a day (on average), so I should be world class in about 3.4 years". As you said it is concentrated, skill-adjusted practice, NOT just doing something over and over. The biggest problem is that you generally need an expert coach/mentor to put this work together for you, since you likely would not be a good judge of what would appropriately challenge you at your current skill level. Most people swing to the tails of the distribution in their self-made challenges, either too easy or too hard, you want the Goldilocks zone. I unfortunately have no wisdom for or solution to this problem, it is one of scale (i.e. there are more people that want said expert mentorship than there are expert mentors to give it) and time.
> And that was it. I could do that much — but that was all. I was hopeless. My brain simply doesn’t work in a way that allows me to write code.
Did he really try for 10k hours? I bet he would have gotten a bit further.
This article really bothers me in its defeatism. It doesn't do talented people "a disservice" to say that anyone can become an expert with 10k hours of practice. No one will be offended by praising their hard work, and no one is best served by believing that their talent is god-given and they are naturally better than everyone else. Outside of certain high-profile athletics there simply isn't enough competition to declare oneself abnormally talented in any endeavor.
The talent component of success can't be scientifically determined anyway. The concept of talent itself is amorphous, there is no falsifiable hypothesis to be formulated. It's not that talent doesn't exist or that hard work is infallible, it's just that a belief in hard work will always result in better outcomes for the believer.
This was the part that really turned me off as well. I rember when I started learning to speak Russian, I would think, "Man, my brain just doesn't work like that." And I was right - part of learning a language is requiring your brain to think in a new way. That's the reason it's so hard.
But now when I sit down and start reading Tolstoy it makes complete sense. All that changed was me learning something, and thereby my natural proclivity adapted. I'm sensing the same thing as I learn to program. The initial learning curve is very steep.
Not to say that some aren't naturally more gifted than others, but you can usually make up for that, at least partially, with some extra effort. I guess it depends in what level you're looking at.
Not everyone who plays basketball for 10,000 hours will be Michael Jordan. But they will be a good player.
I really respect Temple Grandin so I hope that this article's almost nonsensical content is due to it being an excerpt from a book.
First, it conflates being successful with being an expert. I can be successful at something without being an expert. I can also be an expert and die penniless and unknown.
"My brain simply doesn’t work in a way that allows me to write code." There may be some disability that causes this but to counter an anecdote with another one, I think we all know people on the autism spectrum who are excellent programmers. And the fact that a particular person's disability prevents them from doing something says nothing about the rest of the population.
These types of articles really bother me because it's a well-known name, in a big "forward thinking" magazine, basically saying if you believe yourself to be "naturally ungifted" it's okay not to try. You have reasons. As someone constantly on the lookout for new things to learn and a brain on the autism spectrum, I can't abide that.
Using Bill Gates as the definition of expert is crazy. He is the "best". The top. Sample size of 1. That doesn't mean that there are not experts. Maybe not as successful and rich but they are expert. One a similar note, using your own personal experience as an anecdote to represent the entire population is also crazy. Once again sample size of one.
The 10,000 hours rule isn't someone's fantasy, it's based on an increasingly large body of evidence, but this article just dismisses the evidence with a wave of the hand and some assertions. A good selection of research is in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Other people here have mentioned also that it's a specific kind of practice that's called for, not just mindlessly amassing hours, but rather relentlessly working on your weak spots and on skills that are just a bit outside what you can currently do.
The Grandin book looks interesting, but this excerpt just seems lazy.
There is also the recent research on grit by Angela Duckworth who is demonstrating that success depends on perseverance.
That observation probably seems pretty intuitive, but she's demonstrating it with research. The "I was hopeless" reaction to something hard is just a failure of grit. The author has no idea how they would do if the ground it out through the really tough parts.
I also find that when I talk to people about this they are often very resistant to this model of essentially talent-free skill development. It makes a lot people uncomfortable, and just seems wrong to them. I think maybe the notion that it's all innate talent absolves them of the need to work hard to develop advanced skill. Instead nature capriciously doles out talent and that's the story of why I'm not ...
I don't think it dismisses the evidence - it agrees with the idea that 10,000 hours might be required. It just states that it takes 10,000 hours for a talented person to become good at a field - that a person untalented in a field won't necessarily become a true expert given enough practise.
To me this seems intuitively obvious - people's brains aren't built alike, and if we're willing to accept that brains at the fringes (e.g. aspergers) are more attuned to certain tasks, it's not too out there to suggest variance within the 'normal' parameters too. Of course, proving it would require a complex test - one that (somehow) sorts people into attuned or unattuned on a given subject to begin with, and then makes them work for 10,000 hours on the subject.
Realistically, though, I suppose this question just isn't all that interesting. A lot of the time, the important part of the 'nature' component is simply what you're interested in. If you happen to have an interest in a subject, you're vastly more likely to put in the 10,000 hours. I'm a good computer programmer because I enjoyed and was good at it from the beginning, so I spent more time at it. I'm a terrible dancer because I spent maybe a hundred hours on it, sucked, and lost interest. Maybe if I'd spent a hundred times longer doing it I'd be a world beater, maybe not - but it doesn't matter, because my initial experience was enough to put me off. I imagine someone for whom it clicked more naturally would be vastly more likely to stay interested.
I completely agree that natural talent is a huge part of the equation. The best example for me is sight reading on the piano. (For non musicians: "sight reading" is the skill of being able to play from music you've never seen before).
I am a musician (singer, mostly) and when it comes to sight reading as a singer I would estimate that I'm in the 95th percentile or so. But I've tinkered with the piano recreationally for basically my whole life, at times more seriously than others, and yet I still cannot sight read on the piano for my life. There's just too much information for my brain to process in real-time. I've played some pretty difficult music on the organ, but I have to basically memorize the piece to get to that level.
I strongly believe that no amount of time at the piano will make me a good sight reader. I believe I could get marginally better, but I will never reach the level of even an average pianist.
Now one could be tempted to say: "you've spent far more time sight reading as a singer, which explains why you're better at it." And while this is somewhat true, it gets the causation backwards. It was obvious to me from a very early age that I was better at sight reading as a singer, so I spent more time doing it.
I sometimes wonder if this is where the 10,000 hour rule comes from: no one could stand spending 10,000 hours doing something they truly suck at. But on the other hand, I know plenty of amateur musicians who love what they do and have spent their entire lives making music, but will never reach a professional level (which is totally fine, but contradicts the 10,000 hour thesis).
I know plenty of amateur musicians who love what they do and have spent their entire lives making music, but will never reach a professional level
I was thinking about that the other day as well and I believe it has something to do with some form of goal oriented activity behavior. Or at least a distinct process of continuously "rising the barrier". Otherwise it becomes like saying "we are walking every day so why don't we end up all being marathon runners when we turn 40".
In my view it takes a certain kind of competitive mindset that combines being dissatisfied with ones own skill set and having an intrinsic motivation to become better, adjusting the skillset to the top performers in the field and at the same time portraying to the outside a level of confidence in the skill, in order to reach the true heights of a pro.
> no one could stand spending 10,000 hours doing something they truly suck at.
I think that's an important notion people tend to overlook. Doing something you are naturally good at is enjoyable, and doing things you're naturally bad at, is not.
This is less apparent when you're just having fun, like singing karaoke with friends, playing guitar at campfire, playing sports recreationally, etc.
But when you set a conscious goal of being better than most other people, and notice that after hours/days/weeks of deliberate practice, you are still not as good as the more talented people with little practice, it becomes pretty hard to maintain motivation and optimism.
In music theory class years ago, we asked our professor how he was able to sight-read on the piano so easily. His explanation was that the music consists of lots of reused patterns and ideas, and once he mastered those patterns, he could recognize them in the score and it became much easier to play the piece without rehearsing it first.
You have to start with really simple things. When you can sight read a grade 1 piano book, move on to grade 2. Doing written theory homework also helps, because it forces you to think about all the little details and it means your fluency goes up. I really don't believe this is about talent, it's just difficult in the same way that learning to read English is difficult. Also stopping and starting is a no-no, and recording yourself and analyzing where you slipped up helps too. Really, if you want to do it, I'm sure it can be done, but you probably need a better approach.
"And while this is somewhat true, it gets the causation backwards. It was obvious to me from a very early age that I was better at sight reading as a singer, so I spent more time doing it."
This is self-refuting really. You admit that you spend a lot more time on one skill and then report that you are better at that skill and are hopeless at the one you tinkered with.
K Anders Ericsson, who is one of the sources of the research on this speculates somewhere (I can't recall of the top of my head where), that there are very likely extremely small marginal differences in initial aptitude, but that these alone are enough to garner praise and tiny edges in performance that are self-rewarding to the practitioner and that these advantages make them more likely to continue with the work required to get better. That's not natural talent, if it's true, that's just a minuscule advantage that may help foster interest and practice and lead to better skill.
agreed. i'm the same way. while i can sightread slowly, it hasn't improved much despite 25 years of trying. my ear on the hand has gotten to the point that i can listen to something once or twice & sound it out quickly with with 95%+ accuracy. basically my brain was 'pre-wired' for processing one type of information efficiently and another, not so much.
there was an episode of startrek TNG where on this planet they'd analyze kids' dna and figure out what particular talents they had & they'd put extra emphasis on developing those. i'm sure we're heading towards such a future and it has interesting ethical implications. i also wonder how many mozarts are regularly born to plumbers and never get a chance to reach their potential.
I actually just the opposite of sight reading. I think it is a very learnable skill in my experience. Most people I know who study can actually get drastically better over the course of a couple of years.
Playing by ear, OTOH, is much more difficult.
Natural talent may help some. But I can't think of many skill related activities where 10,000 hours of deliberate practice won't make you an "expert". Maybe not the best in the world, but good enough that virtually any layperson would call you an expert.
I absolutely WAS there when it came to sight reading; able to play songs on the piano with a lot of practice, but not able to sight read, despite years of lessons and practice. It largely comes down to studying the songs before you play, looking for the key, patterns, and difficult parts, and keeping your eyes a measure or two ahead as you play
Not sure why articles never get around to mentioning this but you can find the original study and several other relevant ones collected in "The Psychology of Abilities, Competencies, and Expertise."
From that book I also highly recommend "The Early Progress of Able Young Musicians" which discusses the importance of a progression of increasingly competent teachers in successful musicians lives.
There's even a study there that talks directly to her point "Expertise and Mental Disabilities"
I think this is precisely right. There are many more folks who could be claimed experts, who have not become wealthy like Buffet, or Gates. I treat the 10000-hours/10year milestone as more of an indicator of when you should have sufficiently absorbed a great deal of the subject matter -- indeed it would be hard not to spend so much time and not become intimately familiar with the thing. Of course, those 10000 hours need to be spent practicing and learning, not just screwing around.
I think it's more that some people just aren't wired up that way.
I am great at coding and analytics, but naturally quite bad at music. I tried really hard and put in a tremendous amount of time learning music and I was us mediocre at it, no matter how much I loved it and how hard I tried.
a) bad teeny-movies
b) a demotivating school system
he believes that ha has to find his "secret" talent - and after he has found it - life will
I) be easy
II) suddenly make sense.
i try to explain to him that it (life) just does not work like this he should just do what he is interested in - even if it is hard (especially if it is hard). surprise, surprise he does not believe me.
for me the concept of "talent" is just thought-cancer, it might be valid in some edge cases but overall it's just harmfull (not only for teens).
"Thought cancer", perfect! I always wanted a term like this to describe it. Definitely agree, even if there's such thing as raw natural ability, I dont think the lack of it is among the major reasons people fail. Succes is like a fire, there's no "rule", it can result from several different things and it's very complex. Trying to oversimplify it like the author does can only do harm.
He is not too far out. Figuring out your "secret" talent(s) does not make life easier, but it definitely makes easier (and fun) doing the thing you are talented at.
The key, in my opinion, is to figure out how to make money off your talent(s).
By putting such an emphasis on practice, practice, practice at the expense of natural gifts, the popular interpretation of the 10,000-hour rule does a tremendous disservice to the naturally gifted.
Cry me a river. How are "naturally gifted" persons disserved by thorough research on human performance?
This article seems to illustrate the adage that "the adjective is the enemy of the noun," because not once in this excerpt from a longer book is the word "deliberate" used, and yet K. Anders Ericsson (an eminent researcher on the development of expertise)
has long taken care to put the adjective "deliberate" in front of the word "practice" as he writes about how expertise develops. (The article kindly submitted here correctly says, "New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell didn’t invent the rule, but he did popularize it through his best-selling book Outliers.") The 10,000-hour rule, originally formulated as a ten-year rule in studies of musicology a few decades ago, has mostly been researched by Ericsson and other researchers influenced by Ericsson's publications. Ericsson carefully distinguishes "deliberate practice," which ordinarily requires a coach who can monitor the learner's performance, from "playful engagement," which doesn't focus the learner's attention on improved performance in the same way. Many critics of Ericsson's work seem to miss this distinction.
I wonder, as an observer of young people learning programming, how much a dumb computer's literal interpretation of programs input into the computer provides relentless deliberate practice in better programming, even for people who are mostly messing around playfully. Perhaps in learning programming, the inanimate computer can serve as a coach for many learners. I would NOT expect someone devoting 10,000 hours to writing essays for fun, if the essays are never read by any critical readers, to improve as much as a writer as someone devoting 10,000 hours to writing programs (if the learner of programmer pays attention to whether the programs compile and run) would improve as a programmer. People who engage in deliberate practice to improve sports performance routinely have coaches, and also participate routinely in competitions that put their assimilation of the sports skills to the test.
In general, a lot of people misread the tenor of Ericsson's research, which is the subject of an interesting new book, The Complexity of Greatness, edited by Scott Barry Kaufman.
Ericsson is sure that raw talent (whatever that is) alone is NOT sufficient to be an "expert," properly so called, but rather has research-based reasons to believe that deliberate practice is strictly necessary for expert performance in all domains. He thinks it is an open question whether or not something like preexisting talent is even necessary for expertise, or whether sustained deliberate practice by itself might be sufficient to make into an expert someone who initially appeared not to have "talent" for a particular domain. That is an ongoing program of research, as Ericsson's publications
"Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
"Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.
"I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."
I agree with the first half of your comment - the "deliberate" in "deliberate practice" is definitely necessary to understand what the 10,000 hour rule means.
However, I think you take it too far at the end. To say that the nature half of nurture+nature is unnecessary goes against a significant amount of research. In sports, this becomes pretty clear. What are the odds that short people never work hard enough to become good swimmers, for example? It seems drastically more likely that nature has an enormous impact. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is necessary, but by no means sufficient, for success at most sports.
It is less obvious in other domains, but there is still research to the effect that some people simply aren't wired for certain things, just like short people are can't swim at world-class levels. In HN's favorite domain, programming, there is reason to believe that some people simply can't think in the right way. Here's a reasonable article on the subject: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/is-it-....
PG's lazy rule sounds good, but only in the absence of opposing evidence. It behaves like Occam's razor - it leads in the right direction, but don't take it for truth.
On the one hand there is no substitute for hard work. On the other hand some people don't have to work as hard as others to to reach the same level in a given domain.
So the upshot is you can use this as an excuse or a motivator. If you're an optimist you look at those two sentences and go "Cool!! I can do anything I decide I want to as long as I put in the requisite effort." If you're a pessimist you look at them and say. "I'm going to have to work harder than other people if I want to some things"
And if you're a realist you look at them and go "So, how much effort do I need to put in to reach my any of my goals?" and start prioritizing.
The thing is, one of the best ways to achieve deliberate practice is to thoroughly enjoy what you are doing. Yes, you can force your way through it otherwise, but most people will give up if they don't have a passion for the subject (whether it is playing a music instrument, learning wood carving, or computer programming and math). So personally, I don't think anyone has as much of a natural gift for anything, but more of a highly tuned feedback / reward mechanism in their brain that promotes deliberate practice methods. Unless you want to refer to that extreme enjoyment of a subject matter (and the process of becoming expert) the actual "gift".
Great article. To the extent this references Malcolm Gladwell, isn't 10,000 hours from "Outliers"? If so, the message was nature + nurture + LUCK.
For instance to be a great NHL hockey player, you should have a birthday in Jan or Feb. Because youth hockey leagues group you by age. And when you're the biggest and most coordinated in your group ....
Likewise Gates' situation in high school was extraordinary, and exceptional parents.
So, (1) yeah the 10,000 hours, and (2) yes the genetics/wiring, and also (3) the luck. At least to be a true "outlier". One can be an "expert", and very successful and fulfilled, without being a Bill Gates or Wayne Gretzky.
Ten thousand hours of practice will make you a hell of a lot better at something, no matter what your natural gifts are. I suspect that in most cases, ten thousand hours of practice will make you far better than the group of naturally talented people who haven't put in the work.
Given that, I have a real hard time caring about the nature vs. nurture argument - it's only relevant if you're in one of those narrow fields where only the top 0.01% of people can be successful and happy, and that certainly doesn't include programming or entrepreneurship or any of the other stuff we usually talk about around here.
This is exactly how I feel. It is pointless to worry about the relative degree of nature vs nurture when it's beyond doubt that if you work hard at getting better at something, you will become quite proficient. You may not become a world leader, but really, who cares.
Nobody knows how to identify "talent" other than in retrospect. We say people are talented when they produce results, and then we select little anecdotes about their story to allude that it was destiny.
We can't settle this debate because we just don't know enough about how the mind works and how genetics play a role.
My question is, what's the actionable piece of advice? If you try programming and don't get it, you'll never be a good programmer? At what point do you give up and say that you just aren't talented enough?
It seems to me that the only people asking the nature vs. nurture questions are the ones that want an excuse to give up.
Any word on the testing the 10,000 hours theory by learning golf? (Knew & cared nothing for golf, goal is expert player after 10,000 hours practice, last I heard was well on his way.)
Its sorta obvious this article won't go down well with the HN crowd. This is a site where everybody either believes they can code, or learn to code in a week, or teach somebody else to code via codecademy or what-have-you.
fwiw, I strongly agree with the article. Natural talent & inclination triumphs practice everytime, and while that doesn't mean you shouldn't practice, it does mean that you'd be better off pursuing avenues more closely aligned to your natural talent. Here's how you can convince yourself of the same - lets say you are the typical HN reader - lots of programming experience in one or more languages. How soon can you become an expert in oh I don't know BRST cohomology ? My advisor has a PhD in that, & he can't program his way out of a paper bag. Its easy for me to laugh at him & say, hey he should just try Ruby or JS for a week, but hey, how do I just try BRST cohomology for a week ? Where do I begin ?
Core thesis: 'No...Malcolm Gladwell is wrong. You can't be me. Why? Because I'm cool. Yes, that's right. I'm cool, like Warren Buffet."
This article is a phenomenal example of an intelligent and successful person lacking any rational and logical basis for their core thesis.
There are countless individuals who have become experts in their respective field, yet lack any formal training in logic, argumentation or critical thinking. They naturally believe that because people listen to them in a particular field, their skills of reasoning and grasp of logic must be superior. Often they tend to equally believe that their 'gifts' are 'in-born' because they don't ever remember feeling any different; they have been intelligent their entire life.
There are so many logical fumbles in this short piece, whether it be an excerpt or not, that it could be used as an philosophical exercise in pointing out faulty lines of reasoning. Example => So, how does Warren Buffet disprove the 10,000 hour rule? Author's response: "Because he was involved in business affairs from a young age." I assume that her line of reasoning is as follows: 'Warren was incredibly young when he had successfully started his first business. At that age he could not have possibly invested 10,000 hours in the study of business. Thus, he must have been born with business talent.'
Interestingly enough, Warren Buffet's case may be worth looking into in order to better refine the 10,000 hour rule. That being said, the above line of reasoning is hugely problematic. Nowhere is Warren Buffet's 'expertise' at a young age commented upon or evidence given in support of it. The 10,000 hour rule says that you will become an expert with 10,000 hours of deliberate practice/training at ever increasing levels of complexity. The rule does not come to say that you can't be successful without 10,000 hours of practice. (Look at Mark Zuckerber!) The author has both misunderstood and misapplied the correlation between these concepts and what could be meant by the word 'success'. Beyond a couple of other problems, the second major issue is that invalidating one proposition does not inherently validate an opposing proposition. Thus, just because the 10,000 hour rule may be invalidated by Warren Buffet's experience, we cannot make the logical leap to declare that he, therefore, has in-born/genetic attributes that we would consider 'talent'. These are 2 entirely separate arguments that may be related but are not directly tied to one another. I could go on and on with the problems in this article.
The short of it: Paul Graham was being overly optimistic in thinking that writing helps everyone form better arguments and think more carefully. Somebody should introduce Temple Grandin to a philosophy class on critical thinking and basic reasoning.
Its relieving to think "oh I cant do this or that because my brain is just not designed for it." It frees you to be able to give up and not feel any guilt...
It is more enlightened however to understand that if you have enough desire to be something, you can truly become as great as you want to be at any field in this world...
Its wise to be able to admit that you're not great at x, because you don't have enough motivation or desire to put in the work required to master it.
In my first year at university, my brain was exactly like yours. My brain simply didn't work in a way that allows me to write code.
In December 2012 when I wanted to start a tech company and realised I needed to be able to "build" myself...
... MY BRAIN CHANGED
suddenly it became the kind of brain that was able to code and make simple games in ruby and python?
Why? because in December, I acquired a DESIRE to learn code so I could build my company...
Article title doesn't fit. It's contents state that 10,000 hours MAY not make you an expert. Realistically though, no rule of thumb gives 100% coverage. That doesn't invalidate its accuracy for the majority of cases.
I am pretty sure Gladwell actually said the same thing, you need the 10k hours, but you need a definite measure of talent.
This I realize when I am teaching chess to younger kids, some kids just get it and some do not(just like Ostap Bender said in his famous lecture) The ones who do not get it, they can probably become expert players if they got the resources provided by Polgars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r), but that would be the upper limit.
So I am starting to lean towards the fact that all three Polgar sisters were gifted to some extent.
There needs to be a wider experiment to apply the 10k rule, like maybe 50 kids having the ultimate chess (or math or violin or something else) resource and actually putting in 10k hours of deliberate practice (rememember most kids in special schools do not finish the 10k hours as they simply gravitate to other pursuits, and of course that is natural).
Let's not get started on the 10k hour myth for older people. I am of firm belief that after age of 25 or so, even a gifted one will not be able to get by with 10k hours. At age 40 it is pretty much hopeless, decent expert is all you can hope for.
You can clearly see this "upper limit" on sports: talentless people work and train really hard to compete at elite level.
You can see them sweating, cringing and showing all kinds of emotion. Fans love these players, they identify them as another hard-working "blue collar" guy like them.
Then along comes a guy like Josh Hamilton, a guy so incredibly talented everything looks effortless. He seems to trot when he is running full blast, he seems to flip the bat but hits a homerun, looks like he just lobbed the baseball from the outfield but it's a perfect 90mph strike to a base getting the runner out.
A sport particularly brutal in this sense is Tennis: 10k hrs of practice might get you to the top 100, but from there everybody is so incredibly talented it's discouraging. You might spend 10k hours just perfecting your one-hand backhand, then, when you think you got it, along comes Sampras or Federer hitting it 10 times harder without flinching.
10,000 hours of supervised correct practice makes expert?
Nope.
10,000 hours of progressively more difficult supervised correct practice makes expert?
You got it!
Supervised doesn't mean having a teacher standing behind you watching your work. I think it does mean having some degree of feedback on what you are doing and how you are doing it.
In the case of coding that could mean having your code critiqued in open-source projects (either explicitly or as a side effect of the process).
Then there's the question of what "expert" means in a contextual practical sense. To use a personal example, I was not trained as a machinist. I trained in electronics and software. Yet, I had a need to manufacture parts using various CNC machines, so I learned. Am I an expert? No way. I do, however know I can fabricate nearly any part and, more importantly, in the process developed a great understanding of design for manufacturability.
In my own context yes, I am an expert. This did not take 10,000 hours. If I had to guess I'd say less than 1,000 spread over a number of years with an intense focus during a period if approximately six months.
[+] [-] TimPC|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] ryanmolden|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] taeric|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dasil003|13 years ago|reply
Did he really try for 10k hours? I bet he would have gotten a bit further.
This article really bothers me in its defeatism. It doesn't do talented people "a disservice" to say that anyone can become an expert with 10k hours of practice. No one will be offended by praising their hard work, and no one is best served by believing that their talent is god-given and they are naturally better than everyone else. Outside of certain high-profile athletics there simply isn't enough competition to declare oneself abnormally talented in any endeavor.
The talent component of success can't be scientifically determined anyway. The concept of talent itself is amorphous, there is no falsifiable hypothesis to be formulated. It's not that talent doesn't exist or that hard work is infallible, it's just that a belief in hard work will always result in better outcomes for the believer.
[+] [-] austenallred|13 years ago|reply
But now when I sit down and start reading Tolstoy it makes complete sense. All that changed was me learning something, and thereby my natural proclivity adapted. I'm sensing the same thing as I learn to program. The initial learning curve is very steep.
Not to say that some aren't naturally more gifted than others, but you can usually make up for that, at least partially, with some extra effort. I guess it depends in what level you're looking at.
Not everyone who plays basketball for 10,000 hours will be Michael Jordan. But they will be a good player.
[+] [-] tptacek|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MattGrommes|13 years ago|reply
First, it conflates being successful with being an expert. I can be successful at something without being an expert. I can also be an expert and die penniless and unknown.
"My brain simply doesn’t work in a way that allows me to write code." There may be some disability that causes this but to counter an anecdote with another one, I think we all know people on the autism spectrum who are excellent programmers. And the fact that a particular person's disability prevents them from doing something says nothing about the rest of the population.
These types of articles really bother me because it's a well-known name, in a big "forward thinking" magazine, basically saying if you believe yourself to be "naturally ungifted" it's okay not to try. You have reasons. As someone constantly on the lookout for new things to learn and a brain on the autism spectrum, I can't abide that.
[+] [-] joshdance|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buzzcut|13 years ago|reply
The Grandin book looks interesting, but this excerpt just seems lazy.
There is also the recent research on grit by Angela Duckworth who is demonstrating that success depends on perseverance. That observation probably seems pretty intuitive, but she's demonstrating it with research. The "I was hopeless" reaction to something hard is just a failure of grit. The author has no idea how they would do if the ground it out through the really tough parts.
I also find that when I talk to people about this they are often very resistant to this model of essentially talent-free skill development. It makes a lot people uncomfortable, and just seems wrong to them. I think maybe the notion that it's all innate talent absolves them of the need to work hard to develop advanced skill. Instead nature capriciously doles out talent and that's the story of why I'm not ...
[+] [-] AlisdairO|13 years ago|reply
To me this seems intuitively obvious - people's brains aren't built alike, and if we're willing to accept that brains at the fringes (e.g. aspergers) are more attuned to certain tasks, it's not too out there to suggest variance within the 'normal' parameters too. Of course, proving it would require a complex test - one that (somehow) sorts people into attuned or unattuned on a given subject to begin with, and then makes them work for 10,000 hours on the subject.
Realistically, though, I suppose this question just isn't all that interesting. A lot of the time, the important part of the 'nature' component is simply what you're interested in. If you happen to have an interest in a subject, you're vastly more likely to put in the 10,000 hours. I'm a good computer programmer because I enjoyed and was good at it from the beginning, so I spent more time at it. I'm a terrible dancer because I spent maybe a hundred hours on it, sucked, and lost interest. Maybe if I'd spent a hundred times longer doing it I'd be a world beater, maybe not - but it doesn't matter, because my initial experience was enough to put me off. I imagine someone for whom it clicked more naturally would be vastly more likely to stay interested.
[+] [-] haberman|13 years ago|reply
I am a musician (singer, mostly) and when it comes to sight reading as a singer I would estimate that I'm in the 95th percentile or so. But I've tinkered with the piano recreationally for basically my whole life, at times more seriously than others, and yet I still cannot sight read on the piano for my life. There's just too much information for my brain to process in real-time. I've played some pretty difficult music on the organ, but I have to basically memorize the piece to get to that level.
I strongly believe that no amount of time at the piano will make me a good sight reader. I believe I could get marginally better, but I will never reach the level of even an average pianist.
Now one could be tempted to say: "you've spent far more time sight reading as a singer, which explains why you're better at it." And while this is somewhat true, it gets the causation backwards. It was obvious to me from a very early age that I was better at sight reading as a singer, so I spent more time doing it.
I sometimes wonder if this is where the 10,000 hour rule comes from: no one could stand spending 10,000 hours doing something they truly suck at. But on the other hand, I know plenty of amateur musicians who love what they do and have spent their entire lives making music, but will never reach a professional level (which is totally fine, but contradicts the 10,000 hour thesis).
[+] [-] 1337biz|13 years ago|reply
I was thinking about that the other day as well and I believe it has something to do with some form of goal oriented activity behavior. Or at least a distinct process of continuously "rising the barrier". Otherwise it becomes like saying "we are walking every day so why don't we end up all being marathon runners when we turn 40".
In my view it takes a certain kind of competitive mindset that combines being dissatisfied with ones own skill set and having an intrinsic motivation to become better, adjusting the skillset to the top performers in the field and at the same time portraying to the outside a level of confidence in the skill, in order to reach the true heights of a pro.
[+] [-] analyst74|13 years ago|reply
I think that's an important notion people tend to overlook. Doing something you are naturally good at is enjoyable, and doing things you're naturally bad at, is not. This is less apparent when you're just having fun, like singing karaoke with friends, playing guitar at campfire, playing sports recreationally, etc.
But when you set a conscious goal of being better than most other people, and notice that after hours/days/weeks of deliberate practice, you are still not as good as the more talented people with little practice, it becomes pretty hard to maintain motivation and optimism.
[+] [-] tjr|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] foobarbazqux|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] buzzcut|13 years ago|reply
This is self-refuting really. You admit that you spend a lot more time on one skill and then report that you are better at that skill and are hopeless at the one you tinkered with.
K Anders Ericsson, who is one of the sources of the research on this speculates somewhere (I can't recall of the top of my head where), that there are very likely extremely small marginal differences in initial aptitude, but that these alone are enough to garner praise and tiny edges in performance that are self-rewarding to the practitioner and that these advantages make them more likely to continue with the work required to get better. That's not natural talent, if it's true, that's just a minuscule advantage that may help foster interest and practice and lead to better skill.
[+] [-] smortaz|13 years ago|reply
there was an episode of startrek TNG where on this planet they'd analyze kids' dna and figure out what particular talents they had & they'd put extra emphasis on developing those. i'm sure we're heading towards such a future and it has interesting ethical implications. i also wonder how many mozarts are regularly born to plumbers and never get a chance to reach their potential.
[+] [-] kenjackson|13 years ago|reply
Playing by ear, OTOH, is much more difficult.
Natural talent may help some. But I can't think of many skill related activities where 10,000 hours of deliberate practice won't make you an "expert". Maybe not the best in the world, but good enough that virtually any layperson would call you an expert.
[+] [-] ldargin|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] iandanforth|13 years ago|reply
From that book I also highly recommend "The Early Progress of Able Young Musicians" which discusses the importance of a progression of increasingly competent teachers in successful musicians lives.
There's even a study there that talks directly to her point "Expertise and Mental Disabilities"
[+] [-] cowls|13 years ago|reply
I think the idea is that if I spend 10000 hours coding, I would most likely be an expert coder. It does not mean I will be rich like Bill Gates :(
[+] [-] spydum|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] seestheday|13 years ago|reply
I am great at coding and analytics, but naturally quite bad at music. I tried really hard and put in a tremendous amount of time learning music and I was us mediocre at it, no matter how much I loved it and how hard I tried.
[+] [-] franze|13 years ago|reply
for me the concept of "talent" is just thought-cancer, it might be valid in some edge cases but overall it's just harmfull (not only for teens).
[+] [-] mion|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vpeters25|13 years ago|reply
The key, in my opinion, is to figure out how to make money off your talent(s).
[+] [-] LatvjuAvs|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] tokenadult|13 years ago|reply
Cry me a river. How are "naturally gifted" persons disserved by thorough research on human performance?
This article seems to illustrate the adage that "the adjective is the enemy of the noun," because not once in this excerpt from a longer book is the word "deliberate" used, and yet K. Anders Ericsson (an eminent researcher on the development of expertise)
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html
has long taken care to put the adjective "deliberate" in front of the word "practice" as he writes about how expertise develops. (The article kindly submitted here correctly says, "New Yorker writer Malcolm Gladwell didn’t invent the rule, but he did popularize it through his best-selling book Outliers.") The 10,000-hour rule, originally formulated as a ten-year rule in studies of musicology a few decades ago, has mostly been researched by Ericsson and other researchers influenced by Ericsson's publications. Ericsson carefully distinguishes "deliberate practice," which ordinarily requires a coach who can monitor the learner's performance, from "playful engagement," which doesn't focus the learner's attention on improved performance in the same way. Many critics of Ericsson's work seem to miss this distinction.
I wonder, as an observer of young people learning programming, how much a dumb computer's literal interpretation of programs input into the computer provides relentless deliberate practice in better programming, even for people who are mostly messing around playfully. Perhaps in learning programming, the inanimate computer can serve as a coach for many learners. I would NOT expect someone devoting 10,000 hours to writing essays for fun, if the essays are never read by any critical readers, to improve as much as a writer as someone devoting 10,000 hours to writing programs (if the learner of programmer pays attention to whether the programs compile and run) would improve as a programmer. People who engage in deliberate practice to improve sports performance routinely have coaches, and also participate routinely in competitions that put their assimilation of the sports skills to the test.
In general, a lot of people misread the tenor of Ericsson's research, which is the subject of an interesting new book, The Complexity of Greatness, edited by Scott Barry Kaufman.
http://www.amazon.com/The-Complexity-Greatness-Beyond-Practi...
Ericsson is sure that raw talent (whatever that is) alone is NOT sufficient to be an "expert," properly so called, but rather has research-based reasons to believe that deliberate practice is strictly necessary for expert performance in all domains. He thinks it is an open question whether or not something like preexisting talent is even necessary for expertise, or whether sustained deliberate practice by itself might be sufficient to make into an expert someone who initially appeared not to have "talent" for a particular domain. That is an ongoing program of research, as Ericsson's publications
http://www.psy.fsu.edu/faculty/ericsson.dp.html
make clear.
And of course Paul Graham had something to say about this issue in his essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known" (January 2005).
http://paulgraham.com/hs.html
"Don't think that you can't do what other people can. And I agree you shouldn't underestimate your potential. People who've done great things tend to seem as if they were a race apart. And most biographies only exaggerate this illusion, partly due to the worshipful attitude biographers inevitably sink into, and partly because, knowing how the story ends, they can't help streamlining the plot till it seems like the subject's life was a matter of destiny, the mere unfolding of some innate genius. In fact I suspect if you had the sixteen year old Shakespeare or Einstein in school with you, they'd seem impressive, but not totally unlike your other friends.
"Which is an uncomfortable thought. If they were just like us, then they had to work very hard to do what they did. And that's one reason we like to believe in genius. It gives us an excuse for being lazy. If these guys were able to do what they did only because of some magic Shakespeareness or Einsteinness, then it's not our fault if we can't do something as good.
"I'm not saying there's no such thing as genius. But if you're trying to choose between two theories and one gives you an excuse for being lazy, the other one is probably right."
[+] [-] thedufer|13 years ago|reply
However, I think you take it too far at the end. To say that the nature half of nurture+nature is unnecessary goes against a significant amount of research. In sports, this becomes pretty clear. What are the odds that short people never work hard enough to become good swimmers, for example? It seems drastically more likely that nature has an enormous impact. 10,000 hours of deliberate practice is necessary, but by no means sufficient, for success at most sports.
It is less obvious in other domains, but there is still research to the effect that some people simply aren't wired for certain things, just like short people are can't swim at world-class levels. In HN's favorite domain, programming, there is reason to believe that some people simply can't think in the right way. Here's a reasonable article on the subject: http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/is-it-....
PG's lazy rule sounds good, but only in the absence of opposing evidence. It behaves like Occam's razor - it leads in the right direction, but don't take it for truth.
[+] [-] zaphar|13 years ago|reply
So the upshot is you can use this as an excuse or a motivator. If you're an optimist you look at those two sentences and go "Cool!! I can do anything I decide I want to as long as I put in the requisite effort." If you're a pessimist you look at them and say. "I'm going to have to work harder than other people if I want to some things"
And if you're a realist you look at them and go "So, how much effort do I need to put in to reach my any of my goals?" and start prioritizing.
[+] [-] 3minus1|13 years ago|reply
supporting evidence: 1) Warrent Buffet was clearly born to do business. 2) The author didn't learn how to program when she had the chance
This article is fluff.
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] derekp7|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|13 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] trentlott|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] 6cxs2hd6|13 years ago|reply
For instance to be a great NHL hockey player, you should have a birthday in Jan or Feb. Because youth hockey leagues group you by age. And when you're the biggest and most coordinated in your group ....
Likewise Gates' situation in high school was extraordinary, and exceptional parents.
So, (1) yeah the 10,000 hours, and (2) yes the genetics/wiring, and also (3) the luck. At least to be a true "outlier". One can be an "expert", and very successful and fulfilled, without being a Bill Gates or Wayne Gretzky.
[+] [-] gyardley|13 years ago|reply
Given that, I have a real hard time caring about the nature vs. nurture argument - it's only relevant if you're in one of those narrow fields where only the top 0.01% of people can be successful and happy, and that certainly doesn't include programming or entrepreneurship or any of the other stuff we usually talk about around here.
[+] [-] lutorm|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] eranki|13 years ago|reply
We can't settle this debate because we just don't know enough about how the mind works and how genetics play a role.
My question is, what's the actionable piece of advice? If you try programming and don't get it, you'll never be a good programmer? At what point do you give up and say that you just aren't talented enough?
It seems to me that the only people asking the nature vs. nurture questions are the ones that want an excuse to give up.
[+] [-] ctdonath|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitonomics|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] dxbydt|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bradfordarner|13 years ago|reply
This article is a phenomenal example of an intelligent and successful person lacking any rational and logical basis for their core thesis.
There are countless individuals who have become experts in their respective field, yet lack any formal training in logic, argumentation or critical thinking. They naturally believe that because people listen to them in a particular field, their skills of reasoning and grasp of logic must be superior. Often they tend to equally believe that their 'gifts' are 'in-born' because they don't ever remember feeling any different; they have been intelligent their entire life.
There are so many logical fumbles in this short piece, whether it be an excerpt or not, that it could be used as an philosophical exercise in pointing out faulty lines of reasoning. Example => So, how does Warren Buffet disprove the 10,000 hour rule? Author's response: "Because he was involved in business affairs from a young age." I assume that her line of reasoning is as follows: 'Warren was incredibly young when he had successfully started his first business. At that age he could not have possibly invested 10,000 hours in the study of business. Thus, he must have been born with business talent.'
Interestingly enough, Warren Buffet's case may be worth looking into in order to better refine the 10,000 hour rule. That being said, the above line of reasoning is hugely problematic. Nowhere is Warren Buffet's 'expertise' at a young age commented upon or evidence given in support of it. The 10,000 hour rule says that you will become an expert with 10,000 hours of deliberate practice/training at ever increasing levels of complexity. The rule does not come to say that you can't be successful without 10,000 hours of practice. (Look at Mark Zuckerber!) The author has both misunderstood and misapplied the correlation between these concepts and what could be meant by the word 'success'. Beyond a couple of other problems, the second major issue is that invalidating one proposition does not inherently validate an opposing proposition. Thus, just because the 10,000 hour rule may be invalidated by Warren Buffet's experience, we cannot make the logical leap to declare that he, therefore, has in-born/genetic attributes that we would consider 'talent'. These are 2 entirely separate arguments that may be related but are not directly tied to one another. I could go on and on with the problems in this article.
The short of it: Paul Graham was being overly optimistic in thinking that writing helps everyone form better arguments and think more carefully. Somebody should introduce Temple Grandin to a philosophy class on critical thinking and basic reasoning.
[+] [-] Felix21|13 years ago|reply
It is more enlightened however to understand that if you have enough desire to be something, you can truly become as great as you want to be at any field in this world...
Its wise to be able to admit that you're not great at x, because you don't have enough motivation or desire to put in the work required to master it.
In my first year at university, my brain was exactly like yours. My brain simply didn't work in a way that allows me to write code.
In December 2012 when I wanted to start a tech company and realised I needed to be able to "build" myself...
... MY BRAIN CHANGED
suddenly it became the kind of brain that was able to code and make simple games in ruby and python?
Why? because in December, I acquired a DESIRE to learn code so I could build my company...
[+] [-] ChuckMcM|13 years ago|reply
Its not clear to me that we can ascertain the validity or not of this conjecture with simple experiments though.
[+] [-] iandanforth|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] forgotAgain|13 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sireat|13 years ago|reply
This I realize when I am teaching chess to younger kids, some kids just get it and some do not(just like Ostap Bender said in his famous lecture) The ones who do not get it, they can probably become expert players if they got the resources provided by Polgars (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r), but that would be the upper limit.
So I am starting to lean towards the fact that all three Polgar sisters were gifted to some extent.
There needs to be a wider experiment to apply the 10k rule, like maybe 50 kids having the ultimate chess (or math or violin or something else) resource and actually putting in 10k hours of deliberate practice (rememember most kids in special schools do not finish the 10k hours as they simply gravitate to other pursuits, and of course that is natural).
Let's not get started on the 10k hour myth for older people. I am of firm belief that after age of 25 or so, even a gifted one will not be able to get by with 10k hours. At age 40 it is pretty much hopeless, decent expert is all you can hope for.
[+] [-] vpeters25|13 years ago|reply
You can see them sweating, cringing and showing all kinds of emotion. Fans love these players, they identify them as another hard-working "blue collar" guy like them.
Then along comes a guy like Josh Hamilton, a guy so incredibly talented everything looks effortless. He seems to trot when he is running full blast, he seems to flip the bat but hits a homerun, looks like he just lobbed the baseball from the outfield but it's a perfect 90mph strike to a base getting the runner out.
A sport particularly brutal in this sense is Tennis: 10k hrs of practice might get you to the top 100, but from there everybody is so incredibly talented it's discouraging. You might spend 10k hours just perfecting your one-hand backhand, then, when you think you got it, along comes Sampras or Federer hitting it 10 times harder without flinching.
[+] [-] robomartin|13 years ago|reply
Nope.
Correct practice makes perfect?
Close.
Supervised correct practice makes perfect?
Yup.
10,000 of practice makes expert?
Nope.
10,000 hours of supervised correct practice makes expert?
Nope.
10,000 hours of progressively more difficult supervised correct practice makes expert?
You got it!
Supervised doesn't mean having a teacher standing behind you watching your work. I think it does mean having some degree of feedback on what you are doing and how you are doing it.
In the case of coding that could mean having your code critiqued in open-source projects (either explicitly or as a side effect of the process).
Then there's the question of what "expert" means in a contextual practical sense. To use a personal example, I was not trained as a machinist. I trained in electronics and software. Yet, I had a need to manufacture parts using various CNC machines, so I learned. Am I an expert? No way. I do, however know I can fabricate nearly any part and, more importantly, in the process developed a great understanding of design for manufacturability.
In my own context yes, I am an expert. This did not take 10,000 hours. If I had to guess I'd say less than 1,000 spread over a number of years with an intense focus during a period if approximately six months.