The 10,000-Hour Lie: Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers

This was recently popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in Outliers, and first proposed in the early 1990s by Dr. K. Anders Ericsson, a psychology professor at Florida State University, and his colleagues. (Here's an excerpt from his Expert Performance and Deliberate Practice that showcases the number.) I admit that I haven't read Gladwell's newest book and don't have access to Ericsson's original article, but the theory has been further distributed around the web by pretty much everyone with a productivity or personal-development blog, and so it's hardly escaped my notice.

Ericsson approached musicians (accounts vary as to which; most bloggers just say "musicians", a few say "violinists" - which is what I assume Gladwell says - and Ericsson himself uses "pianists" in the excerpt above), whom he placed into three categories - greater experts, lesser experts, and serious amateurs. Greater experts, he and his colleagues found, had amassed 10,000 hours of deliberate practice by age 20; lesser experts had amassed 5,000 hours; and serious amateurs had amassed 2,000 hours. The excerpt above implies that the categorization of the musicians was done before the hours worked were counted, so that the numbers correlate with the categories, rather than defining them.

There are two catches here. The first, which is, at least to me, self-evident, is that these numbers are arbitrary (as is the definition of "greater expert"!). 10,000 hours isn't a magic number; it's an arbitrary marking-point. As such, it's also not a bottom limit, and we don't know what the bottom limit is. Think about it this way: running a mile in three minutes will certainly make you the fastest runner in the world, but it's far beyond the time you need to be a world-class runner (the current record, set by Hicham El Guerrouj almost 10 years ago, is 3:43.13).

The second, which is less evident - and, naturally, completely ignored both by Gladwell and by the bloggers who want a both nice round number to draw in readers (according to recent studies which I don't have available to link, readers are more likely to read articles with numbers in the title) and a nicely large number to complement the current vogue of "you can only be good at one thing, ever" - is that just because you're an "expert" doesn't mean you're actually better than laypeople at what you do! I'll let Ericsson himself tell you (from the excerpt linked above):

"However, recent studies show that there are, at least, some domains where "experts" perform no better then less trained individuals (cf. outcomes of therapy by clinical psychologists, Dawes, 1994) and that sometimes experts' decisions are no more accurate than beginners' decisions and simple decision aids (Camerer & Johnson, 1991; Bolger & Wright, 1992). ... Hence, continued improvements (changes) in achievement are not automatic consequences of more experience and in those domains where performance consistently increases aspiring experts seek out particular kinds of experience, that is deliberate practice (Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer, 1993)-activities designed, typically by a teacher, for the sole purpose of effectively improving specific aspects of an individual's performance."

In fact, the "10,000 hours = expert" "rule" is a cheat. It's designed to make you feel better about getting good at what you want to get good at - or about dropping it like a hot potato. We look at the thousands (there really are - go check sometime) of blog posts talking about how 10,000 hours of Deliberate Practice will make you an expert, and we get the idea that there's a concrete goal that we can aim for, that we can count down the hours until we're Experts, that until then we can procrastinate about doing something because, well, we only have 9500 hours, and we need those last 500 to be a real expert. It's also great for the "put all your eggs in one basket" model of development that's in vogue right now; it's easy to say "you can't possibly get Deliberate Practice in on so many things at the same time, whittle it down to just one and set aside the rest because you'll never be able to get those hours in".

(Be wary of that business model, by the way: you keep reading these blogs because they're full of stuff that makes you feel motivated, but they're also full of the generally-unnoticed implication that you'll never be good enough. So you keep coming back for more motivation, and get a secret helping of demotivation, which makes you want more motivation...)

Here's the real truth: Yes, excellence takes hard work. No, there's no magic number.

The "10,000 hours" theory is much better when it's taken as a parable. Person 1 is the best at what she does. Person 2 works half as hard or long and is half as good. Person 3 works half as hard as that and is a quarter as good as person 1. That's all. The more you work - the harder you work - the better you'll be. Moreover (following Ericsson's other postulate above, about Deliberate Practice), it has to be the right kind of work. In the words of Cornelius Robinson, keep moving forward. If you're an artist, set aside the watercolors and start using acrylics. If you're a fiction writer, try a magazine article instead. Keep doing things that advance your craft instead of just doing the same thing over and over again, and slowly but surely, you'll get better.

And please - do as much as you can in the time that you have without exhausting yourself. Don't just limit yourself to one thing. Just like there's a reason for expressions like "spreading yourself too thin", there's also a reason for expressions like "one-trick pony". Diversify. It might take you a little longer to get excellent at everything you want to, but having the breadth of expertise will be worth it in the end.