I haven't read the book, but what I heard about it second hand is that 10k hours is about mastery, not success. You can be a master without being successful and visa versa. But mastery sure improves your odds of success.<p>Of course 10k hours doesn't guarantee mastery either. I've put in that much on the golf course and still suck at it.
For those who don’t know already, the “10,000 hours” to attain expert-level mastery in any field or endeavor is false. The study that Malcolm Gladwell cites by Anders Ericsson <i>only</i> applied to violin performance, which is a narrow field that has measurable and quantifiable performance levels and hundreds of years of teaching history.<p>I repeat this comment almost every time because 10k is both discouraging for the beginner and sometimes falsely encouraging for the “expert” who may have put in a lot of hours but in reality has been repeating mistakes and not really improving.
Grit by Angela Duckworth (<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-Duckworth/dp/1501111116" rel="nofollow">https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-Duck...</a>) goes into deliberate practice quite a bit.<p>She talks about how deliberate practice is almost never enjoyable because you're trying to improve specific things, but it is how you attain mastery. The other side is "flow", when that mastery is display, and she mentions how it can look so effortless for top athletes, when it's almost definitely the result of hours and hours of deliberate practice.
The book doesn't simply say that practicing something for 10,000 hours will make you a master. The point is that people who are masters at something (or known as brilliant or experts in their field) didn't just magically get to that point by having a particular talent. They got there by having a particular talent, being born into particular circumstances, AND THEN putting in a ton of work (hence the 10,000 hour reference).<p>Bill Gates wasn't born a great programmer and businessman. He was born smart and into a situation where he had access to a computer and then he worked his butt off to learn. Similarly, great athletes are both talented and work like crazy to hone their craft.<p>The point I took from the book is that hard work and many, many hours of study and/or practice is essential in order to get to the top of a field. Doing the hard work will not automatically get you to the top since at some point lack of talent or lack of resources may get in the way. But, you need to do the hard work in order to give yourself a chance to make it to the top.
I think the author of the article is missing the point of the book. And assuming everyone else is missing the point of 10,000 hours of intentional practice.
I'm not sure why "10,000 hours to mastery" pisses off so many people. Sane people don't believe it's a hard number. They know it's a point of view that should help them focus on their goal, instead of some magic fact.<p>It tells newbies that they'll need to spend time and work hard to master the skill. It tells experienced people that they probably aren't the best they can be yet. And it tells masters to stop expecting newbies to be great and to let them have time to learn.
The 10k rule got me started programming when I was 17.<p>I don't have a billion dollar app, but I use programming at work to increase my value tremendously.<p>I want to challenge this with having a low value skill, like playing sports, doing 10k hours, and seeing if the person could make 50k a year.
The observation is that mastery requires thousands of hours of deliberate practice.<p>I find it remarkable that people seem to think that this implies a claim in the opposite direction: that thousands of hours of (any) practice results in mastery.
10k hours on anything will likely make you as good as you can be at something.<p>Whether or not that is enough to become success depends on one's own ego and attachment to realizing if they're focusing on the better thing or not.
> Unfortunately “Work hard to succeed” is the message the world took away from it.<p>Is this unfortunate? Yeah, there are lots of random factors that might affect your outcome. The only one you can reliably influence is how hard you work. While you're lamenting about how you weren't born in the right time or the right place or so and so had the lucky opportunity to get a break and the right time, your competitors are working.
It doesn't matter what the book says about mastery, success, or practice, because Malcolm Gladwell isn't interested in the truth. "I don't write about what is true, I write about what is interesting." Systematic distortion is his stock in trade.<p>Even if he actually said something nominally true, it would still be wrong. Studying successful people and finding it took them 10,000 hours to get there (which he didn't) would not imply that anyone else could get there in the same 10,000 hours. I could practice basketball for 100,000 hours and never be able to sink a half-court shot, blind.<p>What does seem true is that people who enjoy practicing a thing are the ones who master it, probably because seeing progress makes practice enjoyable. When you stop seeing improvement, you stop, and move on to something else. People who master a thing are self-selected as those who could, for whatever reason. No one else is counted.
I think there's an unaddressed point in the book that should include "for the average person with average physical/emotional/intellectual capacity 10k hours - give or take - of _deliberate_ practice should make you a master". This intuitively makes sense to me, and what I took away from the book. I guess others took away other things and if you want to fault the author for that I'm not going to stop you. It's also fashionable to over-analyze everything these days so some won't be satisfied unless there are exact data points involved it should warrant throwing out the whole book and to which I would say to them sometimes it's about the notion rather than it's exactness. In any way the book is interesting and still worth a read.
I look at the hours and hardwork I put in as increasing my chances for success.<p>I wholeheartedly agree that success is mostly based on luck. I believe that the most successful business people were incredibly lucky in their journeys - but most also worked incredibly hard. If you work harder, you increase your chances at finding that luck.<p>If I gave up working hard a year ago, I would have never been found or funded. If I stopped working hard today, I won't find the next source of luck I need.<p>Life is about luck. I don't think it's right to shame others for wanting to work hard to create their own luck.
Well, obviously different tasks have differing levels of complexity and difficulty. I'm sure no one seriously thought that exactly 10,000 hours were needed for mastery of all tasks.
“Working hard does not guarantee you will be successful, but I guarantee all successful people worked hard.” - Coach Kamogawa of Morikawa’s life novel, Ippo.
Whether mastery or success is the end, the rule emphasises quantity of time over quality of time.<p>AFAIK 'quality of time' discussions are restricted to mentions of 'deliberate' practice. That's critical, since if someone can (sorry..) 'work smarter, not harder' then it devalues the 10k rule. Not even to mention luck
What I think is interesting is how much emotion the 10k hour rule rouses in general. The Freakonomics podcast mentioned the 10k rule as well. They posit that given equally talented individuals, the person who puts in the requisite hours of hard work through deliberate practice would obtain the higher level of mastery.
The way I always understood it is that 10000 hours of focused and deliberate practice and work gets you there.<p>I never interpreted it as: just do something for 10000 hours and you'll be a master at it.