RSSWhat Would You Spend 10,000 Hours Doing?
November 17th, 2008 | View Comments
Spread out over 10 years, that’s 2 hours and 45 minutes a day—with no exceptions.
A couple days ago I added an excerpt from Outliers: The Story of Success to my delicious.com bookmarks.
In the early 90s, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson and two colleagues set up shop at Berlin’s elite Academy of Music. With the help of the academy’s professors, they divided the school’s violinists into three groups. The first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become world-class soloists. The second were those judged to be merely “good”. The third were students who were unlikely ever to play professionally, and intended to be music teachers in the school system. All the violinists were then asked the same question. Over the course of your career, ever since you first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practised?
Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time - around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.
The curious thing about Ericsson’s study is that he and his colleagues couldn’t find any “naturals” - musicians who could float effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time that their peers did. Nor could they find “grinds”, people who worked harder than everyone else and yet just didn’t have what it takes to break into the top ranks. Their research suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That’s it. What’s more, the people at the very top don’t just work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.
The caveat is that those 10,000 hours need to be “effortful practice”—as in, you need to be engaged in something challenging and actively trying to get better. Playing “Heart and Soul” for 10,000 hours isn’t going to turn you into a concert pianist.
That article got the wheels turning for me*—if I had to spend nearly three hours a day doing something for the next ten years, what would it be?
Music clearly is not it. I played the piano for 15 years and the violin for 10, logging a generously-estimated 2,000 hours on each. I’d guess I spent about 2,000 hours each in the dance studio and on the soccer field too.
If I had those 8,000 hours back, 8,000 hours of my childhood devoted to becoming the proverbial jack-of-all-trades, master-of-none, what would I do instead? Could I have been a world-class expert in something by the age I am now?
And would I want to be?
If I could make myself a world-class expert in something by the time I’m 40 (reducing my daily commitment to 2 hours, 15 minutes), what would it be? What would I be willing to give up to make it happen? And does my asking this question suggest that I need a career change?
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*Being a psychologist, I’ve definitely heard the 10 years/10,000 hours thing before, but let’s just say that Malcolm Gladwell is much better at emotionally grabbing his audience than K. Anders Ericsson.
Yvonne posted this on November 17th, 2008 @ 4:24pm in Education, Life, Psychology/Neuroscience | Permalink to "What Would You Spend 10,000 Hours Doing?"
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2. Yvonne » November 25th, 2008 at 10:00 pm
Let me know what you think of the book!
Me? I, uh, surf the web for 2.75h/d. Pretty much every day. But I surf the same sites every day, so even if web surfing was a meaningful skill, I don’t think that counts as “effortful practice”.
Another question that I find interesting is “How do you become above average?” To me, the central thesis of Outliers is sort of self-evident: in order to go down in history as one of the all-time greats, you need to have a perfect storm of natural ability, intense effort, and the luck of being in the right place at the right time.
But what about people who won’t make the history books, but are nonetheless really, really good? I suspect there’s a lot more variation there in terms of how much time and effort it took to get that good, but I don’t have any data.
1. jane » November 25th, 2008 at 9:32 pm
next time i go to costco i’ll buy the book. it’s an interesting question - how would i spend my 2.75h/d for the next 10 years?
i’ve looked at what i do naturally over the years - seems to be reflective writing - but i don’t do 2.75h/d consistently. i can see myself doing it though. also i thought about speaking, but speaking for 2.75h/d every day, that is hard even for a chatterbox like myself. but if i want to be a good public speaker for any reason… well, then.