The Fallacy of Ten Thousand Hours to Achieve Mastery
In his book Outliers: The Story of Success, Malcolm Gladwell asserts that it takes roughly ten thousand hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. The idea is that if you want to become an expert in a particular study, you have to put in the time. For example, violinists who became elite performers had put in some ten thousand hours of practice.
But is this idea valid? It may be that people who have achieved mastery in some field have put in some huge number of hours of practice. But that’s not the same as saying that a person who decides to practice an activity for that number of hours will surely achieve mastery. Unfortunately, there’s unlikely to ever be any research that has a sample of people practice some skill for ten thousand hours and then assesses their levels of mastery.
In any case, the people who excel in a given field are probably talented at the activity to start with and thus practice more. But practice has its limits. The findings of psychologists who have looked into the matter suggest that for chess players and musicians, deliberate practice can explain one-third of the variation in performance levels. Other relevant factors include personality, intelligence, and the age at which the person starts the activity, as well as genetics, aptitude, motivation, and the pliability of working memory.
Furthermore, the amount that practice contributes to mastery seems to vary with the activity. According to a study that examined numerous different activities, practice accounted for a 26 percent difference in performance in games, 21 percent in music, and 18 percent in sports. And the percentages no doubt vary depending on which games, music, and sports.
Clearly, practice doesn’t necessarily make perfect—and that’s especially the case if the way you’re practicing something is wrong. For practice to be useful, it entails receiving coaching and feedback from people with appropriate expertise. Otherwise, practice can mean you’re getting better at what you shouldn’t be doing in the first place.
Obviously, whether we’re talking about your golf game or your job, none of this means that practice is without merit. It may be that spending endless hours trying to perfect a skill is a waste of time. But research suggests that the way you go about that practice does matter. So don’t just repeat an activity endlessly; get useful feedback—and take time to reflect on your mistakes so that you learn from them.
