The 10,000 Hour Rule Is a Myth
In our podcast, How to Change Your Brain with Mindfulness, with Daniel Goleman, we talked about the concept of “smart practice” – practicing mindfulness with the help of an experienced instructor who can provide feedback and suggest ways to improve. During our conversation. Daniel Goleman suggested the following:
The 10,000-hour rule is a myth: it is most annoying for the person on whose research it is based. His name is Ericsson and he lives in Florida. He studies experience and says that there is no fixed number of hours – it takes about 300 hours to have a perfect memory – but there is a dose-response relationship where the more you do, the better [you get]. He points out that even professional singers will have a coach, they are always trying to get better. What a coach does is smart practice. You have feedback from someone who knows what they are seeing and can advise you on what to do next, what to try and improve next. In this way, you will continue to improve. So it’s not the number of hours that matters, but how you train. Practice wisely.
Is the 10,000 hour rule a myth? Am I wasting hours crocheting?
The researcher Goleman cites is Anders Ericsson, professor of psychology at Florida State University, and he does say that Malcolm Gladwell oversimplified his conclusions . There is nothing remarkable about hitting that 10,000 hour mark: it was just a catchy number that Gladwell chose because it was, well, catchy. Some skills take much less time to develop (for example, this memory skill mentioned above), and some take more. More importantly, as Daniel Goleman pointed out, you must do what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.”
Gladwell did not differentiate between the types of practice that the musicians in our study performed – a very specific practice called “deliberate practice,” which involves continually pushing oneself outside of their comfort zone after training designed by an expert for development. specific abilities and use of feedback to identify weaknesses and work on them – and any activity that could be called “practice”.
[…] This distinction between deliberate practice aimed at a specific goal and general practice is critical because not every type of practice results in an improvement in the abilities that we have seen in music students or ballet dancers. Broadly speaking, deliberate practice and related practices that are designed to achieve a specific goal consist of individualized workouts – usually done alone – that are specifically designed to improve specific aspects of performance.
Gladwell, however, was not wrong: it is true that it will take you years of (smart) practice before mastery becomes even a distant possibility. So what are you doing reading this? Get back to work.