What You May Have Gotten Wrong About the 10,000 Hours Rule

Whenever someone talks about learning, it is only a matter of time before someone mentions the 10,000 hours rule by Malcolm Gladwell. His book “Outliers: The Story of Success” is most famous for this rule that after a telephone game ended up being quoted along those lines:

To learn something, you need to spend 10,000 hours doing it.

This is by far not what Gladwell has written about. There are two main aspects that are wrong and have a significant impact on the meaning:

1. It is not about doing it for 10,000 hours. If this would be correct, everyone with 5 years of work experience would know the ins and outs of their work and be good at it. Yet our experience shows us that this if often not the case. The missing piece is deliberate practise, in which you push yourself just far enough out of your comfort zone to maximize the opportunities to learn. Doing that for 10,000 hours and you go far beyond of just learning something.
2. This rule is not about learning something, but to achieve mastery in that field. It is not about performing well but exceptional. Being in the top tier of that field and not just better than the average – that is a completely different game.

Fixing those two mistakes has brought us closer to the rule as it was defined by Malcolm Gladwell. However, there is a rather significant catch that should be addressed as well:

3. It is not a rule. There is no scientific proof that you must spend 10,000 hours to achieve mastery. The research done in 1993 by K. Anders Ericsson found that the 10,000 hours are an average of time spent on deliberate practice by the musicians taking part in their studies (one with violinists, one with pianists). Some needed more, some less. Ericsson didn’t say anything about the 10,000 hours being the magic number for mastery, he focused on deliberate practice.
   A meta-study in 2014 by Brooke N. Macnamara et al found that deliberate practice has a much smaller effect on the variance in performance for various fields than expected. If they are right, the “rule” looses the deliberate practice part as well and falls apart completely.

To end this post in an upside: Even when we don’t know what exactly is needed to achieve mastery, there are many good advices for learning new skills. Fast feedback-loops in combination with deliberate practice and teaching can help you a lot (start at Tactics for Learning Faster).