10,000 hour theory debunked

[cantunamunch]

Maybe the rule wasn't meant for skiing, or athletics in general, maybe better suited for trumpet players.
/

The rule was meant for everything - but it doesn't refer to the trainee's time.

It refers to how much time others have to invest in the trainee to see a difference between master and schmoe, assuming it can happen. It's a social cost metric, not a performance metric.

Most misunderstood concept ever.

 

[HardDaysNight]

When I look at a 15 year athletic career, 10,000 hours averages to a little less than 13 hours per week. Some weeks will definitely be more, or less, depending on training goals and periodization. Definitely attainable.

I was speaking of skiing. Actual skiing, not thinking of, brooding about or visualizing skiing. Not working out in the gym but skiing on snow. During times when there’s snow to be skied which is not 52 weeks a year.

 

[martyg]

The rule was meant for everything - but it doesn't refer to the trainee's time.

It refers to how much time others have to invest in the trainee to see a difference between master and schmoe, assuming it can happen. It's a social cost metric, not a performance metric.

Most misunderstood concept ever.

I never got that out of Dr. Ericsson's lectures. If anything, the 10,000 hour number is arbitrary to the original study. It was a nice, round number that they choose to represent that amount of practice that the best violinists were engaged in deliberate practice by the time that they were 20. The study was never acknowledged outside of the high performance mindset community until Gladwell popularized it. And when he did, he widely misquoted it to put it into convenient sound bites.

 

[martyg]

I was speaking of skiing. Actual skiing, not thinking of, brooding about or visualizing skiing. Not working out in the gym but skiing on snow. During times when there’s snow to be skied which is not 52 weeks a year.

So.... performance enhancements only occurs in the environment that the sport is played in / on? That has not been my experience at the OTC.

 

[HardDaysNight]

number that they choose to represent that amount of practice that the best violinists were engaged in deliberate practice by the time that they were 20.

Yes, that’s the point. Deliberate practice playing the violin. Not thinking about playing the violin, not doing hand exercises. Of course visualization is helpful in skiing; so is working out in the gym or on a mountain bike. But that’s not what the 10,000 hours refers to. It refers to specific, dedicated practice of the activity. Which is not feasible for skiers in a realistic time frame.

 

[martyg]

Yes, that’s the point. Deliberate practice playing the violin. Not thinking about playing the violin, not doing hand exercises. Of course visualization is helpful in skiing; so is working out in the gym or on a mountain bike. But that’s not what the 10,000 hours refers to. It refers to specific, dedicated practice of the activity. Which is not feasible for skiers in a realistic time frame.

Nope. “practice” is anything that builds neuromuscular pathways and myelin as per the original body of work.

Ping Dr. Ericsson. Florida State University. Ask him about the very early Dominican baseball players.

 

[razie]

For skiing, it's not just the time spent gliding that matters... Thinking about it, video review, discussing etc.

Anyways, I always thought that 10k hours is more like 8k and there must clearly be differences based on the quality of training and personal advantages, but not as big as some think. What, someone can achieve the same with 100 hours?

Differences in training quality compound in time, I think more than linearly.

Also, this specific article has a lot of "sour grapes" remarks, which make it useless for me.

A 20 percent difference in performance makes a huge difference when you talk about "world level" performance... I bet there is a lot of FIS racers that get within 20-30% of a top 30 flip WC skier's time... I don't know if that's how you would measure the 20% mentioned in the study, but it still sounds like a huge difference.

 

[graham418]

Regardless, if you want to get good at something ,you have to put in the hours. Gifted 'Naturals' will take less hours, not so gifted will take more. And the law of diminishing returns dictates that to reach the pinnacle will take an extra long time....10000 hours? in rough, order of magnitude numbers, might not be too far off

 

[ScottB]

how about 10,000 turns. That might be a realistic goal to attain and with that many under your belt you should have it committed to muscle memory. I haven't read any of the material, so just throwing it out there.

My experience is if you do something often, you get comfortable doing it. Hopefully, you learn proper technique early on and don't get really comfortable at doing it wrong. I ski well, but I can't hit a golf ball straight for the life of me. I don't like golf enough to invest in the lessons it would take to correct my "swang".

 

[fatbob]

Nope. “practice” is anything that builds neuromuscular pathways and myelin as per the original body of work.

So this is where I get confused - isn't that equally a description of "childhood"? We all develop motor, co-ordination skills, reflex speed, visual analysis of our environment et c etc through a lot of play. Anytime I balanced on a log or beam or climbed a tree or chased and kicked a ball- does that count?

It's such a con that I'm not a world beating athlete

 

[Don in Morrison]

4.8 years worth of 40 hour work weeks. Y'know, I've spent that much time on a number of things that I'm still not world class good at. Some of the things I do best I haven't spend near that much time doing.

 

[François Pugh]

I agree 10000 hours is bunk, but it makes a good point. Lots of good practice is needed. IMHO, to some folk the point is more important than the absolute truth.

 

[cantunamunch]

4.8 years worth of 40 hour work weeks. Y'know, I've spent that much time on a number of things that I'm still not world class good at. Some of the things I do best I haven't spend near that much time doing.

I have spent more than 10x that much time "practicing" sleeping - and now I'm terrible at it.

Have I disproved anything about the 10K rule thereby? No, of course not. And that's my point - you can't disprove the 10K rule by pointing at failures. The only way to disprove the 10K rule is to find a pattern that regularly creates master-class success with significantly less invested time. Say 100 hours or 500 hours. Good luck with that. I'm not being sarcastic there, it would benefit everybody if someone did.

Argument by analogy: If we crush and leach 200 tons of rock without finding an ounce of gold, have we proven anything about gold yield? No, we just have cr@p ore. Now, say someone finds a relatively pure nugget. What does that prove? It proves no one has looked there yet and there's easy pickings.

Is there an analogy to the "easy pickings" in our original premise? Yes, there is - newly invented sports/activities which don't have established master-class talent. And that's where the social cost argument comes in. There is no such thing as an established sport/activity where master class talent has put in less practice than the 10K rule calls for, because our society would (nearly continuously and at trivial cost to society as a whole) throw up challengers to sub-10K 'mastery'. And the mastery bar would ratchet upwards.

A perfect example of such ratcheting and how fast it happens: Crossfit Games. Overall winners 10 years ago are now seriously tested at regionals - and we have video proof.

 

[Average Joe]

Gladwell's book that referenced 10,000 hours touched upon many different training methodologies practiced by elite athletes, musicians.....if i recall this was the book that explored birth months as a factor in Canadian junior hockey success.
My takeaway was that the hours of practice was part (and a big part) of success, but how the athlete focused and trained were big parts in the mix.
That he featured in the book many early underachievers who had adult success and also practiced long and hard probably leads some to takeaway the "10,000 hour" rule as some sort of absolute.

 

[QueueCT]

There are some interesting articles about Brazilian soccer players playing "futsal," which is basically soccer on a smaller pitch. The idea is to increase the pace of the game, decrease decision times, and increase player density resulting in more accurate passes being required and a greater volume of touches for the players in a given time. It's one explanation of why Brazilian soccer stars are so successful.

The research claims, as @martyg said, that practicing physical tasks over and over again strengthens the myelin associated with those neural pathways and your brain will "favor" that movement due to a lower electrical resistance relative to other movement pathways. Thus it becomes impossible to "do it wrong." It also clearly shows the importance of practicing the right way so the wrong pathways don't get strengthened. Does this mean 1,000 reps, 10,000 reps, 50,000 reps will get you there? No idea. And I'm not a neurobiologist so can't read the research critically enough to know whether all of this is true or not.

 

[cantunamunch]

That he featured in the book many early underachievers who had adult success and also practiced long and hard probably leads some to takeaway the "10,000 hour" rule as some sort of absolute.

Here is Gladwell himself raising the social cost point:
http://freakonomics.com/podcast/malcolm-gladwell/

GLADWELL: I agree that that would be in the average takeaway. However, no one is more surprised than me that that was the average takeaway. The 10,000-hour stuff that I put in Outliers was really only intended to perform a very specific narrative function — or, not narrative function, but kind of argumentative function — which was, to me the point of 10,000 hours is: if it takes that long to be good, you can’t do it by yourself. If you have to play chess for 10 years in order to be a great chess player, then that means that you can’t have a job, or maybe if you have a job it can’t be a job that takes up most of your time. It means you can’t come home, do the dishes, mow the lawn, take care of your kids. Someone has to do that stuff for you, right? That was my argument, that if there’s an incredibly prolonged period that is necessary for the incubation of genius, high-performance, elite status of one sort or another, then that means there always has to be a group of people behind the elite performer making that kind of practice possible. And that’s what I wanted to say. When you watch Jordan Spieth play golf, don’t just think about Jordan Spieth. Think about the fact that I am guessing his parents devoted a huge chunk of their adult lives to making it possible for him to be an elite golfer. And every time you watch someone on stage on Carnegie Hall playing the violin, understand how many other people sacrificed to make that — the beautiful music you’re hearing — possible. That was my point that I wanted to make about 10,000 hours.

I never got that out of Dr. Ericsson's lectures.

Of course not; it was out of scope for his study and would have been bad science if he'd tried.

If anything, the 10,000 hour number is arbitrary to the original study. It was a nice, round number that they choose to represent that amount of practice that the best violinists were engaged in deliberate practice by the time that they were 20.

Certainly. But we cannot take the 10,000 hour number as being random. Nor can we disregard the scale of it, as opposed to 100 or 100K or 1Million hours.

 

[James]

Nope. “practice” is anything that builds neuromuscular pathways and myelin as per the original body of work.

Ping Dr. Ericsson. Florida State University. Ask him about the very early Dominican baseball players.

What did he think of the Polgar sisters experiment?

For those who haven’t heard of them, their father found a wife interested in raising kids as an experiment. The three daughters went pretty far in chess. I think two were Grand Masters and one beat Kasparov once.

 

[cantunamunch]

What did he think of the Polgar sisters experiment?

For those who haven’t heard of them, their father found a wife interested in raising kids as an experiment. The three daughters went pretty far in chess. I think two were Grand Masters and one beat Kasparov once.

*Pictures Skinner box with an 8x8 gridded floor*

 

[Tom Holtmann]

1. What you referenced is not a study. It is a synopsis of study in popular media. It is written by someone who may, or may not know that they are doing. The author and the study he quotes misses several of the key elements of the original body of work - as he presents it.

2. If you want to get at the truth, read the original study. Then read the studies that it references to look for holes in methodology. Of course, all of this will cost several hundreds of dollar in accessing those reports.

3. Malcolm Gladwell, who popularized this theory (he is a journalist - not a scientist) based much of what he writes about on the works of Anders Ericsson. Malcolm popularized the 10,000 hour thing in main stream media, not in peer reviewed scientific journals. Because, again, Malcolm is a journalist, not a scientist. As per Dr. Ericsson, Malcolm never interviewed him, never called, him, never once spoke to him. Dr. Ericsson has publicly stated that much of what Malcolm wrote is a misrepresentation.

4. If you really want to understand what the original research entailed, look up those original papers in peer reviewed scientific journals. Pay for the subscription. Do that hard work.

5. Having trained under two national team coaches.... no doubt, morphological make-up can influence outcomes. However from my experience, and in questioning those coaches, the athletes who drill basics, over and over, until they just don't get it right, but cannot get it wrong, who can do those drills as naturally as breathing in their sleep, and have video analysis weekly, if mot daily to insure that their movements are as efficient as possible, are the ones who excel.

Its amazing how often people misrepresent his work. He has a very good book called Peak:Secrets From the New Science of Expertise that is excellent.

 

[Tom Holtmann]

Yes, that’s the point. Deliberate practice playing the violin. Not thinking about playing the violin, not doing hand exercises. Of course visualization is helpful in skiing; so is working out in the gym or on a mountain bike. But that’s not what the 10,000 hours refers to. It refers to specific, dedicated practice of the activity. Which is not feasible for skiers in a realistic time frame.

The number changes for different activities. For activities like violin where the ability to practice is relatively easy the number is relatively high and for activities like skiing, sprinting or sky diving where practice is relatively difficult the number might be relatively low. But in either case, reaching the necessary amount of time to reach expertise takes a lot of effort and grit. That is the take away of his research not a specific number of hours.