Over the past decade, everyone seems to have heard of the so-called 10,000-hour rule, popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. It asserted that people who were performing at a world-class level, such as musicians, artists, or sportspeople, had practiced for approximately 10,000 hours up to that point.
And so, if you wanted to become one of the best in the world, all you had to do was also practice for 10,000 hours.
However, the authors behind the original study on which Gladwell based his figures now claim that his interpretation wasn’t actually very accurate.
This has wide implications for anyone trying to develop a skill and expertise, whether in the arts, business, sports, or any other field.
In 1993, Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Römer published the results of a study on a group of violin students in a music academy in Berlin. It stated that the most accomplished students had put in an average of 10,000 hours of practice by their 20th birthday. That paper would go on to become a major part of the scientific literature on expert performers, but only attracted mainstream attention after Outliers was published.
So what is the lesson? You will improve significantly faster at whatever you are trying to practice if you practice deliberately.
If this all seems a bit depressing, then it shouldn’t be.
While this evidence suggests that it might be hard to become one of the world’s best performers, most of us are not dedicated to becoming world-beaters. For most of us, we want to know whether we can improve enough to see ourselves become better and feel like we are achieving something.
Here, Ericsson and Pool give their view on what their research actually suggests.
In pretty much any area of human endeavor, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way.
If you practice something for a few hundred hours, you will almost certainly see great improvement … but you have only scratched the surface.
You can keep going and going and going, getting better and better and better. How much you improve is up to you.
Additionally, it is important to remember that you don’t need to be a world-class performer to be creative and have ideas.
In reality, you don’t need to be “arty” to be creative and have ideas. You can have ideas in whatever domain you work in. And as long as they add value to the end goal, that is the definition of creativity.
So don’t worry if you don’t have an extra 10,000 hours to devote to practice. Any amount of time you spend doing it in a deliberate way will bring even better results.
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