Complexity and the 10,000 Hour rule
Malcom Gladwell……..a favourite author and definitely on my list of people I would have attend a fantastical dinner party.
He famously wrote about 10,000 hour being the magical amount of time needed to become excellent at a task. This wasn’t actually his own theory but he studied and popularised it through his book Outliers: The Story of Success. It was originally proposed by Simon and Chase in an American Scientist journal studying skill in chess players.
He then wrote an article sort of ‘defending’ this theory in The New Yorker in 2013, which I actually found to be a fascinating round-up of what the 10,000 hour rule is, and how it should be understood and applied. Some of my favourite excerpts from that article:
“achievement is talent plus preparation.”
“In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room, straight out of a surgical rotation, and does world-class neurosurgery. And second—and more crucially for the theme of Outliers—the amount of practice necessary for exceptional performance is so extensive that people who end up on top need help. They invariably have access to lucky breaks or privileges or conditions that make all those years of practice possible.”
“in his fascinating new book The Sports Gene, [David] Epstein’s key point is that the ten-thousand-hour idea must be understood as an average. For example, both he and I discuss the same study by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson that looked at students studying violin at the elite Music Academy of West Berlin. I was interested in the general finding, which was that the best violinists, on average and over time, practiced much more than the good ones. In other words, within a group of talented people, what separated the best from the rest was how long and how intently they worked.”
“I think that it is also a mistake to assume that the ten-thousand-hour idea applies to every domain….The point of Simon and Chase’s paper years ago was that cognitively complex activities take many years to master because they require that a very long list of situations and possibilities and scenarios be experienced and processed….if the surgeon who wants to fuse your spinal cord did some newfangled online accelerated residency, you should probably tell him no. It does not invalidate the ten-thousand-hour principle, however, to point out that in instances where there are not a long list of situations and scenarios and possibilities to master—like jumping really high, running as fast as you can in a straight line, or directing a sharp object at a large, round piece of cork—expertise can be attained a whole lot more quickly.”
References
Gladwell, M. (2013). Complexity and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule. The New Yorker. Retrieved from New Yorker
Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. Little, Brown and Company.
Simon, H. A., & Chase, W. G. (1973). Skill in chess. American Scientist, 61(4), 394–403.