Let's Break the 10,000 Hour Rule

In which we update some common tropes about practice and visualization

To become an expert at something, you need to practice 10,000 hours. I’m sure you’ve heard that before. This idea quickly found its way into popular culture following Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers.

Only… what if, just like our 10,000 steps, those 10,000 hours are mostly good for marketing purposes?

Of course, practice matters. More specifically, ‘deliberate practice’ seems to correlate with acquiring expertise. The spark that lit all this is a 1993 study on the role of deliberate practice in young violinists. In short: better violinists practiced more. Based on their data, the authors estimated that outstanding violinists would roughly have practiced 10,000 hours by the time they are twenty years old.

Two big buts:

• A more thorough 2019 replication of the study finds that:

…the size of the effect [of deliberate practice] was substantial, but considerably smaller than the original study's effect size. Teacher-designed practice was perceived as less relevant to improving performance on the violin than practice alone.

• In this 2016 interview, Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson, one of the authors of the original study, quite clearly says:

Malcolm Gladwell read our work, and he misinterpreted some of our findings…. we came up with an average, across the group, of 10,000 hours. But that really meant that there was a fair amount of variability.

10,000 hours? Maybe. For some people.

Of course, no one thinks that you need exactly 10,000 hours and that when the final second ticks away, you suddenly graduate from good to great.

But there is a darker side to the 10,000-hour narrative. By emphasizing that ‘you can be anything as long as you practice long and hard enough’ any shortcomings of your goal become your personal failing and responsibility. The 10,000-hour rule implies that if you did not reach an expert level at whatever chosen skill, it must be because you are just too lazy.

This is not exactly true. A review of studies in several fields suggests only 1 - 26% of the difference between people’s skill levels might be attributed to differences in practice time. And we find something similar among high-performing athletes: around 18% of the difference in their performance could be accounted for by the amount of deliberate practice.

Obviously, in most of these studies, we’re already dealing with people who got pretty good at something. Still, if only a limited amount of variance is explained by the duration of practice, then what’s going on?

Many things. Genetics matter (even in the original 1993 paper, the authors mention the role height and body size play in various physical skills). Interest and motivation matter too (go back to that first quote above: time spent practicing alone matters more. Generally, you don’t practice alone unless you really want/are motivated to.) But lastly, being aware of your limits is a plus too. Silly example: if you’re 5 foot 3, making it into the NBA is going to be harder than if you’re a 6 foot 8 athletic freak. Not impossible (yay, Muggsy), but you’ll have to be very aware that your path will require a different focus.

Knowing what to pursue and what not to pursue given your innate attributes might as well be more important than putting in 10,000 hours of practice in reaching a level of high expertise. It takes wisdom and self-knowledge to admit this to yourself. (This doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy doing something you’re not ‘built’ for, but it does encourage you to be realistic about your expectations.)

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Related writing: Multipotentiality, Daydream, and Fear and the Jonah Complex.

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Let’s turn our sights to another aspect of gaining a skill that is often misunderstood: visualization.

One of the most mind-blowing features of the human mind is that it’s so proficient at making stuff up. That stuff can be a bunch of wildly imaginative impossibilities, but also a way to ‘practice’ skills in our heads. A crazy example: this 1990 study finds that switching between physical and mental piano practice sessions is just as good as doing all those sessions physically. Heck, mental practice might even make Olympians more successful.

But such mental practice is not what we’re usually told to do during visualization. Instead, we hear: “Imagine where you want to be; imagine what it will be like when you’re on top of the world in your chosen (a)vocation.”

Most popular ‘guides’ on visualization focus on the end product, not the process. But it’s exactly the other way around that visualization can work, by visualizing the process and not the end product. Simply envisioning being successful is not going to improve the skills you’re looking for. For example, this study finds that college students who visualized the process of studying for an exam scored better than those imagining passing. Only imagining positive outcomes might actually be related to symptoms of depression in the long term.

Why does visualizing the process seem to work better than visualizing the outcome? One idea is mental contrasting. This is the cognitive strategy of putting the desirable future and the present next to each other and seeking the path between them. To get to that future, you’ll have to choose between different options, mentally prepare for setbacks, and commit to the path ahead.

In other words, for visualization to work, it may be better to picture what you are going to do when things go wrong or when you encounter obstacles, instead of losing yourself in dreams of limitless success.

A great example of this is one of the greatest basketball players and hardest-working athletes of all time, Kobe Bryant (aka Black Mamba). His insane work ethic and near-unmatchable mental toughness became known as the Mamba mentality.

In this 2020 Entertainment Online interview, Kobe himself sums it up like this:

“Mamba mentality is all about focusing on the process and trusting in the hard work when it matters most.”

Kobe, then, put all the elements together in the right way. Innate attributes, insane motivation (and what people sometimes forget, love for the game), and visualizing the process of becoming unstoppable on the court.

He definitely earned his spot on basketball’s Mount Olympus.

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Hey you, thanks for reading. I hope you have a great day.

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