I have a theory (very likely not novel) that the number of hours isn't as important as the continuity and the quality. I've seen first hand the tax people pay when they master something and then stop that activity and then rejoin in martial arts, domain specific knowledge, languages etc.
IMO the 10,000 hours thing is more of a truism based on the definition of what we call an expert. Its based on the human lifespan more than anything. If we lived twice as long, we would have professionals with much higher times spent practicing on average.
Re:30k Hours (2019)
by locuscoeruleus on Friday February 26, 2021 @02:43AM
(#26272262)
The 10,000 hours is how much solitary deliberate practice the students who were accepted into some acknowledged music conservatory had put in by the age of 18 (or some such). They aren't considered experts. But for the ones that make it through the ordeal of that school, some of them will be what we consider experts some day in the future.
Part of the point was that you have to be quite rich to be able to afford to spend 10,000 hours on something, you require other people to take up the slack of things you're not doing because you're practisting things, pay for lessons, drive you to practise.
Look, there it is again! You’re implying that 100% of their practice is deliberate practice. Which is, I think extremely unlikely. People like Wayne Goretsky, Michael Jordan, or Dan Gable, likely approached high ratios of deliberate practice in addition to high practice volumes, it’s rare.
I disagree, an expert isn’t a master. Compare applicants and graduates of these elite conservatory’s and there is real improvement, but most people off the street would have trouble distinguishing the before and after simply by ear.
Agreed, 10K hours is not enough to become an expert in coding for example. You need at least 40K hours with many different languages, companies and projects to become a senior developer.
I did 44K hours in 15 years working for around 15 different companies in 6 different countries and open source work on the side for nights and weekends before I became CTO of a small bootstrapped startup.
So counting how many hours you’ve been working in a field is the exact mistake that most people make. Gladwell’s book has reinforced that confusion.