I don't think Gladwell is a particularly insightful guy, but as someone who has actually read a couple of his books, I feel like the "10,000 hours" thing is frequently misrepresented.

The claim isn't "put in 10k hours and you'll magically become an expert". It's "if you want to become an expert, you have to put in 10k hours". Necessary but not sufficient.

The 10k hours number is also dubious. It just happens to be the average number of hours students at some special violin school have spent in solitaire practice by the time they turn 18 (or what ever age they apply for the school).

Another missing point, and this happens frequently also in rigorous treatment-control studies, is the heterogeneity of responses to treatment. Say, 10k hours might be the average deliberate practice time needed to reach "expert level" (not true), but for some it can take 1k hours, for others 15k, for others infinite time (but they can drop off), and so on.

I also read that specific book/chapter where he discusses 10 000 hours, and the implication based on his bill gates and hockey example, were as you said, that it is a necessary condition. And those examples in particular I think point out how having had the time and experience to get ahead of your "cohort" (people of a similar age or time period)

Not necessarily. You can become an expert in your self-defined programming language without putting in 10k hours.

You probably need ~10k hours in programming in general. Just a lot of the skill transfers over in that case.

The feels more like a violinist learning a new song, and in this case one they made up, rather than learning an entirely new skillset.

You can become an expert in cooking a hot dog without 10,000 hours of practice.

Has anyone ever recognize "expert" skill in hot dog cooking? Cooking, certainly, but hot dog cooking?

What does it even mean to be an expert? What are we allowed or not allowed to be an expert in? Who's the judge that sets what fields you can be an expert in? Is there a range of expertise? Do I have to be in the top 10% of people in a field? The top 2%?

The whole idea of being an expert is an arbitrary social designation backed up by hogwash. We think we know what it means but it's really just hand-waving.

10,000 is a round number representing a large fraction of a young person’s life, ~20 hours a week for 10 years. It seems significant because we assume talented young people can be experts if they spend a lot of time on something, but it really just reflects the criteria chosen for defining experts and time on a subject.

A prerequisite of becoming a Doctor for example is learning how to read, but that’s not considered part of the time commitment. Recursively when considering how long it takes to be an expert Heart Surgeon there is a tendency to ignore how long it takes to become a Doctor.

Ericsson's main point is that talent isn't as important as a lot of people, including other experts in the field, think. What matters is identifying your weaknesses and training specifically to improve those, often with the help of a coach. Just doing something for a long time doesn't necessarily make you great at it.

Then again, weakness of that argument is that all people in the study qualify as talented.

That falls into the same trap of ignoring all the time perfecting prerequisite skills. An Olympic marathon runner needed to get good at balancing before they could learn to walk, and then very good at walking etc.

Similarly, 10,000 being a round number is how it was chosen arbitrarily by the Japanese for the 10,000 steps thing that has since caught on globally.

> 10,000 being a round number is how it was chosen arbitrarily by the Japanese

According to a 2019 article from Harvard Health, “10,000 steps” was a marketing term for hardware made by a Japanese company. (Not sure if the original root goes back to Japanese folklore, but the article implies it doesn’t.)

> Dr. Lee discovered that the origins of the number go back to 1965, when a Japanese company made a device named Manpo-kei, which translates to "10,000 steps meter." “The name was a marketing tool,” she says. [0]

[0] https://www.health.harvard.edu/blog/10000-steps-a-day-or-few...

And 10,000 things