This is the sixth installment in my series about the development of Anders Ericsson’s theory of deliberate practice. Let’s be clear: It’s not just about 10,000 hours.
In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published Outliers: The Story of Success, in which Gladwell wrote: “researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”1
In 2012, in an article titled “Piecing Together Performance” published in the APS Observer (the journal of the Association for Psychological Science), Eric Jaffe wrote:
Ericsson and his colleagues found in a 1993 study that professional musicians had accumulated about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over the course of a decade. The results became the basis of Ericsson’s deliberate practice theory of elite performance, also called the 10,000 hour rule.
Ericsson did not take kindly to this characterization of deliberate practice.
In a fairly terse rejoinder, Ericsson stated:
Jaffe’s (2012, p. 13) article discusses recent research on one of the longstanding issues in Psychology, namely “the roles of natural endowment and hard work in human performance” (Jaffe, 2012, p. 13). It goes on to state that “Ericsson and his colleagues found in a 1993 study that professional musicians had accumulated about 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over the course of a decade. The results became the basis of Ericsson’s deliberate practice theory of elite performance, also called the 10,000 hour rule.” (Jaffe, 2012, p. 13). With these two sentences Jaffe reinforces misconceptions in some popularized books and internet blogs that incorrectly infer a close connection between deliberate practice and the “10,000 hour rule”. In fact, the 10,000 hour rule was invented by Malcolm Gladwell (2008, p. 40) who stated that “researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.” Gladwell cited our research on expert musicians as a stimulus for his provocative generalization to a magical number. Our research found that the best violinists reported having spent a remarkably large number of hours engaged in solitary practice when, in fact, 10,000 hours was the average of the best group; indeed most of the best musicians had accumulated substantially fewer hours of practice at age 20. Our paper found that the attained level of expert music performance of students at an international level music academy showed a positive correlation with the number of solitary practice hours accumulated in their careers and the gradual improvement due to goal-directed deliberate practice. In contrast, Gladwell (2008) does not even mention the concept of deliberate practice.
The Takeaways
- Deliberate Practice Is NOT a “10,000-Hour Rule”. Ericsson’s research found that the most elite violinists averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. Many top performers had accumulated far fewer hours. The focus of the research was on goal-directed, deliberate practice as the key to skill acquisition, not a fixed hour requirement.
- Deliberate Practice, Not Hour Counts, Drives Elite Performance. Ericsson’s theory of deliberate practice emphasizes quality and structure of practice, not the number of hours. Superior performance results from sustained, goal-oriented, deliberate practice, which varies in time among individuals. The “10,000-hour rule” oversimplifies this concept, misleading people to believe that simply accumulating hours guarantees mastery.
The Payoff
If you’ve made it this far and were born after 1980, you know you want this, straight from Wendy’s YouTube channel:
1 Gladwell discusses the 10,000-Hour Rule in Chapter Two. The quoted language can be found on page 40.
Eric Jaffe’s article from the APS Observer (“Piecing Together Performance”) can be found here. Note: The online version includes updates made after the original print edition. (It does appear, however, that the original language criticized by Anders Ericsson remains as originally published.)
Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers can be found here. It can be purchased from Amazon here. (I earn no commission. I’m not trying to make any money through this blog.)
Anders Ericsson’s response to Jaffe’s article (which also references Malcolm Gladwell’s description of Ericsson’s deliberate practice) can be found here.
Comments