I find this to be a severely lacking refutation of Gladwell’s point. The main argument being that Ericsson, who collected the data which Gladwell cites to, disagrees with his point. Seeing that the average expert has 10,000 hours of practice in their field a reasonable conclusion is that you should try to practice 10,000 hours if you want to become an expert. Just because Ericsson disagrees with that doesn’t mean it’s not a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
But Ericsson’s research found that one group of expert violinists averaged 10,000 hours. Another group of “expert” violinists averaged 5,000 hours, and other numbers he cites for expertise range from 500 to 25,000. So really, it’s generalizing from “you should have 10,000 hours of practice by the time you’re 20 if you want an international career as a violinist” to “you should get 10,000 hours of practice if you want to be an expert in anything”.…
Yeah, I think this passes the common sense test as well. It’d be quite suspicious if it took 10,000 hours to get to the top of the field of any discipline, regardless of the relative competitiveness or difficulty of different disciplines.
On the other hand, I think frontier’s point is good as well. If you don’t have any data, it’s reasonable to use the average as a rule of thumb. I think the real point of Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule is “It’s almost certainly going to take a ton of practice to become an expert at the thing, and you should expect and relish that.”
I find this to be a severely lacking refutation of Gladwell’s point. The main argument being that Ericsson, who collected the data which Gladwell cites to, disagrees with his point. Seeing that the average expert has 10,000 hours of practice in their field a reasonable conclusion is that you should try to practice 10,000 hours if you want to become an expert. Just because Ericsson disagrees with that doesn’t mean it’s not a perfectly reasonable conclusion.
But Ericsson’s research found that one group of expert violinists averaged 10,000 hours. Another group of “expert” violinists averaged 5,000 hours, and other numbers he cites for expertise range from 500 to 25,000. So really, it’s generalizing from “you should have 10,000 hours of practice by the time you’re 20 if you want an international career as a violinist” to “you should get 10,000 hours of practice if you want to be an expert in anything”.…
Yeah, I think this passes the common sense test as well. It’d be quite suspicious if it took 10,000 hours to get to the top of the field of any discipline, regardless of the relative competitiveness or difficulty of different disciplines.
On the other hand, I think frontier’s point is good as well. If you don’t have any data, it’s reasonable to use the average as a rule of thumb. I think the real point of Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule is “It’s almost certainly going to take a ton of practice to become an expert at the thing, and you should expect and relish that.”