The 10,000 hour rule
I have always been fascinated by extraordinary people and what makes them who they are. Is talent born? Is it an innate ability? Is it pure genius? Is there something that separates the experts and geniuses of the world from ordinary people, in which ordinary people cannot achieve no matter how hard they try?
A couple of months ago, I went to the bookstore and there was a book that caught my eye, although it only had a white cover with black font and a simple bronze star in the upper right corner. It was the title, which you may have heard before, called Outliers – The Story of Success – by Malcolm Gladwell. Before I fell asleep yesterday, the book was on my desk and I flipped through it, rereading one of the most insightful chapters I’ve come across in a long time, called the 10,000 hour rule.
The chapter describes the journey process of how one becomes a world class expert. A world-class expert can be generally defined as someone who is widely known to be the best in the class, to be the best, to be able to perform in a way that separates them from everyone else, especially at an age that nobody waiting. for.
For example, he talks about how there was a study comparing average student violinists, with good student violinists, with the best student violinists, students who had the potential to be world-class soloists.
By the age of five, all of these students were practicing about 2-3 hours a week, about 20-30 minutes a day. At the age of eight, while the average and good students were still practicing at the same pace, the best began to excel, playing 6 hours a week by age nine, roughly 45 minutes a day. Then they started playing 8 hours a week at twelve, about 1 hour a day, 16 hours a week at fourteen, about 2 hours a day, and by the age of twenty, they were playing 30 hours a day. the week, about 4 hours. a day, just by playing a musical instrument.
He goes on to talk about the Beatles, possibly one of the greatest rock bands in history. He tells the story of how, before coming to the United States, they had already been playing together for seven years. This was a period of time where they started out as a high school band and grew into a popular public band. But it all started with a lucky chance through random people connections that took them from playing in London to playing for strip clubs in Germany.
For example, in Liverpool, London, the Beatles had only done 1-hour sessions for the public, but in Hamburg, Germany, they had to play many times during 8-hour sessions, 7 nights a week. They usually played around 5-6 hours a night on stage every day. Even before going to the States, they had already performed live some 1,200 times, much more than many bands can play on stage in their entire career.
The chapter talks about the richest person on the planet today: Bill Gates. How he came to create a software program that is used by almost every person on the planet who owns a computer, Windows, is not a genius way of working, but an incredible amount of work to get to that point.
Bill had the opportunity to use learning programming on a timesharing computer system in eighth grade, something most Americans didn’t even have access to at the time, which was around the late 1960s, since that had just been invented.
During a seven-month period as a high school student, Bill averaged eight hours a day and seven days a week in the computer lab. All he did was program, program, program; it was his obsession. He would go there at night, he would go there on weekends, and on rare occasions he and his friends didn’t program for 20 or 30 hours a week.
Between 8th grade and the end of your senior year of high school, these 5 years, you had experience with programming at a timesharing terminal, you had experience working in C-Cubed offices, you had experience working in a computer center at the University from Washington for ISI (Information Sciences Inc.) sometimes working from 3 to 6 in the morning, and had experience working for a technology company TRW as a programmer.
People who hear that anyone who deliberately drops out of Harvard is crazy, but the people who make these kinds of decisions know exactly what they’re doing. They know something millions of people don’t know. At the time, when Bill dropped out of Harvard as a sophomore, he had already been programming nonstop for seven years. To say that he was hesitant to start his own software company out of his life’s passion, instead of studying more in school, it would be crazy not to do it for a person like him.
And what do the best violinists in the world, the Beatles and Bill Gates have in common? Yes, they are the best at what they do, they are famous, and more often than not, they are rich, but for a reason. These people spend hours practicing, starting from a young age, and by the time they reach their twenties, they have accumulated a length of practice time that most people never reach: 10,000 hours.
This is the number that experts say is needed to achieve true mastery. And all of these people took advantage of a lucky opportunity given to them at that time or created their own opportunity through endless practice, something that at first sight no one would know until they demonstrated their talents.
So what can the rule of 10,000 teach us? It teaches us that if we want to be the best at something, at the top of our game, it’s not about special talent. It’s about putting in hours and hours of practice until it’s something that just becomes a part of us.
And even if we’re at an age where we think it’s too late, it’s never really too late to learn something new or be extremely good at something. All the people above started taking about thirty minutes a day to do something, which increased to an hour a day, then two hours a day, and so on.
From composers like Mozart to legendary chess players like Bobby Fischer, these geniuses didn’t start out as geniuses. It took about 10 years of 10,000 hours for them to become what they are. Studies show that there is no such evidence that the “geniuses” most of us think of are born with magical, innate talent. They just practice much, much, much more than everyone else doing the same thing.
An ordinary person may see an expert as someone “out of his depth”, but an expert sees an ordinary person and knows exactly how much hard work he has put in to get where he is. So I guess the question is: all those who want to be “the best”, those who want to be gurus, teachers, experts, to be at the top, are they willing to seriously commit, work, training; All this to accumulate some 10,000 hours of practice to be at the top, to be the best, to be the next genius?