10,000 Hours

In his 2008 super-hot book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell writes about a phenomenon that’s apparently quite well-known in the fields of neurology and the study of genius. It’s called the 10,000 Hour Rule. According to neurologist Daniel Levitin, “It seems it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”

Researchers first stumbled across this rule in a study of violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music in the early 1990s. Students were divided into three broad groups. The first composed those students whose performance and esteem by their professors seemed to indicate they would become top-notch musicians, stars in their field. The second group consisted of those deemed to become very good, but not top-notch. Second chairs in symphonies, that sort of thing. The third group were good, but only good enough to perhaps pursue careers as music teachers, not soloists or symphony members.

What was the main difference between the three groups?

Members of all three began playing their instruments at the same age, around five years old. For the first few years, most practiced the same amount, about two or three hours a week. Then, around age eight, a major difference revealed itself. Those students who eventually wound up in the first group began practicing more than those in the second group. And those in the second group began practicing more than those in the third group. So much so that by age twenty, the elite group members had 10,000 hours of total cumulative practice under their belts. The second group averaged about 8,000 hours, while the third hovered at about 4,000.

The researchers realized that 10,000 hours was a magic number. They did not find any “amateur” musicians who had practiced that much and not achieved success and recognition, nor had they found any virtuosi who practiced much less. 10,000 hours of practice seems to be the minimum requirement for mastery.

Just how much is 10,000 hours?

It’s 4.8 years’ worth of 40 hour work weeks. Round that up to an even five years if you plan on taking two-week vacations every year.

But most of us, especially us adults, can’t chunk off that much time. How about three hours a day, say, after the children are in bed, seven days a week? Forgo the teevee, any communication with the wife, etc? Well, at this rate, with no cheating or compromising, mastery will come after nine years and six weeks of practice.

What were you doing nine years and six weeks ago? The first week of January, 2001? Hmmm? Who were you with, where were you living, what were you doing for a paycheck? What would you like to have mastered? What subject or what skill? If you started then, you’d be a virtuoso now.

And it’s not just music and musicians we’re talking about. It’s practically anything. Hockey, basketball, ice skating. Chess. Computers. Painting. Anything that ends with –ology. They’ve even studied “master criminals,” and the 10,000 Rule still holds.

Is there anything you’ve been practicing or studying that you’re part of the way there? Maybe only a thousand hours in? A hobby, or an interest from school? Or are you a master in your field, whatever that may be? If so, do you think you’ve surpassed the 10,000 hours of diligent, directed study and practice?

A personal example? Okay. I started writing as a kid, an unfinished fantasy novella and two or three short stories by the age of twelve. But it lay dormant for twenty or so years, and I didn’t get back into it until about 2002. So in the past eight years, I’ve spent, approximately:

300 hours on my novel The Whale of Cortary
300 hours on my novel Kirana
150 hours on 15 short stories
50 hours on several unfinished novellas and short stories
40 hours reading how-to-write books and magazine articles
40 hours brainstorming ideas, outlines, settings, characters
500 hours on blog postings over the past two years

Which comes to 1,380 hours. Oh dear. It seems I’m quite a ways away from mastering this thing called “writing.” Guess I’ll just have to keep plugging along.

One thing the 10,000 Rule does not address is why one person gets more out of a practice session than another. So while the Rule seems to set a bar for quantitative time one has to put in for mastery, there is a certain innate ability that most certainly comes into play.

Which I find both relieving and exciting. There’s still hope for a lazy, distracted, much-too-much-in-demand slacker like me.