I agree, I would consider myself a successful musician if I can sustain a comfortable living off of it. Nothing complex either, afford an apartment, afford a working vehicle, and having a savings account.
The problem with the 10k hr rule is that it's severely misunderstood and taken out of context. In Outliers, Gladwell mentions the rule as part of an exploration of "what makes the greats great". He doesn't state it as an absolute or isolated fact. Also, the rule actually says it takes 10k hrs of DELIBERATE PRACTICE to master A SKILL. People ignore the deliberate practice part and think it just means "if I play the guitar for 10k hrs, I'll be a master!" and that's far from true. I'd also say it's hard to define what "a skill" means. I, for one, think songwriting is not just a skill. It is a very complex activity that requires a series of skills. Also, I'm not sure I agree that having a number one song means you've mastered songwriting. I'm not trying to diminish the merit of your achievement, which I admire and respect (hey, who am I to question you?), but we must consider there are some very crappy songs that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and reached #1, and I wouldn't say they're all masterpieces, as much as they have commercial success. Anyways, the rule is debatable and almost impossible to conclusively confirm or deny, but it makes much more sense when it's well explained, well understood and not taken out of context.
Yeah, there are some amazing musical acts who've never had a song reach #1 on the Billboard chart (like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Bruce Springsteen) yet it's stiil obvious they mastered their craft. Whether a song was a hit at the time of its release matters a lot less than whether that song has stood the test of time.
"deliberate practice" is still quite vague. This rule of his has too many holes in it to be taken seriously. The closest thing you could say when concerning duration to reach mastery is. "It depends"
The whole point of the 10,000-hour argument is that to master something (not necessarily be famous) you need continuous practice while seeking out advice from experts and new experiences and reflecting on your work so you can adjust. One cannot blindly work at something incorrectly and become great at it. One must care and allow that care to guide you.
What counts it's what you do within each hour. You can mindlessly practice excercises for 3 hours, and just half an hour being fully dedicated, concious about what you're doing; and it will be worlds of difference. And luck within this also, maybe you meet some teacher that changes your perspective on things, or guides you in some way that will take you less time for some things. Past experiences also help a lot. Before studying music, I've was a software programmer, and I went 2 years to Math college. The logical thinking I've develop over the years helped me understand and analyze sheet music, and a lot of theory concepts, patterns. And I've noticed with my mates at music school, some things I find easy to understand and conceptualize, find "the math", the logic, behind it. And I see my friends struggle, like they don't see some of the patterns, or really think about them at all.
I agree, I think a great teacher can make a HUGE difference. I wasted a lot of time trying to learn on my own getting bits and pieces from more advanced players and trying to cop licks off Albums
Mastering a skill does not automatically mean success! Hard work does not automatically mean success! Having the right skill, at the right level, at the right time and in the right place and be willing to work hard, together with the confidence to take a risk, will probably result in success of some sort.
you are correct, they - he is making a mistake, he is confusing MASTERY with SUCCESS and genius, I am a great fan of him but he is not a psychologist and it is not his field. Besides, I am a great fan of his kids too but having absolute pitch does not mean being a great musician at all. I am sure they are , but it is like being strong and being a great boxer. Strenght is not enough, body builders are not boxers.
Right time, right place. So critical. How many undiscovered talents are out there in the world? Skill, ability, talent, confidence, hard work, and myriad other things still don’t guarantee success or being discovered. I don’t believe we ever truly master anything.
It's not just 10,000 hours of doing the activity. It's 10,000 hours of DELIBERATE practice. That's the word which is often left out when people quote the 10k hour rule. Deliberate practice is purposeful, systematic. A deliberate practice session has a specific purpose. It means you strategically choose what you do to tackle your weaknesses, you practice out of your comfort zone, you practice at the edge of your abilities in order to push your skills a step further. And of course, 10k hours is just a rule of thumb. It gives you a rough idea of what it actually takes to become really really good at something.
I agree with you. The 10,000 hour rule is bogus. I have played guitar since I was 8 years old. Im 64 now and haven't mastered the instrument.Can I play well? YES Can I play like the best of the best Hell no. Yet I have seen young children in their early teens who can shred on guitar and sing too!!! They just have that special thing. "Talent" is real.
Same here! I took up guitar when I was 15 . I'm 55 now and on a really, really good day I'd describe myself as competent. I'd say I improved when I realized that the only way I'd ever become even a halfway decent shredder would be to mix cocaine into instant coffee, eat it with a spoon and wash it down with a gallon of Red Bull. Translation: it ain't happening! Talent is *definitely* real...!
I guess if you just played the Pentatonic scale for 50 years you may "Master" it. lol :) Of course, I like many others wanted to learn and play songs of many Genre's I started with Blues, ala Bluesbreakers moved into Cream then Allman Bros and Skynyrd all the Classic rock stuff then Van Halen blew my mind and the shredders came Satriani , Malmsteen and so on. I also realized I didnt have the finger dexterity or consistancy to get through a long fast tune without mistakes and it seemed NO amount of practice helped that. Its a frustrating thing to want to Master something you LOVE then find out you dont have what it takes. Ha Ha ask any Football, Basketball, Hockey player who was a star in school but couldnt make PRO. We are not alone as Guitar players.
I've been playing over half a century myself. There seems to be this ridiculous mindset that if you aren't a "PRO" or play like a "PRO" then you are just wasting your time. Music has been my mistress through a long and sometimes difficult journey; sometimes comforting, sometimes mocking, often (mostly) frustrating. It is part of the fabric that is me. Will I ever 'master' the guitar? No. Will I be it's slave trying to reach impossible heights? Nope, that's not happening either. But unlike a 'pro' I don't have to play when I don't feel like it. There is a joy to picking up an instrument just because you feel like it- not because you are compelled to practice because _______________ (fill in the blank).
@Bob Boitt You build good finger dexterity by working on your technique. No one is born with amazing finger dexterity. What you practice is more important than how much you practice. You sound like someone who just didn't have enough determination to follow their dream
I stopped playing for a couple of years. When i started playing again, my level started to increase radically. I found that what i learned in the past i assimilated and digested and i could see things more clearly and analyse what i was doing.
@1234 yeah i agree, but if they are doing wrong in that particular thing. they would understand the mistakes instantly ,cause he is investing time in that thing,
@@hellomotherfuckers53 He is talking about technical aspect of a musical instrument. I can tell you based on personal experiences, he is correct 100%. Learning how to play the notes, or being able to read sheet music is not enough, you have to be able to interpret it, you have to be able express it, you have to be able to infuse emotions and thoughts in your music...the best way to understand what I am trying to say is to have a sheet music played by a computer (very easy to set up), and then to compare it to live musicians performing it..there'll be quite extreme difference even an average person would be able to tell apart and, I dare to say, they'd like a live performance better.
it is precisely because mastery can not be defined that the 10, 000 rules is correct. In fact, he is confusing MASTERY (expert) with SUCCESS (gaining from your activity). I am a great fan of his, but neuroscience is not his job and the book " Frans Johansson's book " The Click Moment."""is wrong for making the same confusion between mastery and success.
andrea inzaghi No, the 10,000 "rule" is not correct. It was based on guesswork and faulty research (like when people try to diagnose long dead people with Asperger's or whatever). It's exactly as valid as the Meyers-Briggs personality test. Neuroscience has nothing to do with any of it "precisely because mastery cannot be defined". Don't talk out your ass.
Except his definition is 100% wrong. He confuses mastery with commercial success. Rembrandt, rich in his youth, could not sell in later years despite maybe being the greatest master in history because morons did not support him. At times, Leonardo had to do other things to support himself (and wrote famous letter about it). Monet was an absolute master, and broke, before his paintings started to sell. Horrible definition equating dollars earned to Mastery. And a lot of hacks make fortunes.
I had worked in a bookstore for about 18,000 hours when Gladwell's third book, Outliers, arrived and a stack was immediately placed on the bestseller table due to the success of his previous books, The Tipping Point(2000) and Blink (2005). Each of those had a stack in permanent residence on our paperback bestsellers table. I had sampled them way back when, but had not been drawn in. One of my colleagues and I were stocking the table the day Outliers arrived. We had never discussed these perennial sellers. I pointed to The Tipping Point and Blink, and asked her, "What do you think these?" Her two word reply: "Mental popcorn."
You work at your own pace. Some of the top virtuoso musicians reported practicing for 10 hours and others for 2 hours. It really depends on the individual. Some people are faster learners than others. Find your own pace and work at it and practice and you’ll get there! It’s not about talent but hard work and dedication. Of course there are people that learn really fast and are way better than you in far less time but if you work 10x as hard as they do you’ll exceed them. And remember there’s always gonna be someone better than you so don’t get discouraged and give up.
I honestly don't think you can become a 'virtuoso' by practicing 2 hours a day. Not trying to to nitpick on your post. I get your point that you should go at your own pace. You may become very good with 2 hours a day, but never a genius.
Michael Park I was just giving a point . You’re absolutely right . Few if not none have achieved virtuoso status with just 2 hours of practice everyday. I was making a point by putting an exaggerated range. I’ve watched interviews by concert pianists , and some of them say anything after 5 hours is too much and some say 10 hours. So yeah.
Michael Park you don't need to be a genius. Having pleasure when making music and considering yourself adequate is enough when we accept most humans fall in the middle of the talent spectrum
Sena Erdem yes exactly! And I don’t think all virtuosos are geniuses . To me geniuses are innovators. Most Virtuosos just have high instrumental prowess and dazzling technique on their instrument but don’t really do anything new with it (Well to be fair some do) .
Really? Do you really believe that if you work 10x harder than someone else you'll be better than them? Is that a fact? Honestly, I truly wish that's how the world worked - it would be a much fairer world - but unfortunately there is no guarantee that you will be better than them. I could have worked 10x harder than Michael Jordan and I was not going to surpass him. I get the positive thinking, but let's not be unrealistic either.
10.000 hours of effective practice. Not just practice. I play my instrument about 4 hours a day, but i don't think that I get any more than 1.30 hours of hyperfocused, effective practice a day. I have goals and practice towards them, but some goals I reach before others. I think this is because those are the goals I was truly focused on while practising. My point is that I think it's a stretch to just count all the hours spent on an activity as good practice, you have to take in to consideration that a lot of those hours were spent not as effectively as they could have been.
I disagree with your premise. You didn't master the art of record producing the day you achieved a platinum record. You mastered it long before that. Having a platinum record require a lot of things to come together that are mostly out of your control ... the right songs, the right artist, the right moment in time. It's not all on your mastery of production. Other examples you offer contain the same flaw in logic. I think the 10,000 hour rule is more right than wrong.
yes, but the problem isn't with his lingo. it's in the nature of sociology. a lot of it is coming up with a legit (enough) way to quantify something that generally is undefinable. you're both right, but so is he. and he had to pick some defining trait. that's were the sketchyness of the 10,000 hour rule comes into play. it is very easy to pick you're subject and then set the definition of mastery at the some 10,000 hour spot they achieved. i could do it for 5,000, or 1,000, or 20,000. the neat thing about 10,000 is the rough amount of time that takes is a completely 'doable' time period, that loads of examples can be fabricated from. (as we see by comparing it to rick's examples).
Which brings us to the question, "how do you define mastery?" Is the 10,000 hour rule even a relevant definition of mastery? According to the study Gladwell got his numbers from, the 10,000 hours only appeared for musicians. They got 10 years for chess and music, and between 16.5 to 22 for science and literature.
On the other hand, there's also that thing about the beginner's hunger. It is commonly associated with the energy, drive and intensity of youth. You see how often it is that the debut album or first batch of albums by a band hapens to be their best? Later on in their careers they would only try to revive that power but very few succeed. It is the sort of thing that happens in the moment and cannot be replicated even if one later on tries to redo it with presumably more experience/ skill. For some reason nothing can beat the first shot. Yes, practicing a good long time to the point that you become very well-versed in your craft is perhaps a very logical way of looking at how virtuosity is developed -- but there's also that something else, that other domain which does not necessarily correlate with how much time was put into doing something. Furthermore, there is that issue of getting "past your prime". You see, there will always be a point of decline even if you continue to practice hard. This leads me to surmise that time spent in honing skills as a prerequisite for becoming really accomplished perhaps only tells a fraction of the story...
I've had very similar experiences, albeit in some different fields. Playing guitar started as a passion with zero foresight or vision. In the beginning I just wanted to experience creating certain tones, which meant endlessly repeating riffs and tweeking knobs. This drove my dad nuts and he finally said: "maybe you should learn to play songs". I took it to heart and started working on chords and changes. Then a new friend taught me the minor pentatonic scale and I suddenly "saw" the connection between riffs/soloing and chord progressions and began to learn songs and write; that seemed to happen overnight. Next up, my wife got tired of me experiementing with bands in basements and told me to get out and play, even if it meant solo shows. When I did, I realized three things very quickly: 1) I needed to learn a lot more songs 2) I needed to change how I play (mostly right hand technique) in order to sound "bigger" than just one guy. 3) I needed to learn more about singing technique/s. This also seemed to happen relatively quickly. For me, each improvement came with a kind of compulsive desire to practice (sometimes orderly and/or with guidance, often without either), some type of imagined larger context or vision, and access to technology and/or information that enhanced my experience. Each of these elements were present when substantial gains were made in my experience.
Great topic for discussion. I feel there has been some misinterpretation by some. Gladwell doesn't say "10,000 hours and you become a master at your 'thing", the research across a number of case studies pointed to approximately that number. Obviously it will depend on the individual, he does acknowledge that. Also the definition of 'Mastery' is a very grey area. There is no way (in my opinion) that having a disc go Platinum, or scoring a number 1 hit is the benchmark of compositional mastery. That was achieved way before that point. The other major misconception from a lot of the comments below is that Gladwell does not saying just doing the 'thing' for 10,000 hours makes you a master, but deliberate, focused practice with constant reflection and planning. I would bet that the large numbers quoted by Rick and others below could easily be trimmed by a significant amount if time taken 'noodling', making a coffee, bathroom trips, and over -repetition of things while practicing were taken off the number. I am currently participating in a friend's Doctoral research on the topic. As part of his thesis he has 4 people undergoing 'skill development', one with coding, 2 on musical instruments and a golfer. I am learning the Chapman Stick (having specialized and 'mastered' the trombone, playing professionally in orchestras and West End shows) and I am up to 457 hours (I still suck! I have videos on my page at various stages of the time). It's an interesting process. I am part of the 'cross-over theory' section where skills in a related area should carry over to the learning of the new area. The golfer started literally from nothing and at approx. 9000 hours in he is applying for his PGA tour card. Sorry for the long post. A great topic. Rick, your stuff it literally my favorite thing on the internet.
Paul Wright for sure, putting in the time will bare more fruit than not. Some people get so hung up on words and numbers they miss the point. 10,000 hours is not a detailed engineering rule to land a person on the moon. It is a thought that putting in the time helps to bring results.
Adding to this clarification, the premise is not that 10k hours of even high quality practice inevitably leads to mastery. Rather, the whole concept was an argument against the idea of people being natural born genius prodigies. At least in some fields, you may need a natural predisposition (aka talent) in addition to the hours of practice. 10k hours of good quality practice is necessary but not sufficient for mastery. That said, I have always had some of the same objections to this idea that Rick laid out. First, there is obviously a difference in the rate of accumulation of mastery in some fields between young minds and adults or even older kids. Many skills can't be mastered by adults at all. Then you have the question of what counts as a field for purposes of mastery. I am am attorney. Does it take 10k hours to master the field of lawyering? And if so, what counts? Practice as a licensed attorney? What about the 10k hours of training and education during law school? Or is lawyering a combination of several skills that all need their own 10k hour requirement (mastering the English language, logical reasoning, the skill of researching, oratory, and learning the procedural and substantive law itself)? In golf, do you need to spend 10k hours practicing golf or 10k each on driving, putting, irons, woods, wedges, etc.? I assume there are answers to these questions in the underlying research that Gladwell draws from, but his book didn't give me much indication of what they are.
The 10,000 hour number is not only approximate, is an average of drastically variability in the amount of practice required.Ericssons own data showed expertise can be aquired in as little as 2000 hours, or not at all, even after 26 000 hours of deliberate practice. What severely complicates this matter, is that the concept of "deliberate practice" is inherently poorly defined.The definition can only be approximated in practice, as none of the tenets are accurately quantifiable. For example, what is feedback? If I swing a tennis racket at a ball and subsequently miss, my own observation of the missed hit fullfils the definition of "feedback".Hence we can see that nobody ever practices without feedback, and subsequent adjustments to their approach. If a coach gives the feedback, what assurance is there that the nature of their feedback will be beneficial in any way? What if the student cannot improve by taking on board the feedback from a reputeable coach? All in all, the concepts promoted by Anders Ericsson are riddled with flaws, and not very well supported by the evidence. The evidence very strongly supports inherited factors as crucial determinants of ability, a fact Ericsson refused to acknowledge during his career.I believe Anders suffered from an obsession, due to being brainwashed into this belief by his father.
I've seen incredibly hard-working, talented friends spend their entire lives chasing passions and get nothing and I've seen talent-less hacks show up and be given careers. Because we live in a word of "gurus" and survivor bias it's very hard not to beat yourself up over lack of success. I've had success through hard work but goddamn do I realize how much luck and circumstance have played.
I followed this 10,000 rule for Piano skill in about 4 years. Yes, I works like a charm if you do it right. Playing piano required muscle memory, and definitely need good amount of practise. I put 4 to 5 hours a day for practise and am happy with the result. It's a mindset goal rather than exact amount of 10,000 hours. It varies on many variables such as the quality of practice, teacher involvement, time of practice, thought process in practice, etc. The more variables involved the more skill and less hours I got.
Ericsson does not like his work mentioned by Gladwell ;) K. Anders Ericsson wrote in "The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists". "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* " If you need a silly vague formula to motivate you, you're doing something wrong! Happy New Year!
Devane2012 Thank you, I was about to say the same thing. Malcolm Gladwell's interpretation of Ericsson's work basically amounts to 'click bait' in the form of a book.
Justin Cauble Another of his shitty books is Blink, the crux of which that if you repeat something many many times, you'll eventually get to a point where you no longer have to consciously think about a process. Legend has it that he asked people walking in a park if they know how they're going to 'take the next step'.
Exactly my thoughts. My friend introduced me to these stuff when I was younger. Nowadays if I find anything technical (book/ted talk) I first find out the authors credentials. If he/she's just a journalist I will look up the original source material or move on.
I think you may be missing the point here Rick. Gladwell is merely throwing down a generalized view of mastery across various disciplines...and is attempting to provide a measure...that will produce his result if stretched across x number of areas of mastery... Just as his book “Outliers”...alludes...this standard will not apply to everything...and there will be “outliers” that will demand much more time.....”quantum physics” comes to mind...or anything that possibly changes over time...through new knowledge or technology...so that you end up “chasing it” well across the 10,000 hour benchmark....
Rick, your RUclips content is great, and worthwhile. Substance gives you staying power. I subscribe to too many channels, but yours continues to reward. I’m posting to thank you, but also to throw shade on whoever is hitting thumbs down on your videos. Anybody in the music business has to have a thick skin to withstand reviews. But I’m left wondering what factor petty jealousies of other musicians play in all this. Seems like, no matter what the level - local bands to top tier professionals - the music business is rife with insecurity and envy. “Nothing you can do that can’t be done, nothing you can sing that can’t be sung...” I’ve never been one to pick favorite colors or rank great efforts, but something about this Beatles song resonates more and more with me. Thanks again.
What about the 1 Second Rule? You know, the amount of time it takes me to like your videos. You're the best dude on YT! You've taught me more than I'll ever know. Have a Beato New Year!
I completely agree with the comments on distinguishing mastery and success. This is my attempt to define success. I think we can all agree on what is mastery without much debate: being better than almost everyone in some skill. It's like a competition, you wanna be at the top 1% of the class, then 1 in 1000, then 1 in 100,000, etc. But success is much much harder to pin down. Here is a definition that works for me: success is achieving your goals. So if you set the bar low enough you can become automatically successful, right? The trick is that achieving easy goals in not at all satisfying. Success that does not bring satisfaction and foster self-esteem is not complete. I think when we call someone extremely successful what we implicitly mean is that that person set their dreams/vision as their goals and achieved specifically those goals. You know the question "what would you do if you knew you could not fail"; if you can answer for yourself it reveals your core values and your vision. The people we think of when we are talking about success are those who looked liked from the outside they set goals in line with their core values and set them without putting any constraints on the goals whether they thought those goals are achievable or not. Being successful in the computer industry may indicate that you are a master entrepreneur, business leader, manager of people, etc; it does not necessarily mean you are a master programmer or designer or engineer. Did Steve Jobs himself invent the products that made Apple the brand that it is or he had an unrelenting crystal clear vision about what he wanted and he was a master at managing talented people to design the products he envisioned? Anyway we can all think of numerous examples on mastery, talent, success, etc that we can dissect. Wow, you are still here 😊
I always took the 10k hour rule as kind of way to de-mystify how someone gets really great at something complex. It takes A LOT OF TIME. Some people think that's just too simple of an answer, and they are sort of right. It doesn't just take time, it takes deliberate practice. That means the person organizes their learning with lesson plans and a good teacher. They don't just stare at a piano for 10k hours and all the sudden they are a master at it. I always took it as encouragement... If I'm not nearly as good at playing drums as I want to be, I can think to myself "well, I'm nowhere near 10k hours of practice, so how can I be that angry at myself that I'm not as good as Neil Peart yet?" Not that I'd be as good as him at 20k hours! But it gives you perspective on talent and ability and the work needed to achieve mastery at something.
To actually master something is impossible, mainly because once you´ve reached the level of a grandmaster you find completely new avenues of attaining even more skill in your selected field of expertise . Same goes for perfection . In short : we humans don´t even live long enough to get close to attaining mastership or perfection in any way or form .
Roughly 10,000 hours combined with talent. Guys like Jaco Pastorius, Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai are/were very talented and obsessed with playing their musical instruments. Remember Vai's 12 hour workout that was published in a magazine years ago? Someone who is not as talented and puts in the hours will improve obviously, but won't become as good as the top guys. Hard work beats talent, but only if talent doesn't work hard.
What is talent though? Can it be defined only as 'not hard work'? It sucks because we can only kinda look at it afterward and say oh there he HAD talent when he began to master the bla bla... When we try to pinpoint it in the beginning it's too easy to lose objectivity, or what we think is talent doesn't go anywhere or lead to anything... There's a compelling argument that the only difference between me and Steve Vai is actual hours of practice as driven by passion. It may not be a nice neat 10000 hours, but we still don't know whether Steve Vai has something that 'most' people don't... except for time + commitment or passion... Intelligence, memory and physical prowess are as important in music as they are anywhere else, so people more 'gifted' in those areas have what... more talent? So it takes less hard work to get to certain level than someone less 'gifted'? I dunno, it's a complex head scratchy mess lol!
_I love this line, _*_"Hard work better talent, but only if talent doesn't work hard."_* Such is true for most *_skill-based_* talents. However, for scholastically or academically or intellectually leaning talents, a large portion to it is attributable to *Nature." Nonetheless, the *Nurture* aspect of honing skills is without argument; and even the _mechanical_ aspects of manipulating math problems, or improving on one's _memory._ If skills, talent, and intelligence primarily spawn from *DNA,* then genetics new field of study called *epigenetics* will surely shed light into _The Great Human Potential Beyond Your DNA!_ In summary, the *10,000-Hour* isn't really a _rule_ as it is more of a _figure of speech_ that *constant and correct practice makes you perfect!* The Rule really is: *No. of Hours of Practice* _is inversely proportional to_ *DNA predisposition to such talent, skills, or intelligence* *S U C C E S S,* however is a relatively *subjective matter* which live in the *_City of Perception._* He actually used to live in the *_State of Rules_* in the *_County of Objectivity._*
Zippy Leroux talent is when someone can do easily what may take time for others. I’ve seen it in too many musicians I grew up with. 2 people pick up an instrument at the same time and one of them just naturally able to create beautiful melodies from thin air while another can just to the solid basics. But no matter where we are we all enjoy music and strive to bring our best when we perform.
Talent is a natural aptitude. We all have them and they're all different. Some kids can start dribbling a basketball almost immediately while others can try for years and still never figure out how to not bounce the ball off their foot.
Honestly, The next Jaco or Steve Vai is playing guitar/bass right now instead of watching youtube videos and that's what separates the greats from the average. In their free-time all they do is play whereas many of us spend our time doing mindless things.
That 10,000 hour thing does seem fishy. It has been debunked by many since then. Maybe he picked a couple of examples of achievers, did a quickie time estimate, decided he liked picking a round number, and thought no one would check. On another subject, where he really lost me was when he cozied up to Nathan Myhrvold, the Microsoft tycoon and severe patent troll, who buys up patents and then sues anyone who has a product that in any way resembles the patent, especially when there's no merit to it. Nice business plan, eh? Nathan invited Gladwell to his compound, wined and dined him, and got Gladwell to write a glowing tribute to him, in which Gladwell quickly dismissed the patent troll accusation with a 1-line non-denial denial. I suppose Gladwell's right about one thing. It takes a long time to be good at stuff. But as you point out very effectively, this concept isn't exactly brand new, nor can it be precise across all activities.
sorry, it has never been debunked. You are confusing mastery with success like the books that claim to have debunked it, and beside, the 10. 000 theory is not so simple. Great fan of him, but he is over simplyfing.
The key is to be passionate and perseverant and put in the work. Also, do things that you have more of a predisposition for. That's not to say we shouldn't strive for things we are not naturally gifted at, but certain things come easier and yield better results.
Learning how to practice deeply and efficiently is the key. You can play a song for 10,000 hours but if you continually make the same mistakes you are only mastering mistakes. Great video! Love it!
Rick,I come from a family who all wanted to learn to play music and did.However,I became the most accomplished player,not because I was the most gifted,but because I spent years and years dedicated to learning. I had to practice ten times as much as one of my brothers in order to master something. Not all players are created equal. If you have a certain gift for a task you advance at a very different rate. All people have to dedicate a certain amount of time,but it is much less for some than others. Talent is everything when it comes to learning.
While i can't necessarily agree nor disagree with that theory,which i heard of some years ago and never knew the origin of(thank you!),i do know that in the years i've been playing,writing performing,etc. ever so often,ill hit these plateaus in my playing where i get "the AHa moment" where a whole lot of information just kind of gels together all at once and sends me further along.these days,it mostly happens in the area of my understanding of theory and composition,which is great for my students.whatever it can be attributed to,be it 10,000 hrs. or prodigious talent or LSD in my earlier years,all i know is its a blessing and a gift to be passed on to those that want to learn.your videos are great,man.keep up the good work.i point all my pupils your way.
The 10 000 hours rule is a rule of the thumb, not an absolute thing. Of course if you are lame, you won't ever be an olympic sprinter, and in many disciplines the competition is so tough (in chess, in music, whatever) that simply mastering the stuff isn't enough, you need to be nearly superhuman. Taking it as a rule of the thumb works fine in the real world: if you spend 10000 hours practicing something, you'll be competent in it and from the POV of the general public, an expert, a master. As a musician, I'll never be as high as you are; however I've worked for years, played on stage or worked in studio with world class bands, made records, etc. Compared to 99.9% of people who can't even play "happy birthday", I'm clearly an expert, a master, though I'll always be ridiculous as a pianist compared to the actual famous "masters".
Thats not totally true. I've seen people sing for years and they still suck at it. It's not their fault though. I give them an "A" for their effort and dedication.
if you learn when you are a children before puberty normally you will master some tecnique, but MASTERY does not equal SUCCESS or GENIUS. Mr Rick Beato is a great person but now he is confusing two different notions.
Undoubtedly it takes thousands of hours to become good at whatever you are trying to achieve. 10,000 hours is not that hard to hit. Five hours a day, for 5 1/2 years. Or, eight hours a day for 3 1/2 years. 10,000 hours is not a bad goal.
Most really good guitarists i know fell asleep with a guitar in their lap every night...waking up when guitar hits the floor....i personally believe 1 hour a day MINIMUM.
I agree with most of your videos. However, I disagree with this video. First of all, Gladwell says that in order for the 10,000 hours to apply the person must have a baseline talent level. Also, there's no guarantee that the rule will work because luck will always be part of the equation. Also, he makes a specific point that spending 10,000 hours is no guarantee of making a meaningful contribution, however, it is a prerequisite. He makes no promise about the 10,000 rule but rather is making a rather profound observation about the baseline of time required in order to make a meaningful contribution in a given field. I tell my students that discipline is the great equalizer. If you have a baseline talent level then achieving a level of greatness is achievable. Now, how that skill is monetized is a completely different issue which is why I find it important talk about professionalism, business, marketing, and etc. It's not just about playing your instrument well its about finding a compatible path in the music industry. I dig your videos. Hopefully, one day I can bring you to The Ohio State University to do a masterclass for our students. Let's talk. Happy New Year!
you are right sir , besides he is confusing mastery - expertise with success, are two very different things. Absolute pitch does not equal becoming a great composer, for instance. Last but not least, some subjects must be learned when you are a children. But that does not contraddict the 10. 000 rule.
Happy New Year Beatians! The thing is everybody is different. People pick up certain things quicker than others. What quantifies mastery? Some of the jazz masters say they're still learning music in their 70s and 80s. Also it is very important what you do with your time. Noodling for 6 hrs a day is unlikely to produce the same results as 1 hour of applied learning. You could develop more in one month with applied, focused learning an hour a day than a year of noodling. Work hard and try to be consistent and the results will begin to show, 3hrs a day for ten years you should at least be very good at what you do!
It is not a RULE. It is a concept. It is not to be taken literally. Nothing changes magically when the odometer rolls over from 9,999 to 10,000. It is also not a measure of the time put in, it is a measure of the effort expended. Grade school/secondary school takes 20,000 hours, but that does not make every graduating senior an expert student. It is also not a measure of success, or expected success. It is about effort and motivation, and getting good at something, which takes time. The takeaway is that: 1) it takes a long time to get good at something (and longer if you don't have the wherewithal in the first place), 2) expect to put in the time and effort if you want to be good at something, and 3) realize that the more effort you expend the better you will get. That is the steak. The idea of thinking of this simplistically like a '10,000 hour rule' is just the sizzle. Marketing. So I agree with Rick, and I do not buy into the literal concept as defined in that way. Gladwell himself probably doesn't either, but he likes that the simplistic literal concept sells books. What I do buy into are the concepts that it actually represents. Teacher TRX sums this up much more succinctly below.
A lot of people think it´s about practice time but it´s not. There´s a lot of talent and intelligence involved. If it was only about time everybody would be a virtuoso. What all this kind of supervirtuoso musicians have in common is that they learn and assimilate in a day what a normal musician would learn in a month. They are very efficient with their practice time and are constantly learning. Talent, intelligence and efficiency > Time. Time has always been the eternal excuse of the not accomplished musician.
Saw an interview with Macca the other day, where he points out that because the Beatles had to play 8 hours a night in Hamburg, they learned thousands of songs to keep it interesting. I think that was the key ingredient to the success of the Beatles - they learned so many songs in so many different styles (think "Taste of Honey" or "Besame Mucho"), it was much easier for them when it came time to write their own songs. So it wasn't the number of hours they practised their craft, it was how they spent the time.
Leo hit the nail on the head. Trying to reverse engineer success is nearly impossible. That's what this bloke in the video tried to do to disprove the 10,000-hour idea. Even people with immense talent need an unknown amount of practice to become masters. Why hasn't there been another Beetles? Another Michael Jackson? Another Elvis? Another John Williams? Certainly, there have been many masters besides these few I mentioned, but there are a whole lot of mystical factors that come into becoming the best of the best. What Gladwell was saying is putting in many hours of deliberate hard work is probably the most common denominator in all cases. Remove the number. Forget about 10,000 hours. If one wants to argue that you can be great or a master without putting in the work, good luck chasing that dream. Here is the bottom line, what difference does it make. If you don't want to put in the time why are you even pursuing that endeavor? Do something else. Because it is all about the doing. That's why people who are great are not concerned about their greatness. They just do. So if you're questioning the 10,000 hours chances are you'll probably never be a master or great at anything. It may just not be who you are. You'll always be average at best. And by definition, that means like most. Not special. Welcome to reality.
I had the headmaster of an arts school in a major city tell me that one must pracctice 8-10 hours a day, seven days a week for ten years in order to become a professional. He then said it requires a devotion of about 60% of that to maintain your level.
One day, Gregg Allman heard his kid brother Duane 'messing around on his guitar. Gregg immediately realized he was the second best guitar man in the family. No art master school necessary.
Malcolm states that the only thing that counts towards the 10,000 hour rule is deliberate practice. Just running scales or mindlessly repeating anything doesn’t count. One could practice 10,000 hours in any discipline, but only spend 2,000 hours in deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is when you’re totally focused and pushing your boundaries. It includes being conscious of what you’re doing and analyzing it, and adjusting what you’re doing accordingly. I agree that 10,000 as a hard and fast number may be misleading. I can say in my own practice that one great benefit of being aware of a standard of hours, be it 10,000 or some other number, is that it motivates me to practice more and to put in time practicing even when I don’t feel motivated, because I feel the need to rack up hours. I just have to be careful to make sure that my hours are quality hours in which I’m really stretching myself and analyzing what I’m actually practicing and how I’m doing it. My point is that even if 10,000 hours isn’t necessarily a verifiable guarantee of success, it motivates one to practice more and more often, and I think that’s a great thing.
Ditto that - picked up guitar at 57, but have a lifetime singing in choirs. Many things like reading music, matching pitch & rhythms, hearing scale degrees/intervals, etc., seem to be "transferable" skills. But playing songs on the guitar, that's all new, and has been a real exciting journey so far. Perhaps that's the point - I have goals for guitar, work toward them, but I could care less about reaching some 'pinnacle' of ability. I do track practice time, but my heart and focus is on real specific tasks; limited number of songs, tone, sound, and techniques - Like Rick's "3 Things To Practice (And 3 More Things To Practice) to Improve Your Guitar Playing Fast".
Another thing that we need to consider also is the industry one is talking about. For example, if one is trying to find success in the music industry, you don't need to be the best to succeed. Having a good personality, good looks, hard work ethic, can all play a bigger role then just your talent alone. At the end of the day, the music business is about selling a product, and the most advanced art (if there is such a thing) doesn't necessarily sell the most. On the other hand, if you want to be a major league baseball player, you do have to be really talented. There isn't room in sports for mediocracy - hard work, good looks, good personality won't land you a spot on a major league team.
I would caution against confusing "Recognition" with "Mastery". I don't know how many hours it took Van Gogh to hit his stride, but selling only one painting in his lifetime doesn't mean he wasn't a master painter. I would append your closing statement with "there are also plenty of people who became masters without broad recognition and there are plenty of people who are broadly recognized (popular), who aren't necessarily 'masters' at their craft."
First of all, I love your videos. Thank you for making them. What Gladwell says in that book is that you need at least 10.000 hours to master a skill. Not that after you practice for that long you will automatically master your skill, you my require more practice. He also says that to be successful you don't need to be the best, just good enough. That's why there are some people who may achieve success in less time. Basically, the message of the books is that if you want to master a skill, you need to put a lot of effort, at least some natural ability and even then you may be great, but it doesn't mean that you will be successful. It's a really good book. I don't know if you read it completely, but I would definitely recommend it!
Quality and Quantity combined is what matters. If you drew a circle for 10,000 hours and nothing else then you would have only expertise toward drawing circles and no other form of art. This applies to all fields and you should never exclude those to methods because they are both valuable.
The famous Irish traditional fiddler James Kelly who is a master musician in his genre has a very simple expression. "There are no guarantees...." which is directly in line with your summation. The most famous exponent of Irish traditional music piper, singer, tune/song collector, Seamus Ennis said of the the uilleann pipes that it takes 21 years to master them. These days it seems like kids are learning it much faster... but still, are they mastering the expression? That's up for grabs. Ennis went on to say, "You know, there’s an awful lot to be said about this Irish traditional folk music and folklore. Because first of all, you have to learn it. And first you must learn the talk. And then you must learn the grip. And after that, you must learn the truckly-howl. And then you have the whole lot, only just to keep on practicing it." Perhaps, the faeries told him that.....! ;-)
Interesting thoughts on the topic, Rick, as usual You addressed this in a live stream when I asked you about it, but you've done a wonderful job of expanding on your ideas and tackling the issue. It also gives a lot hope to those of us who might be late bloomers...though maybe not in the world of chess! Still, that could be another possible topic for you. One finds a great many late bloomers in the world of art, whether it be painting, music, writing, etc. Thanks for another insightful video.
I'm a classically-trained clarinetist. I grew up playing clarinet in many different ensembles all throughout school. I've easily put in more than 10,000 hours playing clarinet and have not found success (after all, music is a very competitive field). But I'm not doing it to be successful, I'm doing it because I love it and I'm still able to make some money doing it.
I made a goal to spends 10K hours playing drums so I could sound like Bonham. I got bored and stopped at 5 hours, and I sound as good as Lars...and I am okay with that...
Its not 10 000 hours that matters. It's 10 000 hours of quality practice. Many people seem to just think they can count to 10 000. No one has ever claimed that. The 10 000 hour rule also not guarantee success, its a minimum requirement. On the contrary, if you don't put in the work, you are pretty much guaranteed to not succeed ;)
As I have gotten older, I have gotten more effective at practicing. I have a better understanding of how to practice more effectively and consciously reflect on what I'm doing so that I can assess whether my practice methods are effective and revise and refine my methods as necessary to achieve improvement. Also, I am better at comprehending the nature and essence of the skill I'm trying to achieve so I can focus on my efforts more directly on getting there. So I would say an hour of practice at this stage of my life is more effective than an hour of practice 10 or 20 years ago. Maybe most important, I find joy in practice now, whereas I didn't when I was young. To me there are few things more exciting than pursuing a skill, seeking to achieve perfection, though you never quite get there - a never-ending quest! There is such beauty in human achievement. That is why we love watching great musicians or great athletes or virtually anyone who is excellent at what they do. Even if we are amateurs, there is happiness in seeking to get better at something.
I have the odd experience of growing up in musical family and “preforming” for the first time at the age of nine. Singing and playing guitar most of my life, on the couch and in bar bands. Recently, I took a long break- about seven years. Didn’t play more than 30minutes a few times a month often going weeks without playing at all. I was never great but I was a solid player with a decent musical vocabulary. I have recently gotten interested (and have the time) to play more again and have found the muscle memory isn’t there as solid right now so it feels clumsy at times but more interesting is that my tastes have changed and the patterns and fills I used to play are still there, but new stuff is coming to the surface. Sometimes its like “where did that come from?” Or “why didn’t I go here before?” To get back to the subject, It’s sort of like even though I wasn’t practicing, I was still learning somehow. I’m sure some of it is that I had grown tired of playing the same stuff, took a long break, and have just been paying attention to what I was listening to but my playing has changed significantly in a good way. Hopefully the speed and dexterity comes back quickly because I’m enjoying my new found vocabulary I’m trying to play now. This makes me think there is a difference between skill and knowledge and they aren’t tied together in lockstep, one can advance even as the other is falling behind. It feels like previously my skill was improving while my knowledge was getting stale and then my knowledge increased as I let the skills go away. I may be odd about this but I have heard other people describe their relationship with playing music as progressing in steps like going up stairs, periods of quick learning interrupted by periods of little improvement. This feels like a big step, almost like I had to unlearn some old ways that had become automatic in order to “make room” for something new. I hope I’m not sounding too weird or personal about this but it’s an interesting time in my musical life and I’m looking forward to getting my callouses back! Lol, right now my fingers are just sore.
It's about the quality of each hour spent. Not the quantity. I've been playing since I was a child, but didn't start taking practicing seriously until I was around 9. And 7 hours of practice then, is equivalent to 30 minutes now. And I'm not counting playing, just practice. Solid focused and deliberate practice.
I would say that the problem is in the practices you're comparing anecdotally. I don't think having a number one song necessarily implies mastery. Rebecca Black, PSY, Baauer, and Ylvis all accomplished this with "Friday", "Gangnam Style", "Harlem Shake", and "What Does the Fox Say" but they are obviously not masters. They hit the lotto. Achieving 100,000 subscribers also does not imply mastery. You can explode with subscribers or views in one day by uploading videos of suicides or murders, videos of attractive people nude, anything about Donald Trump, or simply by stumbling upon the next goofy trend like planking or "the running man. challenge". Going platinum is closer I think, but still, there are many platinum artists out there who have them but are probably not masters. I think Soulja Boy's "Crank That" probably went platinum. The 10K hours theory is a just a general guideline based on the observations of successful people and what they had in common. If you reduce the sample group to activities that always require skill (golfing, dancing, writing, speaking, programming, or classical piano) this number probably makes a lot more sense. The confusion comes when we try to apply it to activities that have more to do with the appearance, personality, personal history, or novelty of the performer than the actual craft. Great topic though!
i love your explanation on this. It is a generic statement but if you go in the underbelly of the book, its mainly saying, if you put in the hours, you will be closer to mastery of a particular aspect but the 10000 hour would only work for some activities that require skill like you said but there are so many variables. You are also right by saying it is actually hard to quantify "Mastery" and the examples he gave do not conclusively attribute to mastery other than good marketing strategies and great timing using the social media era as a great driver of content. My video went viral on Instagram of me playing guitar with my friend singing in an elevator, doesnt necessarily mean im a master at guitar or that he is a virtuoso at singing. Great video though :D
Kate Bush wrote her first song at 12 which became one of her tracks not long after. The answer, sadly I believe, is talent. Like that guy in class whos really good at drawing/really fast/naturally hilarious/never studies and get excellent grades etc theres a thing called talent that obliterates the 10, 000 hr rule. You can get good with practice but talent is what makes the guys we pay to see.
There is such a thing as deep training. In deep training you deliberately go beyond your comfort level I think Malcolm Gladwell meant that, when he introduced the 10.000 hours rule. Still, I think Rick has a valid point. If the competition in a certain field is hard, like in piano playing, it requires maybe 20.000 hours of deep training for the opportunity to have success. And there are many fields in which it only takes about 20 hours to be competent enough to earn money. Rick Beato also made a very fleeting remark, that it is a matter of genes. Well, human beings do not differ that much in their genes. And that is exactly the point of Malcolm Gladwell. I agree with him that success is not a matter of talent. It always is the result of hard work, whether it is 20 hours, 10.000 hours, or 100.000 hours.
Its not always the case. I do a job that is physical, and it took me only about 700 hours to reach a very high level of skill. Mostly because I was already very fit. It really depends on what the case is.
Matthew Syed's book 'Bounce' covers this topic and he cites several examples of children who were intentionally and intensively educated in different fields by their parents and who later became world-beaters in their fields. In some cases the parents even boasted beforehand that their methods would produce these results. Examples are in chess, tennis, golf, and others. I think the 10,000 hour 'rule' is largely a figure of speech but has a very relevant message. A long period of purposeful practice, combined with the right attitude and correct mental techniques to overcome failure and maximise the chance of success are what is required. I don't see how 'talent' is much of a part of it. All the big 'talents' I can think of (where I know something of their background) spent enormous amounts of time at a very young age developing their craft. People don't realise this, and attribute their abilities to 'talent'. However, mastery is not the same as financial or competitive success. That part of the equation requires some degree of luck, imo.
Saw an interview once with Ivan Lins, Brazilian songwriter and jazz pianist. He claimed to have only played music for 2-3 years (during his time as a student at MIT where he played piano in clubs and bars) before becoming a professional songwriter and musician who wrote/co-wrote several jazz standards. True or not, some people must be able to pick things up quicker than others, they are just born with it, naturally gifted etc. Practice make them even better, specially when it comes to performance.
Very interesting discussion. I think there is a difference between mastery and professional success, and the relationship between the two differs depending on the specific field. With chess, the correlation between mastery and professional success is quite high. With other professions such as music or acting, one's professional success depends on many other factors other than mastery. There is natural talent, of course, but there are also factors like good looks, good marketing, or just good luck which have nothing to do with mastery. Also, if an actor or musician has a reputation for being difficult to work with, it will be harder for them to achieve professional success even if they achieve mastery. That is why I believe that coupling one's mastery level to the awards one has received is problematic.
I haven't yet read Outliers but I've listened to interviews with Gladwell. I think the point about 10,000 hours is not that it's a guarantee of success but that those who are successful in their given field tend to have put in at least 10,000 hours of practice before they are successful. The Beatles were undoubtedly talented but they also worked really hard. Your son Dylan has a rare gift but it's also the result of hours and hours of practice/learning.
Here's what I think is inherently wrong about the 10000 hour rule: it only takes into account the time you spend consciously practicing. I have several hobbies and areas of interest, but let's consider the two I think of my most serious pursuits: music and historical fencing. When I started playing guitar back in high school, I would practice songs and scales for hours and hours on end practically every day and build up a reasonable level of technical proficiency in around two years. I didn't really understand much of what I was doing, but I could play songs I wanted to. I also started composing after a few weeks of playing guitar; those early tries were and are horrible and I never want to even think about them again to be honest. Anyway, after high school I enrolled into this one-year music school and learned theory and most importantly the way chords are formed and what I reasonably can and can't do with a certain chord. I felt great about my new skills and wanted to enter either a lower or higher level school for music production, but I failed year after year to get accepted because my sight-reading and other related skills weren't up to par with all the people who had played violin or oboe from the age of 4. Eventually I gave up and started pursuing other career-paths. It was a hard pill to swallow, but I now think I was lucky to fail, no way is there a future in the music industry for me and this way I can do other things for money and express myself without having to care about selling records, gigging for money, or producing horrible punk bands. It led to several years of not really practicing anything seriously, just noodling improvisations every now and then. And now we get to my point: this "non-practice" was at least as important for my evolution as a player and composer as the rigorous practice of my late teens. Because of it, I now know exactly what I'm doing when playing, I can hear my own playing in my head as I do it, and I can relatively easily compose songs in a few hours without as much as touching an instrument. I also believe that subconscious processing has a huge part in this development, spending so many years surrounded by and thinking about music has definitely been a major aspect of invisible growth. When it comes to historical fencing (HEMA), I only started doing it relatively recently, maybe three years ago or so, but I've gotten better at it than some people who have been doing it for longer than I have. We don't have that much practice time a week, twice to three times usually, but I don't attend every single session because I have other things going on with my life. I believe one of the biggest reasons why I've gotten relatively good in a short time is I think about fencing actions a lot. I have read so many treatises apart from what we actually actively study, and I think about and process techniques and situations almost daily trying to understand what I can do and in what context, and what types of things I should avoid and if those could also be usable in some rare case.
Wish you all the best for 2018, Rick. The last post of 2017, (last but not least), was a killer! Bravo. I've never heard of this 10 000 hours rule before, and learned a thing. Anyway, I really like the way you teach things.
I remember in High School, I would read books on photography. I would study the pictures and then take out my camera an reproduce what I saw in the books. I then got a photography scholarship and applied what I learned to that. Later, I became a professional videographer making Industrial videos. I applied all my photography experience to framing and shooting videos. Total time that I put into learning this craft: About 10,000 hours. 👍
Nature and/or Nurture for sure. I know I'm better with Music than I was when I started. I can pick out some kinds of chords by ear verses not being able to do that at all when I started playing guitar. Finding some basic harmonies when singing with groups took some repetition to get to the level of ability of being able to do that at the drop of a hat and it's still a bit shaky. Playing an instrument and being able to sing at the same time obviously is going to be a honed skill for me because I usually struggle with it and either have someone else sing or play instruments when I perform songs with my church group. I'd put myself in a beginner/intermediate category at best. I should have taken my piano lessons more seriously. Hindsight is 20/20 right? Rock on good people.
I feel like the 10,000 hour rule is kind of an example of how you can arrange things in such a way as to make statistics appear to say almost whatever you want them to. As Mark Twain famously said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics." As Rick has implied, common sense and basic critical thinking can easily inform us that "mastery" is either subjectively or more-or-less arbitrarily judged, and the amount of energy (force through a distance applied over time) required to achieve it is going to vary substantially depending on what you're trying to achieve and how you go about it and on your own natural abilities and inclinations. Malcom's point was that people with the time, money and access to the necessary training/education and equipment, etc., to be able to put thousands of hours into pursuits like computer programming early in their lives have an enormous advantage over people who don't have those things. It's not a new idea, and many have tried to use it as a basis for arguments against capitalism and for socialism. "Socialism," or something they're calling socialism, has become incredibly popular among people in their early 20's, probably because leftist educators have dominated the humanities and social sciences in our colleges and universities for quite a long time. But if very few people have a computer, then whoever gets access to one is going to have a huge advantage over everyone else as far as computer programming goes, regardless of whether that person is living in a free society or in a government controlled one. And the idea that there will never be rarefied resources if you "set up the system in a good way" is just ludicrous. It's not even desirable, because if you somehow managed to actually prevent rarefied resources from existing, at that point you have eliminated your ability to create new and better things. Anything that is new and better is initially rarefied! No matter how you set up your government! A lot of young people point at various positive aspects of the experience of life that people in certain European countries enjoy, and they say "See, socialism can be good!" But in real socialism, the government controls *all* of the means of production. That is not what those European countries have. They still have capitalist, free market systems driving their economies, they just tax people like crazy and provide a bunch of "free" services. The parts of the European experience that these children don't seem to be aware of are things like a hospital telling you no you can't come get your kid, whom we're pretty much holding captive, and whom we've admitted we can't save from death, and take them to another place where they may be able to save them, even if you've managed to raise the money to pay for it on your own, because of some politically driven rule made by some centralized government committee or official. That's the kind of thing that socialism results in, because the whole point of socialism is to completely dispense with the idea of individual rights! You cannot rob someone of all their personal property without doing that! When you hand over the right to control all the currency, all the means of production, etc., to the government, you hand over all of your say so about things, folks. That's just the way human civilization works, it's been proven over and over and over again. With socialism comes poverty and oppression of all kinds. In a free society, in which each individual has substantial say so about things, by virtue of controlling their personal accumulations of property, money, and means of production, opportunities to do things like what Bill Gates did end up being fairly maximally distributed. What we need protection from is overly centralized power, whether that power is political or economic, and whether it is in the hands of government, or the hands of the privately held enormous monopolies, or in government propped up monopolies. Right now, RUclips and Facebook operate large public forums, and as such, it's illegal for them to engage in political censorship, but they are engaging in it in a huge way, and no one can afford to sue them for it, and even if someone did, we have enough leftists in our government now, that such efforts might fail, because most of the political censorship being done by them is in a left-leaning direction. For example, anybody espousing a medical view that differs from those set forth by the CDC are being shutdown by Facebook, Twitter and RUclips. The CDC derives a huge percentage of it's budget from the pharmaceutical industry! The CDC (and individuals in positions of power at the CDC) owns pharmaceutical patents and profits from the sale of pharmaceuticals! The CDC has ordered their scientists to destroy evidence that would present obstacles to their pharmaceutical pushing agenda! And their PR campaign around it all is incredible. The need to eliminate the conflict of interest the CDC operates under is a huge political issue right now, so squelching differing views from the CDC is absolutely political censorship and social media sites can and should be sued for doing it. "If you have a totally free society and people can do whatever they want, how do you deal with racism?" You expose it to the world and shame the people doing it! You don't need socialism or incredibly draconian laws or regulations or even "affirmative action," really, you just need transparency and freedom of the press. And I think any individual should be able to declare themselves a "member of the press" for the purposes of calling out undesirable behavior on the part of a large, powerful government or private institution. The recent true-story-based movie, "Just Mercy" is a case in point. It describes how a black lawyer took the story of a black man who was very unjustly put on death row, to 60-minutes, and thereby more-or-less shamed the Alabama supreme court into doing the right thing; which hopefully set a precedent which will have an impact on the problem. Speaking of racism, one of the incredibly important things about a free society is protection of fundamental individual rights from even the majority's view of things! When my parents were growing up, the majority of people in Virginia voted that a black man could not marry a white woman and that a black man could not vote. That's why we need checks and balances on the power of government, and why we need a set of individual civil rights that our courts are there to protect. Against the majority if necessary! Effective protection of individual rights and especially the right to own and control private property, these form the foundation for freedom and liberty in the world. The current crop of youngsters are not cognizant of the consequences of allowing cracks in that foundation to exist and to spread. The mob must not be allowed to rob all the wealthy of their wealth. Robbing $10,000,000 from one wealthy person and giving it to 10,000 poor people does not do those poor people one whit of good. Maybe they'll eat for a month or two. But setting things up in a way that encourages that one wealthy person to start a franchise that employs 10,000 people, well - that can actually help. And having wealthy people around to pay for the production of luxuries means that more and more luxuries are constantly being created, thereby employing a bunch of people, and a bunch of things that used to be luxuries are constantly being cast off for pennies on the dollar in favor of newer better ones, which is why most of the poor people in America have TV's and cars. Poor people in America have historically enjoyed lifestyles that have been positively luxurious compared to poor people in other places, where governments and tribes and gangs control everything. Black lives absolutely do matter, but the last thing we need in America is a rise of tribalism or a move toward Marxism. Anyway, all that is to just to talk about the general notion that Malcom was parading in presenting the 10,000 hour rule, and to warn against some of the potential abuses of that general notion.
The best way to settle this question is to ask a teacher who observes mastery on a daily basis. During my career as a teacher I observed that some (few) students are sponges who can learn at an accelerated rate. They all have an ability to focus and concentrate intensely when necessary. Usually, it is relatively short periods of time. More importantly, they enjoy challenges and the process of mastery. I don't know why.
First Rule: Have passion for what you do. Second Rule: Practice, Practice, Practice. Third Rule: Pray it all works out.
Third rule doesn't work.
@@anmol3Don’t say that
I would argue that being successful does not always equate to mastery. Or vice versa.
44 years putting it in ,wheres my fame
I agree, I would consider myself a successful musician if I can sustain a comfortable living off of it. Nothing complex either, afford an apartment, afford a working vehicle, and having a savings account.
Who's that current musician who taught himself to play guitar by watching RUclips and is now successful?
@@mloftin6472 shawn mendes
It's also about having great contacts.
Doesnt matter if I dont master guitar, I'll still have had fun playing for those 10,000 hours
You'll do well Sam...music should be fun.
You should definitely still be a great guitarist if you practice it right
Absolutley right mate
That's all that matters friend
thats the spirit
The problem with the 10k hr rule is that it's severely misunderstood and taken out of context.
In Outliers, Gladwell mentions the rule as part of an exploration of "what makes the greats great". He doesn't state it as an absolute or isolated fact.
Also, the rule actually says it takes 10k hrs of DELIBERATE PRACTICE to master A SKILL.
People ignore the deliberate practice part and think it just means "if I play the guitar for 10k hrs, I'll be a master!" and that's far from true.
I'd also say it's hard to define what "a skill" means. I, for one, think songwriting is not just a skill. It is a very complex activity that requires a series of skills.
Also, I'm not sure I agree that having a number one song means you've mastered songwriting. I'm not trying to diminish the merit of your achievement, which I admire and respect (hey, who am I to question you?), but we must consider there are some very crappy songs that have sold hundreds of thousands of copies and reached #1, and I wouldn't say they're all masterpieces, as much as they have commercial success.
Anyways, the rule is debatable and almost impossible to conclusively confirm or deny, but it makes much more sense when it's well explained, well understood and not taken out of context.
Really, liked your comment!
Subscribed!
Yeah, there are some amazing musical acts who've never had a song reach #1 on the Billboard chart (like Creedence Clearwater Revival and Bruce Springsteen) yet it's stiil obvious they mastered their craft. Whether a song was a hit at the time of its release matters a lot less than whether that song has stood the test of time.
Yes, but that distinction won't generate click bait worthy content.
"deliberate practice" is still quite vague. This rule of his has too many holes in it to be taken seriously. The closest thing you could say when concerning duration to reach mastery is. "It depends"
@@forfreedom.3570 why? He only has like 48 subscribers
The whole point of the 10,000-hour argument is that to master something (not necessarily be famous) you need continuous practice while seeking out advice from experts and new experiences and reflecting on your work so you can adjust. One cannot blindly work at something incorrectly and become great at it. One must care and allow that care to guide you.
What counts it's what you do within each hour. You can mindlessly practice excercises for 3 hours, and just half an hour being fully dedicated, concious about what you're doing; and it will be worlds of difference.
And luck within this also, maybe you meet some teacher that changes your perspective on things, or guides you in some way that will take you less time for some things.
Past experiences also help a lot. Before studying music, I've was a software programmer, and I went 2 years to Math college. The logical thinking I've develop over the years helped me understand and analyze sheet music, and a lot of theory concepts, patterns. And I've noticed with my mates at music school, some things I find easy to understand and conceptualize, find "the math", the logic, behind it. And I see my friends struggle, like they don't see some of the patterns, or really think about them at all.
I agree, I think a great teacher can make a HUGE difference. I wasted a lot of time trying to learn on my own getting bits and pieces from more advanced players and trying to cop licks off Albums
So my 30 minute guitar lesson once a week is not enough to master the guitar?
If you practice at home everyday, yes, it is enough.
Lol,funny.
With that speed it will take century 🤣
Try 2 hours. At least.
you need to factor in the quality of that 30 minutes
Mastering a skill does not automatically mean success!
Hard work does not automatically mean success!
Having the right skill, at the right level, at the right time and in the right place and be willing to work hard, together with the confidence to take a risk, will probably result in success of some sort.
Nailed it !
you are correct, they - he is making a mistake, he is confusing MASTERY with SUCCESS and genius, I am a great fan of him but he is not a psychologist and it is not his field. Besides, I am a great fan of his kids too but having absolute pitch does not mean being a great musician at all. I am sure they are , but it is like being strong and being a great boxer. Strenght is not enough, body builders are not boxers.
Right time, right place. So critical. How many undiscovered talents are out there in the world? Skill, ability, talent, confidence, hard work, and myriad other things still don’t guarantee success or being discovered. I don’t believe we ever truly master anything.
What is success?
TRUE BITCHES
It's not just 10,000 hours of doing the activity. It's 10,000 hours of DELIBERATE practice. That's the word which is often left out when people quote the 10k hour rule. Deliberate practice is purposeful, systematic. A deliberate practice session has a specific purpose. It means you strategically choose what you do to tackle your weaknesses, you practice out of your comfort zone, you practice at the edge of your abilities in order to push your skills a step further.
And of course, 10k hours is just a rule of thumb. It gives you a rough idea of what it actually takes to become really really good at something.
I agree with you. The 10,000 hour rule is bogus. I have played guitar since I was 8 years old. Im 64 now and haven't mastered the instrument.Can I play well? YES Can I play like the best of the best Hell no. Yet I have seen young children in their early teens who can shred on guitar and sing too!!! They just have that special thing. "Talent" is real.
Same here! I took up guitar when I was 15 . I'm 55 now and on a really, really good day I'd describe myself as competent. I'd say I improved when I realized that the only way I'd ever become even a halfway decent shredder would be to mix cocaine into instant coffee, eat it with a spoon and wash it down with a gallon of Red Bull. Translation: it ain't happening! Talent is *definitely* real...!
I guess if you just played the Pentatonic scale for 50 years you may "Master" it. lol :) Of course, I like many others wanted to learn and play songs of many Genre's I started with Blues, ala Bluesbreakers moved into Cream then Allman Bros and Skynyrd all the Classic rock stuff then Van Halen blew my mind and the shredders came Satriani , Malmsteen and so on. I also realized I didnt have the finger dexterity or consistancy to get through a long fast tune without mistakes and it seemed NO amount of practice helped that. Its a frustrating thing to want to Master something you LOVE then find out you dont have what it takes. Ha Ha ask any Football, Basketball, Hockey player who was a star in school but couldnt make PRO. We are not alone as Guitar players.
I've been playing over half a century myself. There seems to be this ridiculous mindset that if you aren't a "PRO" or play like a "PRO" then you are just wasting your time. Music has been my mistress through a long and sometimes difficult journey; sometimes comforting, sometimes mocking, often (mostly) frustrating. It is part of the fabric that is me. Will I ever 'master' the guitar? No. Will I be it's slave trying to reach impossible heights? Nope, that's not happening either.
But unlike a 'pro' I don't have to play when I don't feel like it. There is a joy to picking up an instrument just because you feel like it- not because you are compelled to practice because _______________ (fill in the blank).
The key part is 10,000 hours of _deliberate practice_. Not just noodling around or playing stuff you already know.
@Bob Boitt You build good finger dexterity by working on your technique. No one is born with amazing finger dexterity. What you practice is more important than how much you practice. You sound like someone who just didn't have enough determination to follow their dream
I stopped playing for a couple of years. When i started playing again, my level started to increase radically. I found that what i learned in the past i assimilated and digested and i could see things more clearly and analyse what i was doing.
Sometimes long breaks help a TON
Probably easiest skill to master: procrastination.
I am actually still practicing procrastination every day since the conservatory.
ehh maybe I'll try mastering procrastination later on
Indeed lol
But you need to throw it away for a fulfilled life
You can practice for 10,000 hours and be super technical on the instrument you pick. That doesn't mean you will be musical, does it?
Chris Hamm Depends on what you practice but yeah, I agree.
You can also avoid practicing technique and theory and not be musical.
If you master the art, so why you wouldn’t be musical
@1234 yeah i agree, but if they are doing wrong in that particular thing. they would understand the mistakes instantly ,cause he is investing time in that thing,
@@hellomotherfuckers53 He is talking about technical aspect of a musical instrument. I can tell you based on personal experiences, he is correct 100%. Learning how to play the notes, or being able to read sheet music is not enough, you have to be able to interpret it, you have to be able express it, you have to be able to infuse emotions and thoughts in your music...the best way to understand what I am trying to say is to have a sheet music played by a computer (very easy to set up), and then to compare it to live musicians performing it..there'll be quite extreme difference even an average person would be able to tell apart and, I dare to say, they'd like a live performance better.
Great video Rick!!! I really liked your references and your point about mastery being hard to define. :)
it is precisely because mastery can not be defined that the 10, 000 rules is correct. In fact, he is confusing MASTERY (expert) with SUCCESS (gaining from your activity). I am a great fan of his, but neuroscience is not his job and the book " Frans Johansson's book " The Click Moment."""is wrong for making the same confusion between mastery and success.
andrea inzaghi exactly. There is no way to quantify these things.
andrea inzaghi
No, the 10,000 "rule" is not correct. It was based on guesswork and faulty research (like when people try to diagnose long dead people with Asperger's or whatever). It's exactly as valid as the Meyers-Briggs personality test. Neuroscience has nothing to do with any of it "precisely because mastery cannot be defined". Don't talk out your ass.
True..I just done a quick calc..came to about 5000 hours..but I am now writing hit songs (IMHO)..theres alot more to it
Except his definition is 100% wrong. He confuses mastery with commercial success. Rembrandt, rich in his youth, could not sell in later years despite maybe being the greatest master in history because morons did not support him. At times, Leonardo had to do other things to support himself (and wrote famous letter about it). Monet was an absolute master, and broke, before his paintings started to sell. Horrible definition equating dollars earned to Mastery. And a lot of hacks make fortunes.
I had worked in a bookstore for about 18,000 hours when Gladwell's third book, Outliers, arrived and a stack was immediately placed on the bestseller table due to the success of his previous books, The Tipping Point(2000) and Blink (2005). Each of those had a stack in permanent residence on our paperback bestsellers table. I had sampled them way back when, but had not been drawn in. One of my colleagues and I were stocking the table the day Outliers arrived. We had never discussed these perennial sellers. I pointed to The Tipping Point and Blink, and asked her, "What do you think these?" Her two word reply: "Mental popcorn."
You work at your own pace. Some of the top virtuoso musicians reported practicing for 10 hours and others for 2 hours. It really depends on the individual. Some people are faster learners than others. Find your own pace and work at it and practice and you’ll get there! It’s not about talent but hard work and dedication. Of course there are people that learn really fast and are way better than you in far less time but if you work 10x as hard as they do you’ll exceed them. And remember there’s always gonna be someone better than you so don’t get discouraged and give up.
I honestly don't think you can become a 'virtuoso' by practicing 2 hours a day. Not trying to to nitpick on your post. I get your point that you should go at your own pace. You may become very good with 2 hours a day, but never a genius.
Michael Park I was just giving a point . You’re absolutely right . Few if not none have achieved virtuoso status with just 2 hours of practice everyday. I was making a point by putting an exaggerated range. I’ve watched interviews by concert pianists , and some of them say anything after 5 hours is too much and some say 10 hours. So yeah.
Michael Park you don't need to be a genius. Having pleasure when making music and considering yourself adequate is enough when we accept most humans fall in the middle of the talent spectrum
Sena Erdem yes exactly! And I don’t think all virtuosos are geniuses . To me geniuses are innovators. Most Virtuosos just have high instrumental prowess and dazzling technique on their instrument but don’t really do anything new with it (Well to be fair some do) .
Really? Do you really believe that if you work 10x harder than someone else you'll be better than them? Is that a fact? Honestly, I truly wish that's how the world worked - it would be a much fairer world - but unfortunately there is no guarantee that you will be better than them. I could have worked 10x harder than Michael Jordan and I was not going to surpass him. I get the positive thinking, but let's not be unrealistic either.
10.000 hours of effective practice. Not just practice.
I play my instrument about 4 hours a day, but i don't think that I get any more than 1.30 hours of hyperfocused, effective practice a day. I have goals and practice towards them, but some goals I reach before others. I think this is because those are the goals I was truly focused on while practising.
My point is that I think it's a stretch to just count all the hours spent on an activity as good practice, you have to take in to consideration that a lot of those hours were spent not as effectively as they could have been.
I disagree with your premise. You didn't master the art of record producing the day you achieved a platinum record. You mastered it long before that. Having a platinum record require a lot of things to come together that are mostly out of your control ... the right songs, the right artist, the right moment in time. It's not all on your mastery of production. Other examples you offer contain the same flaw in logic. I think the 10,000 hour rule is more right than wrong.
I am a great fan of him but he is confusing mastery with success, different notions.
yes, but the problem isn't with his lingo. it's in the nature of sociology. a lot of it is coming up with a legit (enough) way to quantify something that generally is undefinable. you're both right, but so is he. and he had to pick some defining trait. that's were the sketchyness of the 10,000 hour rule comes into play. it is very easy to pick you're subject and then set the definition of mastery at the some 10,000 hour spot they achieved. i could do it for 5,000, or 1,000, or 20,000. the neat thing about 10,000 is the rough amount of time that takes is a completely 'doable' time period, that loads of examples can be fabricated from. (as we see by comparing it to rick's examples).
Which brings us to the question, "how do you define mastery?" Is the 10,000 hour rule even a relevant definition of mastery?
According to the study Gladwell got his numbers from, the 10,000 hours only appeared for musicians. They got 10 years for chess and music, and between 16.5 to 22 for science and literature.
On the other hand, there's also that thing about the beginner's hunger. It is commonly associated with the energy, drive and intensity of youth. You see how often it is that the debut album or first batch of albums by a band hapens to be their best? Later on in their careers they would only try to revive that power but very few succeed. It is the sort of thing that happens in the moment and cannot be replicated even if one later on tries to redo it with presumably more experience/ skill. For some reason nothing can beat the first shot.
Yes, practicing a good long time to the point that you become very well-versed in your craft is perhaps a very logical way of looking at how virtuosity is developed -- but there's also that something else, that other domain which does not necessarily correlate with how much time was put into doing something. Furthermore, there is that issue of getting "past your prime". You see, there will always be a point of decline even if you continue to practice hard. This leads me to surmise that time spent in honing skills as a prerequisite for becoming really accomplished perhaps only tells a fraction of the story...
I've had very similar experiences, albeit in some different fields. Playing guitar started as a passion with zero foresight or vision. In the beginning I just wanted to experience creating certain tones, which meant endlessly repeating riffs and tweeking knobs. This drove my dad nuts and he finally said: "maybe you should learn to play songs". I took it to heart and started working on chords and changes. Then a new friend taught me the minor pentatonic scale and I suddenly "saw" the connection between riffs/soloing and chord progressions and began to learn songs and write; that seemed to happen overnight. Next up, my wife got tired of me experiementing with bands in basements and told me to get out and play, even if it meant solo shows. When I did, I realized three things very quickly: 1) I needed to learn a lot more songs 2) I needed to change how I play (mostly right hand technique) in order to sound "bigger" than just one guy. 3) I needed to learn more about singing technique/s. This also seemed to happen relatively quickly. For me, each improvement came with a kind of compulsive desire to practice (sometimes orderly and/or with guidance, often without either), some type of imagined larger context or vision, and access to technology and/or information that enhanced my experience. Each of these elements were present when substantial gains were made in my experience.
Great topic for discussion. I feel there has been some misinterpretation by some. Gladwell doesn't say "10,000 hours and you become a master at your 'thing", the research across a number of case studies pointed to approximately that number. Obviously it will depend on the individual, he does acknowledge that. Also the definition of 'Mastery' is a very grey area. There is no way (in my opinion) that having a disc go Platinum, or scoring a number 1 hit is the benchmark of compositional mastery. That was achieved way before that point.
The other major misconception from a lot of the comments below is that Gladwell does not saying just doing the 'thing' for 10,000 hours makes you a master, but deliberate, focused practice with constant reflection and planning. I would bet that the large numbers quoted by Rick and others below could easily be trimmed by a significant amount if time taken 'noodling', making a coffee, bathroom trips, and over -repetition of things while practicing were taken off the number.
I am currently participating in a friend's Doctoral research on the topic. As part of his thesis he has 4 people undergoing 'skill development', one with coding, 2 on musical instruments and a golfer. I am learning the Chapman Stick (having specialized and 'mastered' the trombone, playing professionally in orchestras and West End shows) and I am up to 457 hours (I still suck! I have videos on my page at various stages of the time). It's an interesting process. I am part of the 'cross-over theory' section where skills in a related area should carry over to the learning of the new area. The golfer started literally from nothing and at approx. 9000 hours in he is applying for his PGA tour card.
Sorry for the long post. A great topic. Rick, your stuff it literally my favorite thing on the internet.
Paul Wright for sure, putting in the time will bare more fruit than not. Some people get so hung up on words and numbers they miss the point. 10,000 hours is not a detailed engineering rule to land a person on the moon. It is a thought that putting in the time helps to bring results.
he is simply confusing mastery-expertise with SUCCESS and genius, he is a great musician and I am a great fan of him but psychology is another field.
Could you please post a link to the paper if it's ready?
Adding to this clarification, the premise is not that 10k hours of even high quality practice inevitably leads to mastery. Rather, the whole concept was an argument against the idea of people being natural born genius prodigies. At least in some fields, you may need a natural predisposition (aka talent) in addition to the hours of practice. 10k hours of good quality practice is necessary but not sufficient for mastery.
That said, I have always had some of the same objections to this idea that Rick laid out. First, there is obviously a difference in the rate of accumulation of mastery in some fields between young minds and adults or even older kids. Many skills can't be mastered by adults at all.
Then you have the question of what counts as a field for purposes of mastery. I am am attorney. Does it take 10k hours to master the field of lawyering? And if so, what counts? Practice as a licensed attorney? What about the 10k hours of training and education during law school? Or is lawyering a combination of several skills that all need their own 10k hour requirement (mastering the English language, logical reasoning, the skill of researching, oratory, and learning the procedural and substantive law itself)? In golf, do you need to spend 10k hours practicing golf or 10k each on driving, putting, irons, woods, wedges, etc.?
I assume there are answers to these questions in the underlying research that Gladwell draws from, but his book didn't give me much indication of what they are.
The 10,000 hour number is not only approximate, is an average of drastically variability in the amount of practice required.Ericssons own data showed expertise can be aquired in as little as 2000 hours, or not at all, even after 26 000 hours of deliberate practice. What severely complicates this matter, is that the concept of "deliberate practice" is inherently poorly defined.The definition can only be approximated in practice, as none of the tenets are accurately quantifiable. For example, what is feedback? If I swing a tennis racket at a ball and subsequently miss, my own observation of the missed hit fullfils the definition of "feedback".Hence we can see that nobody ever practices without feedback, and subsequent adjustments to their approach. If a coach gives the feedback, what assurance is there that the nature of their feedback will be beneficial in any way? What if the student cannot improve by taking on board the feedback from a reputeable coach?
All in all, the concepts promoted by Anders Ericsson are riddled with flaws, and not very well supported by the evidence. The evidence very strongly supports inherited factors as crucial determinants of ability, a fact Ericsson refused to acknowledge during his career.I believe Anders suffered from an obsession, due to being brainwashed into this belief by his father.
I've seen incredibly hard-working, talented friends spend their entire lives chasing passions and get nothing and I've seen talent-less hacks show up and be given careers. Because we live in a word of "gurus" and survivor bias it's very hard not to beat yourself up over lack of success. I've had success through hard work but goddamn do I realize how much luck and circumstance have played.
I followed this 10,000 rule for Piano skill in about 4 years. Yes, I works like a charm if you do it right. Playing piano required muscle memory, and definitely need good amount of practise. I put 4 to 5 hours a day for practise and am happy with the result. It's a mindset goal rather than exact amount of 10,000 hours. It varies on many variables such as the quality of practice, teacher involvement, time of practice, thought process in practice, etc.
The more variables involved the more skill and less hours I got.
Ericsson does not like his work mentioned by Gladwell ;)
K. Anders Ericsson wrote in "The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists".
"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* "
If you need a silly vague formula to motivate you, you're doing something wrong!
Happy New Year!
Devane2012 Thank you, I was about to say the same thing. Malcolm Gladwell's interpretation of Ericsson's work basically amounts to 'click bait' in the form of a book.
Justin Cauble Another of his shitty books is Blink, the crux of which that if you repeat something many many times, you'll eventually get to a point where you no longer have to consciously think about a process.
Legend has it that he asked people walking in a park if they know how they're going to 'take the next step'.
I was going to say exactly this - I would strongly recommend Ericsson's book 'Peak', it sets out his findings brilliantly.
Exactly my thoughts. My friend introduced me to these stuff when I was younger. Nowadays if I find anything technical (book/ted talk) I first find out the authors credentials. If he/she's just a journalist I will look up the original source material or move on.
I'm close to spending 10k hours watching Rick Beato videos.
I think you may be missing the point here Rick.
Gladwell is merely throwing down a generalized view of mastery across various disciplines...and is attempting to
provide a measure...that will produce his result if stretched across x number of areas of mastery...
Just as his book “Outliers”...alludes...this standard will not apply to everything...and there will be “outliers” that will demand much more time.....”quantum physics” comes to mind...or anything that possibly changes over time...through new knowledge or technology...so that you end up “chasing it” well across the 10,000 hour benchmark....
Rick, your RUclips content is great, and worthwhile. Substance gives you staying power. I subscribe to too many channels, but yours continues to reward.
I’m posting to thank you, but also to throw shade on whoever is hitting thumbs down on your videos. Anybody in the music business has to have a thick skin to withstand reviews. But I’m left wondering what factor petty jealousies of other musicians play in all this. Seems like, no matter what the level - local bands to top tier professionals - the music business is rife with insecurity and envy.
“Nothing you can do that can’t be done, nothing you can sing that can’t be sung...” I’ve never been one to pick favorite colors or rank great efforts, but something about this Beatles song resonates more and more with me. Thanks again.
What about the 1 Second Rule? You know, the amount of time it takes me to like your videos. You're the best dude on YT! You've taught me more than I'll ever know. Have a Beato New Year!
I completely agree with the comments on distinguishing mastery and success. This is my attempt to define success. I think we can all agree on what is mastery without much debate: being better than almost everyone in some skill. It's like a competition, you wanna be at the top 1% of the class, then 1 in 1000, then 1 in 100,000, etc. But success is much much harder to pin down. Here is a definition that works for me: success is achieving your goals. So if you set the bar low enough you can become automatically successful, right? The trick is that achieving easy goals in not at all satisfying. Success that does not bring satisfaction and foster self-esteem is not complete.
I think when we call someone extremely successful what we implicitly mean is that that person set their dreams/vision as their goals and achieved specifically those goals. You know the question "what would you do if you knew you could not fail"; if you can answer for yourself it reveals your core values and your vision. The people we think of when we are talking about success are those who looked liked from the outside they set goals in line with their core values and set them without putting any constraints on the goals whether they thought those goals are achievable or not.
Being successful in the computer industry may indicate that you are a master entrepreneur, business leader, manager of people, etc; it does not necessarily mean you are a master programmer or designer or engineer. Did Steve Jobs himself invent the products that made Apple the brand that it is or he had an unrelenting crystal clear vision about what he wanted and he was a master at managing talented people to design the products he envisioned? Anyway we can all think of numerous examples on mastery, talent, success, etc that we can dissect. Wow, you are still here 😊
There could be a delay between mastering something and the world recognizing that master-mint.
I always took the 10k hour rule as kind of way to de-mystify how someone gets really great at something complex. It takes A LOT OF TIME. Some people think that's just too simple of an answer, and they are sort of right. It doesn't just take time, it takes deliberate practice. That means the person organizes their learning with lesson plans and a good teacher. They don't just stare at a piano for 10k hours and all the sudden they are a master at it. I always took it as encouragement... If I'm not nearly as good at playing drums as I want to be, I can think to myself "well, I'm nowhere near 10k hours of practice, so how can I be that angry at myself that I'm not as good as Neil Peart yet?" Not that I'd be as good as him at 20k hours! But it gives you perspective on talent and ability and the work needed to achieve mastery at something.
To actually master something is impossible, mainly because once you´ve reached the level of a grandmaster you find completely new avenues of attaining even more skill in your selected field of expertise .
Same goes for perfection .
In short : we humans don´t even live long enough to get close to attaining mastership or perfection in any way or form .
Roughly 10,000 hours combined with talent. Guys like Jaco Pastorius, Yngwie Malmsteen and Steve Vai are/were very talented and obsessed with playing their musical instruments. Remember Vai's 12 hour workout that was published in a magazine years ago?
Someone who is not as talented and puts in the hours will improve obviously, but won't become as good as the top guys. Hard work beats talent, but only if talent doesn't work hard.
What is talent though? Can it be defined only as 'not hard work'? It sucks because we can only kinda look at it afterward and say oh there he HAD talent when he began to master the bla bla... When we try to pinpoint it in the beginning it's too easy to lose objectivity, or what we think is talent doesn't go anywhere or lead to anything... There's a compelling argument that the only difference between me and Steve Vai is actual hours of practice as driven by passion. It may not be a nice neat 10000 hours, but we still don't know whether Steve Vai has something that 'most' people don't... except for time + commitment or passion...
Intelligence, memory and physical prowess are as important in music as they are anywhere else, so people more 'gifted' in those areas have what... more talent? So it takes less hard work to get to certain level than someone less 'gifted'? I dunno, it's a complex head scratchy mess lol!
_I love this line, _*_"Hard work better talent, but only if talent doesn't work hard."_*
Such is true for most *_skill-based_* talents. However, for scholastically or academically or intellectually leaning talents, a large portion to it is attributable to *Nature." Nonetheless, the *Nurture* aspect of honing skills is without argument; and even the _mechanical_ aspects of manipulating math problems, or improving on one's _memory._
If skills, talent, and intelligence primarily spawn from *DNA,* then genetics new field of study called *epigenetics* will surely shed light into _The Great Human Potential Beyond Your DNA!_
In summary, the *10,000-Hour* isn't really a _rule_ as it is more of a _figure of speech_ that *constant and correct practice makes you perfect!*
The Rule really is:
*No. of Hours of Practice* _is inversely proportional to_ *DNA predisposition to such talent, skills, or intelligence*
*S U C C E S S,* however is a relatively *subjective matter* which live in the *_City of Perception._* He actually used to live in the *_State of Rules_* in the *_County of Objectivity._*
Zippy Leroux talent is when someone can do easily what may take time for others. I’ve seen it in too many musicians I grew up with. 2 people pick up an instrument at the same time and one of them just naturally able to create beautiful melodies from thin air while another can just to the solid basics. But no matter where we are we all enjoy music and strive to bring our best when we perform.
Talent is a natural aptitude. We all have them and they're all different. Some kids can start dribbling a basketball almost immediately while others can try for years and still never figure out how to not bounce the ball off their foot.
Honestly, The next Jaco or Steve Vai is playing guitar/bass right now instead of watching youtube videos and that's what separates the greats from the average. In their free-time all they do is play whereas many of us spend our time doing mindless things.
That 10,000 hour thing does seem fishy. It has been debunked by many since then. Maybe he picked a couple of examples of achievers, did a quickie time estimate, decided he liked picking a round number, and thought no one would check. On another subject, where he really lost me was when he cozied up to Nathan Myhrvold, the Microsoft tycoon and severe patent troll, who buys up patents and then sues anyone who has a product that in any way resembles the patent, especially when there's no merit to it. Nice business plan, eh? Nathan invited Gladwell to his compound, wined and dined him, and got Gladwell to write a glowing tribute to him, in which Gladwell quickly dismissed the patent troll accusation with a 1-line non-denial denial.
I suppose Gladwell's right about one thing. It takes a long time to be good at stuff. But as you point out very effectively, this concept isn't exactly brand new, nor can it be precise across all activities.
sorry, it has never been debunked. You are confusing mastery with success like the books that claim to have debunked it, and beside, the 10. 000 theory is not so simple. Great fan of him, but he is over simplyfing.
The key is to be passionate and perseverant and put in the work. Also, do things that you have more of a predisposition for. That's not to say we shouldn't strive for things we are not naturally gifted at, but certain things come easier and yield better results.
Learning how to practice deeply and efficiently is the key. You can play a song for 10,000 hours but if you continually make the same mistakes you are only mastering mistakes. Great video! Love it!
Rick,I come from a family who all wanted to learn to play music and did.However,I became the most accomplished player,not because I was the most gifted,but because I spent years and years dedicated to learning. I had to practice ten times as much as one of my brothers in order to master something. Not all players are created equal. If you have a certain gift for a task you advance at a very different rate. All people have to dedicate a certain amount of time,but it is much less for some than others. Talent is everything when it comes to learning.
Good food for thought Rick. Wishing you and your family a happy and productive new year.
Many thanks for the content you post.
While i can't necessarily agree nor disagree with that theory,which i heard of some years ago and never knew the origin of(thank you!),i do know that in the years i've been playing,writing performing,etc. ever so often,ill hit these plateaus in my playing where i get "the AHa moment" where a whole lot of information just kind of gels together all at once and sends me further along.these days,it mostly happens in the area of my understanding of theory and composition,which is great for my students.whatever it can be attributed to,be it 10,000 hrs. or prodigious talent or LSD in my earlier years,all i know is its a blessing and a gift to be passed on to those that want to learn.your videos are great,man.keep up the good work.i point all my pupils your way.
The 10 000 hours rule is a rule of the thumb, not an absolute thing. Of course if you are lame, you won't ever be an olympic sprinter, and in many disciplines the competition is so tough (in chess, in music, whatever) that simply mastering the stuff isn't enough, you need to be nearly superhuman.
Taking it as a rule of the thumb works fine in the real world: if you spend 10000 hours practicing something, you'll be competent in it and from the POV of the general public, an expert, a master. As a musician, I'll never be as high as you are; however I've worked for years, played on stage or worked in studio with world class bands, made records, etc. Compared to 99.9% of people who can't even play "happy birthday", I'm clearly an expert, a master, though I'll always be ridiculous as a pianist compared to the actual famous "masters".
Thats not totally true. I've seen people sing for years and they still suck at it. It's not their fault though. I give them an "A" for their effort and dedication.
if you learn when you are a children before puberty normally you will master some tecnique, but MASTERY does not equal SUCCESS or GENIUS. Mr Rick Beato is a great person but now he is confusing two different notions.
Undoubtedly it takes thousands of hours to become good at whatever you are trying to achieve.
10,000 hours is not that hard to hit. Five hours a day, for 5 1/2 years.
Or, eight hours a day for 3 1/2 years.
10,000 hours is not a bad goal.
My favorite channel. I can listen to anyone talk about music for hours if they know what they are talking about.
Greatness! Ditch your lighting. Warmer lighting. Love everything you post!
The most important thing is to start. "Doing" opens the door to serendipity.
Most really good guitarists i know fell asleep with a guitar in their lap every night...waking up when guitar hits the floor....i personally believe 1 hour a day MINIMUM.
It's not about the time someone puts into their practice, it's about the quality of practice they put when practicing.
I agree with most of your videos. However, I disagree with this video. First of all, Gladwell says that in order for the 10,000 hours to apply the person must have a baseline talent level. Also, there's no guarantee that the rule will work because luck will always be part of the equation. Also, he makes a specific point that spending 10,000 hours is no guarantee of making a meaningful contribution, however, it is a prerequisite. He makes no promise about the 10,000 rule but rather is making a rather profound observation about the baseline of time required in order to make a meaningful contribution in a given field.
I tell my students that discipline is the great equalizer. If you have a baseline talent level then achieving a level of greatness is achievable. Now, how that skill is monetized is a completely different issue which is why I find it important talk about professionalism, business, marketing, and etc. It's not just about playing your instrument well its about finding a compatible path in the music industry.
I dig your videos. Hopefully, one day I can bring you to The Ohio State University to do a masterclass for our students. Let's talk. Happy New Year!
Thank you Shawn and Happy New Year! I would love to come to Ohio State do a masterclass anytime. Let me know :)
you are right sir , besides he is confusing mastery - expertise with success, are two very different things. Absolute pitch does not equal becoming a great composer, for instance. Last but not least, some subjects must be learned when you are a children. But that does not contraddict the 10. 000 rule.
Happy New Year Beatians! The thing is everybody is different. People pick up certain things quicker than others. What quantifies mastery? Some of the jazz masters say they're still learning music in their 70s and 80s. Also it is very important what you do with your time. Noodling for 6 hrs a day is unlikely to produce the same results as 1 hour of applied learning. You could develop more in one month with applied, focused learning an hour a day than a year of noodling. Work hard and try to be consistent and the results will begin to show, 3hrs a day for ten years you should at least be very good at what you do!
It is not a RULE. It is a concept. It is not to be taken literally. Nothing changes magically when the odometer rolls over from 9,999 to 10,000. It is also not a measure of the time put in, it is a measure of the effort expended. Grade school/secondary school takes 20,000 hours, but that does not make every graduating senior an expert student. It is also not a measure of success, or expected success. It is about effort and motivation, and getting good at something, which takes time.
The takeaway is that: 1) it takes a long time to get good at something (and longer if you don't have the wherewithal in the first place), 2) expect to put in the time and effort if you want to be good at something, and 3) realize that the more effort you expend the better you will get. That is the steak. The idea of thinking of this simplistically like a '10,000 hour rule' is just the sizzle. Marketing.
So I agree with Rick, and I do not buy into the literal concept as defined in that way. Gladwell himself probably doesn't either, but he likes that the simplistic literal concept sells books. What I do buy into are the concepts that it actually represents.
Teacher TRX sums this up much more succinctly below.
Great video and totally on point. Hard work, diligence and time... Great vid.
Happy new year Rick. I love topics you bring up, always interesting. Thank you !
A lot of people think it´s about practice time but it´s not.
There´s a lot of talent and intelligence involved. If it was only about time everybody would be a virtuoso.
What all this kind of supervirtuoso musicians have in common is that they learn and assimilate in a day what a normal musician would learn in a month. They are very efficient with their practice time and are constantly learning.
Talent, intelligence and efficiency > Time.
Time has always been the eternal excuse of the not accomplished musician.
Saw an interview with Macca the other day, where he points out that because the Beatles had to play 8 hours a night in Hamburg, they learned thousands of songs to keep it interesting. I think that was the key ingredient to the success of the Beatles - they learned so many songs in so many different styles (think "Taste of Honey" or "Besame Mucho"), it was much easier for them when it came time to write their own songs. So it wasn't the number of hours they practised their craft, it was how they spent the time.
Leo hit the nail on the head. Trying to reverse engineer success is nearly impossible. That's what this bloke in the video tried to do to disprove the 10,000-hour idea. Even people with immense talent need an unknown amount of practice to become masters. Why hasn't there been another Beetles? Another Michael Jackson? Another Elvis? Another John Williams? Certainly, there have been many masters besides these few I mentioned, but there are a whole lot of mystical factors that come into becoming the best of the best. What Gladwell was saying is putting in many hours of deliberate hard work is probably the most common denominator in all cases. Remove the number. Forget about 10,000 hours. If one wants to argue that you can be great or a master without putting in the work, good luck chasing that dream. Here is the bottom line, what difference does it make. If you don't want to put in the time why are you even pursuing that endeavor? Do something else. Because it is all about the doing. That's why people who are great are not concerned about their greatness. They just do. So if you're questioning the 10,000 hours chances are you'll probably never be a master or great at anything. It may just not be who you are. You'll always be average at best. And by definition, that means like most. Not special. Welcome to reality.
I had the headmaster of an arts school in a major city tell me that one must pracctice 8-10 hours a day, seven days a week for ten years in order to become a professional. He then said it requires a devotion of about 60% of that to maintain your level.
One day, Gregg Allman heard his kid brother Duane 'messing around on his guitar. Gregg immediately realized he was the second best guitar man in the family. No art master school necessary.
Happy New Year Rick ! Thanks for all your work =) Your book is really good to spend tons of hours studying it!
Malcolm states that the only thing that counts towards the 10,000 hour rule is deliberate practice. Just running scales or mindlessly repeating anything doesn’t count. One could practice 10,000 hours in any discipline, but only spend 2,000 hours in deliberate practice. Deliberate practice is when you’re totally focused and pushing your boundaries. It includes being conscious of what you’re doing and analyzing it, and adjusting what you’re doing accordingly. I agree that 10,000 as a hard and fast number may be misleading. I can say in my own practice that one great benefit of being aware of a standard of hours, be it 10,000 or some other number, is that it motivates me to practice more and to put in time practicing even when I don’t feel motivated, because I feel the need to rack up hours. I just have to be careful to make sure that my hours are quality hours in which I’m really stretching myself and analyzing what I’m actually practicing and how I’m doing it. My point is that even if 10,000 hours isn’t necessarily a verifiable guarantee of success, it motivates one to practice more and more often, and I think that’s a great thing.
I hope it does not take that long... I'm starting late... ;)
Franck Martin i feel you
Ditto that - picked up guitar at 57, but have a lifetime singing in choirs. Many things like reading music, matching pitch & rhythms, hearing scale degrees/intervals, etc., seem to be "transferable" skills. But playing songs on the guitar, that's all new, and has been a real exciting journey so far. Perhaps that's the point - I have goals for guitar, work toward them, but I could care less about reaching some 'pinnacle' of ability. I do track practice time, but my heart and focus is on real specific tasks; limited number of songs, tone, sound, and techniques - Like Rick's "3 Things To Practice (And 3 More Things To Practice) to Improve Your Guitar Playing Fast".
Never is too late...
Find a mentor, ( You have RUclips use it)
Me too.... I might not have 10,000 hours left!!!! ;)
Another thing that we need to consider also is the industry one is talking about. For example, if one is trying to find success in the music industry, you don't need to be the best to succeed. Having a good personality, good looks, hard work ethic, can all play a bigger role then just your talent alone. At the end of the day, the music business is about selling a product, and the most advanced art (if there is such a thing) doesn't necessarily sell the most. On the other hand, if you want to be a major league baseball player, you do have to be really talented. There isn't room in sports for mediocracy - hard work, good looks, good personality won't land you a spot on a major league team.
I would caution against confusing "Recognition" with "Mastery". I don't know how many hours it took Van Gogh to hit his stride, but selling only one painting in his lifetime doesn't mean he wasn't a master painter. I would append your closing statement with "there are also plenty of people who became masters without broad recognition and there are plenty of people who are broadly recognized (popular), who aren't necessarily 'masters' at their craft."
First of all, I love your videos. Thank you for making them.
What Gladwell says in that book is that you need at least 10.000 hours to master a skill. Not that after you practice for that long you will automatically master your skill, you my require more practice. He also says that to be successful you don't need to be the best, just good enough. That's why there are some people who may achieve success in less time. Basically, the message of the books is that if you want to master a skill, you need to put a lot of effort, at least some natural ability and even then you may be great, but it doesn't mean that you will be successful. It's a really good book. I don't know if you read it completely, but I would definitely recommend it!
Linguistically and logically laid out...well done!
Quality and Quantity combined is what matters. If you drew a circle for 10,000 hours and nothing else then you would have only expertise toward drawing circles and no other form of art. This applies to all fields and you should never exclude those to methods because they are both valuable.
Jim Morrison is a great example. Yes, he probably had wrote poems for quite awhile, but started writing great songs right from the start.
The famous Irish traditional fiddler James Kelly who is a master musician in his genre has a very simple expression. "There are no guarantees...." which is directly in line with your summation. The most famous exponent of Irish traditional music piper, singer, tune/song collector, Seamus Ennis said of the the uilleann pipes that it takes 21 years to master them. These days it seems like kids are learning it much faster... but still, are they mastering the expression? That's up for grabs. Ennis went on to say, "You know, there’s an awful lot to be said about this Irish traditional folk music and folklore. Because first of all, you have to learn it. And first you must learn the talk. And then you must learn the grip. And after that, you must learn the truckly-howl. And then you have the whole lot, only just to keep on practicing it." Perhaps, the faeries told him that.....! ;-)
Thank you fir sharing your perspective on this. It helped me make a decision.
Love your stuff Rick - and your delivery!
Interesting thoughts on the topic, Rick, as usual You addressed this in a live stream when I asked you about it, but you've done a wonderful job of expanding on your ideas and tackling the issue. It also gives a lot hope to those of us who might be late bloomers...though maybe not in the world of chess! Still, that could be another possible topic for you. One finds a great many late bloomers in the world of art, whether it be painting, music, writing, etc. Thanks for another insightful video.
I'm a classically-trained clarinetist. I grew up playing clarinet in many different ensembles all throughout school. I've easily put in more than 10,000 hours playing clarinet and have not found success (after all, music is a very competitive field). But I'm not doing it to be successful, I'm doing it because I love it and I'm still able to make some money doing it.
I agree with you Rick… But I always love to hear Malcom’s ideas. Love that guy!
I made a goal to spends 10K hours playing drums so I could sound like Bonham. I got bored and stopped at 5 hours, and I sound as good as Lars...and I am okay with that...
Its not 10 000 hours that matters. It's 10 000 hours of quality practice. Many people seem to just think they can count to 10 000. No one has ever claimed that. The 10 000 hour rule also not guarantee success, its a minimum requirement. On the contrary, if you don't put in the work, you are pretty much guaranteed to not succeed ;)
As I have gotten older, I have gotten more effective at practicing. I have a better understanding of how to practice more effectively and consciously reflect on what I'm doing so that I can assess whether my practice methods are effective and revise and refine my methods as necessary to achieve improvement. Also, I am better at comprehending the nature and essence of the skill I'm trying to achieve so I can focus on my efforts more directly on getting there. So I would say an hour of practice at this stage of my life is more effective than an hour of practice 10 or 20 years ago. Maybe most important, I find joy in practice now, whereas I didn't when I was young. To me there are few things more exciting than pursuing a skill, seeking to achieve perfection, though you never quite get there - a never-ending quest! There is such beauty in human achievement. That is why we love watching great musicians or great athletes or virtually anyone who is excellent at what they do. Even if we are amateurs, there is happiness in seeking to get better at something.
There's also plenty of people who have mastered a skill set without becoming "successful," right?!
practice, practice, practice, and practice some more!!
Yeah but what if you practice the wrong things in the wrong way based upon wrong foundations?
Then you need to start watching Rick Beato's vids ASAP! lol
I have the odd experience of growing up in musical family and “preforming” for the first time at the age of nine. Singing and playing guitar most of my life, on the couch and in bar bands. Recently, I took a long break- about seven years. Didn’t play more than 30minutes a few times a month often going weeks without playing at all. I was never great but I was a solid player with a decent musical vocabulary. I have recently gotten interested (and have the time) to play more again and have found the muscle memory isn’t there as solid right now so it feels clumsy at times but more interesting is that my tastes have changed and the patterns and fills I used to play are still there, but new stuff is coming to the surface. Sometimes its like “where did that come from?” Or “why didn’t I go here before?” To get back to the subject, It’s sort of like even though I wasn’t practicing, I was still learning somehow. I’m sure some of it is that I had grown tired of playing the same stuff, took a long break, and have just been paying attention to what I was listening to but my playing has changed significantly in a good way. Hopefully the speed and dexterity comes back quickly because I’m enjoying my new found vocabulary I’m trying to play now. This makes me think there is a difference between skill and knowledge and they aren’t tied together in lockstep, one can advance even as the other is falling behind. It feels like previously my skill was improving while my knowledge was getting stale and then my knowledge increased as I let the skills go away.
I may be odd about this but I have heard other people describe their relationship with playing music as progressing in steps like going up stairs, periods of quick learning interrupted by periods of little improvement. This feels like a big step, almost like I had to unlearn some old ways that had become automatic in order to “make room” for something new. I hope I’m not sounding too weird or personal about this but it’s an interesting time in my musical life and I’m looking forward to getting my callouses back! Lol, right now my fingers are just sore.
well done Rick, i don´t car about all the thoughts you have done it!
It's about the quality of each hour spent. Not the quantity. I've been playing since I was a child, but didn't start taking practicing seriously until I was around 9. And 7 hours of practice then, is equivalent to 30 minutes now. And I'm not counting playing, just practice. Solid focused and deliberate practice.
Great video and 100% true!Greetings from Crete !!!
I would say that the problem is in the practices you're comparing anecdotally. I don't think having a number one song necessarily implies mastery. Rebecca Black, PSY, Baauer, and Ylvis all accomplished this with "Friday", "Gangnam Style", "Harlem Shake", and "What Does the Fox Say" but they are obviously not masters. They hit the lotto. Achieving 100,000 subscribers also does not imply mastery. You can explode with subscribers or views in one day by uploading videos of suicides or murders, videos of attractive people nude, anything about Donald Trump, or simply by stumbling upon the next goofy trend like planking or "the running man. challenge". Going platinum is closer I think, but still, there are many platinum artists out there who have them but are probably not masters. I think Soulja Boy's "Crank That" probably went platinum.
The 10K hours theory is a just a general guideline based on the observations of successful people and what they had in common. If you reduce the sample group to activities that always require skill (golfing, dancing, writing, speaking, programming, or classical piano) this number probably makes a lot more sense. The confusion comes when we try to apply it to activities that have more to do with the appearance, personality, personal history, or novelty of the performer than the actual craft. Great topic though!
i love your explanation on this. It is a generic statement but if you go in the underbelly of the book, its mainly saying, if you put in the hours, you will be closer to mastery of a particular aspect but the 10000 hour would only work for some activities that require skill like you said but there are so many variables. You are also right by saying it is actually hard to quantify "Mastery" and the examples he gave do not conclusively attribute to mastery other than good marketing strategies and great timing using the social media era as a great driver of content. My video went viral on Instagram of me playing guitar with my friend singing in an elevator, doesnt necessarily mean im a master at guitar or that he is a virtuoso at singing. Great video though :D
Precisely!
Kate Bush wrote her first song at 12 which became one of her tracks not long after. The answer, sadly I believe, is talent. Like that guy in class whos really good at drawing/really fast/naturally hilarious/never studies and get excellent grades etc theres a thing called talent that obliterates the 10, 000 hr rule. You can get good with practice but talent is what makes the guys we pay to see.
Always interesting topics that make us think, always, in this channel. thaks, man.
There is such a thing as deep training. In deep training you deliberately go beyond your comfort level
I think Malcolm Gladwell meant that, when he introduced the 10.000 hours rule.
Still, I think Rick has a valid point. If the competition in a certain field is hard, like in piano playing, it requires maybe 20.000 hours of deep training for the opportunity to have success. And there are many fields in which it only takes about 20 hours to be competent enough to earn money.
Rick Beato also made a very fleeting remark, that it is a matter of genes. Well, human beings do not differ that much in their genes. And that is exactly the point of Malcolm Gladwell. I agree with him that success is not a matter of talent. It always is the result of hard work, whether it is 20 hours, 10.000 hours, or 100.000 hours.
Its not always the case.
I do a job that is physical, and it took me only about 700 hours to reach a very high level of skill.
Mostly because I was already very fit.
It really depends on what the case is.
Matthew Syed's book 'Bounce' covers this topic and he cites several examples of children who were intentionally and intensively educated in different fields by their parents and who later became world-beaters in their fields. In some cases the parents even boasted beforehand that their methods would produce these results. Examples are in chess, tennis, golf, and others.
I think the 10,000 hour 'rule' is largely a figure of speech but has a very relevant message. A long period of purposeful practice, combined with the right attitude and correct mental techniques to overcome failure and maximise the chance of success are what is required.
I don't see how 'talent' is much of a part of it. All the big 'talents' I can think of (where I know something of their background) spent enormous amounts of time at a very young age developing their craft. People don't realise this, and attribute their abilities to 'talent'.
However, mastery is not the same as financial or competitive success. That part of the equation requires some degree of luck, imo.
Saw an interview once with Ivan Lins, Brazilian songwriter and jazz pianist. He claimed to have only played music for 2-3 years (during his time as a student at MIT where he played piano in clubs and bars) before becoming a professional songwriter and musician who wrote/co-wrote several jazz standards. True or not, some people must be able to pick things up quicker than others, they are just born with it, naturally gifted etc. Practice make them even better, specially when it comes to performance.
Very interesting discussion. I think there is a difference between mastery and professional success, and the relationship between the two differs depending on the specific field. With chess, the correlation between mastery and professional success is quite high. With other professions such as music or acting, one's professional success depends on many other factors other than mastery. There is natural talent, of course, but there are also factors like good looks, good marketing, or just good luck which have nothing to do with mastery. Also, if an actor or musician has a reputation for being difficult to work with, it will be harder for them to achieve professional success even if they achieve mastery. That is why I believe that coupling one's mastery level to the awards one has received is problematic.
I haven't yet read Outliers but I've listened to interviews with Gladwell. I think the point about 10,000 hours is not that it's a guarantee of success but that those who are successful in their given field tend to have put in at least 10,000 hours of practice before they are successful. The Beatles were undoubtedly talented but they also worked really hard. Your son Dylan has a rare gift but it's also the result of hours and hours of practice/learning.
This is outstanding information, Rick! Thank you!
Here's what I think is inherently wrong about the 10000 hour rule: it only takes into account the time you spend consciously practicing. I have several hobbies and areas of interest, but let's consider the two I think of my most serious pursuits: music and historical fencing. When I started playing guitar back in high school, I would practice songs and scales for hours and hours on end practically every day and build up a reasonable level of technical proficiency in around two years. I didn't really understand much of what I was doing, but I could play songs I wanted to. I also started composing after a few weeks of playing guitar; those early tries were and are horrible and I never want to even think about them again to be honest.
Anyway, after high school I enrolled into this one-year music school and learned theory and most importantly the way chords are formed and what I reasonably can and can't do with a certain chord. I felt great about my new skills and wanted to enter either a lower or higher level school for music production, but I failed year after year to get accepted because my sight-reading and other related skills weren't up to par with all the people who had played violin or oboe from the age of 4. Eventually I gave up and started pursuing other career-paths. It was a hard pill to swallow, but I now think I was lucky to fail, no way is there a future in the music industry for me and this way I can do other things for money and express myself without having to care about selling records, gigging for money, or producing horrible punk bands. It led to several years of not really practicing anything seriously, just noodling improvisations every now and then. And now we get to my point: this "non-practice" was at least as important for my evolution as a player and composer as the rigorous practice of my late teens. Because of it, I now know exactly what I'm doing when playing, I can hear my own playing in my head as I do it, and I can relatively easily compose songs in a few hours without as much as touching an instrument. I also believe that subconscious processing has a huge part in this development, spending so many years surrounded by and thinking about music has definitely been a major aspect of invisible growth.
When it comes to historical fencing (HEMA), I only started doing it relatively recently, maybe three years ago or so, but I've gotten better at it than some people who have been doing it for longer than I have. We don't have that much practice time a week, twice to three times usually, but I don't attend every single session because I have other things going on with my life. I believe one of the biggest reasons why I've gotten relatively good in a short time is I think about fencing actions a lot. I have read so many treatises apart from what we actually actively study, and I think about and process techniques and situations almost daily trying to understand what I can do and in what context, and what types of things I should avoid and if those could also be usable in some rare case.
Wish you all the best for 2018, Rick.
The last post of 2017, (last but not least), was a killer! Bravo.
I've never heard of this 10 000 hours rule before, and learned a thing. Anyway, I really like the way you teach things.
I remember in High School, I would read books on photography. I would study the pictures and then take out my camera an reproduce what I saw in the books. I then got a photography scholarship and applied what I learned to that. Later, I became a professional videographer making Industrial videos. I applied all my photography experience to framing and shooting videos. Total time that I put into learning this craft: About 10,000 hours. 👍
Nature and/or Nurture for sure. I know I'm better with Music than I was when I started. I can pick out some kinds of chords by ear verses not being able to do that at all when I started playing guitar. Finding some basic harmonies when singing with groups took some repetition to get to the level of ability of being able to do that at the drop of a hat and it's still a bit shaky. Playing an instrument and being able to sing at the same time obviously is going to be a honed skill for me because I usually struggle with it and either have someone else sing or play instruments when I perform songs with my church group. I'd put myself in a beginner/intermediate category at best. I should have taken my piano lessons more seriously. Hindsight is 20/20 right? Rock on good people.
Greatness requires true passion AND practice
I feel like the 10,000 hour rule is kind of an example of how you can arrange things in such a way as to make statistics appear to say almost whatever you want them to. As Mark Twain famously said, "There are lies, damned lies, and statistics."
As Rick has implied, common sense and basic critical thinking can easily inform us that "mastery" is either subjectively or more-or-less arbitrarily judged, and the amount of energy (force through a distance applied over time) required to achieve it is going to vary substantially depending on what you're trying to achieve and how you go about it and on your own natural abilities and inclinations.
Malcom's point was that people with the time, money and access to the necessary training/education and equipment, etc., to be able to put thousands of hours into pursuits like computer programming early in their lives have an enormous advantage over people who don't have those things.
It's not a new idea, and many have tried to use it as a basis for arguments against capitalism and for socialism.
"Socialism," or something they're calling socialism, has become incredibly popular among people in their early 20's, probably because leftist educators have dominated the humanities and social sciences in our colleges and universities for quite a long time. But if very few people have a computer, then whoever gets access to one is going to have a huge advantage over everyone else as far as computer programming goes, regardless of whether that person is living in a free society or in a government controlled one. And the idea that there will never be rarefied resources if you "set up the system in a good way" is just ludicrous. It's not even desirable, because if you somehow managed to actually prevent rarefied resources from existing, at that point you have eliminated your ability to create new and better things. Anything that is new and better is initially rarefied! No matter how you set up your government!
A lot of young people point at various positive aspects of the experience of life that people in certain European countries enjoy, and they say "See, socialism can be good!" But in real socialism, the government controls *all* of the means of production. That is not what those European countries have. They still have capitalist, free market systems driving their economies, they just tax people like crazy and provide a bunch of "free" services. The parts of the European experience that these children don't seem to be aware of are things like a hospital telling you no you can't come get your kid, whom we're pretty much holding captive, and whom we've admitted we can't save from death, and take them to another place where they may be able to save them, even if you've managed to raise the money to pay for it on your own, because of some politically driven rule made by some centralized government committee or official. That's the kind of thing that socialism results in, because the whole point of socialism is to completely dispense with the idea of individual rights! You cannot rob someone of all their personal property without doing that!
When you hand over the right to control all the currency, all the means of production, etc., to the government, you hand over all of your say so about things, folks. That's just the way human civilization works, it's been proven over and over and over again. With socialism comes poverty and oppression of all kinds.
In a free society, in which each individual has substantial say so about things, by virtue of controlling their personal accumulations of property, money, and means of production, opportunities to do things like what Bill Gates did end up being fairly maximally distributed. What we need protection from is overly centralized power, whether that power is political or economic, and whether it is in the hands of government, or the hands of the privately held enormous monopolies, or in government propped up monopolies.
Right now, RUclips and Facebook operate large public forums, and as such, it's illegal for them to engage in political censorship, but they are engaging in it in a huge way, and no one can afford to sue them for it, and even if someone did, we have enough leftists in our government now, that such efforts might fail, because most of the political censorship being done by them is in a left-leaning direction. For example, anybody espousing a medical view that differs from those set forth by the CDC are being shutdown by Facebook, Twitter and RUclips. The CDC derives a huge percentage of it's budget from the pharmaceutical industry! The CDC (and individuals in positions of power at the CDC) owns pharmaceutical patents and profits from the sale of pharmaceuticals! The CDC has ordered their scientists to destroy evidence that would present obstacles to their pharmaceutical pushing agenda! And their PR campaign around it all is incredible. The need to eliminate the conflict of interest the CDC operates under is a huge political issue right now, so squelching differing views from the CDC is absolutely political censorship and social media sites can and should be sued for doing it.
"If you have a totally free society and people can do whatever they want, how do you deal with racism?" You expose it to the world and shame the people doing it! You don't need socialism or incredibly draconian laws or regulations or even "affirmative action," really, you just need transparency and freedom of the press. And I think any individual should be able to declare themselves a "member of the press" for the purposes of calling out undesirable behavior on the part of a large, powerful government or private institution. The recent true-story-based movie, "Just Mercy" is a case in point. It describes how a black lawyer took the story of a black man who was very unjustly put on death row, to 60-minutes, and thereby more-or-less shamed the Alabama supreme court into doing the right thing; which hopefully set a precedent which will have an impact on the problem.
Speaking of racism, one of the incredibly important things about a free society is protection of fundamental individual rights from even the majority's view of things! When my parents were growing up, the majority of people in Virginia voted that a black man could not marry a white woman and that a black man could not vote. That's why we need checks and balances on the power of government, and why we need a set of individual civil rights that our courts are there to protect. Against the majority if necessary!
Effective protection of individual rights and especially the right to own and control private property, these form the foundation for freedom and liberty in the world. The current crop of youngsters are not cognizant of the consequences of allowing cracks in that foundation to exist and to spread.
The mob must not be allowed to rob all the wealthy of their wealth. Robbing $10,000,000 from one wealthy person and giving it to 10,000 poor people does not do those poor people one whit of good. Maybe they'll eat for a month or two. But setting things up in a way that encourages that one wealthy person to start a franchise that employs 10,000 people, well - that can actually help. And having wealthy people around to pay for the production of luxuries means that more and more luxuries are constantly being created, thereby employing a bunch of people, and a bunch of things that used to be luxuries are constantly being cast off for pennies on the dollar in favor of newer better ones, which is why most of the poor people in America have TV's and cars. Poor people in America have historically enjoyed lifestyles that have been positively luxurious compared to poor people in other places, where governments and tribes and gangs control everything. Black lives absolutely do matter, but the last thing we need in America is a rise of tribalism or a move toward Marxism.
Anyway, all that is to just to talk about the general notion that Malcom was parading in presenting the 10,000 hour rule, and to warn against some of the potential abuses of that general notion.
great points, not everyone does and focuses on just one thing
Practice makes BETTER. Nothing is perfect.
Well stated at the end. Luck really has a lot of impact. As well as, of course, the hours...
I started learning trumpet six months ago. I practice 30-60 min. Per day. I hope I can be not terrible after a couple of years and I’ll be happy.
The best way to settle this question is to ask a teacher who observes mastery on a daily basis. During my career as a teacher I observed that some (few) students are sponges who can learn at an accelerated rate. They all have an ability to focus and concentrate intensely when necessary. Usually, it is relatively short periods of time. More importantly, they enjoy challenges and the process of mastery. I don't know why.