10,000 Hours

Ever hear of the 10,000 Hour Rule?

This idea suggests that you need around 10,000 hours of careful, deliberate practice in order to become an expert, or to “master” a skill. This concept was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers.

Gladwell used lots of anecdotal data to support the concept, but the main centerpiece is a study titled "The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance." This 1993 study focused on expert violinists at the Berlin Academy of Music.

This study did indeed show that the most accomplished violinists had accumulated an average of around 10,000 hours of deliberate practice by the age of 20. However, there’s some nuance here, as usual: some of the violinists at 10,000 hours were considerably better than the others, so even within that experience range, there were still other factors at play.

Maybe more importantly, the deliberate practice aspect proved to be a necessary component, and deliberate practice was very, very different…