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 than the way most people practiced.

Today, I want to share my own observations about this sort of deep practice, so we can look at this concept through the lens of Brazilian jiu jitsu. While musical mastery might mean that you can hypnotize an audience, mastery in jiu jitsu means you can tie someone into a pretzel.

I started wrestling when I was 13 years old. Gradually, this led to judo and jiu jitsu in the late 1990s.

A lot of the moves from wrestling carried over into both judo and jiu jitsu, and nearly all of what I learned in judo applied to BJJ, and vice versa. I was starting down Gladwell’s prescribed path to mastery.

What does 10,000 hours really mean, though? If you train twice a week for an hour, you’ll need to train for 5000 weeks in order to hit that 10,000 hour mark. That’s 96 years! Clearly, in order to hit this mark, you have to practice frequently.

If you want to get there in 10 years, you’ll need to focus on your training for 20 hours a week. Ten years later, and you’ll have those 10,000 hours of practice.

Training jiu jitsu for 10 hours a week is tough. Your body needs time to recover, and you have to build up to that level of intensity over a few years, generally speaking. A typical consistent student at Revolution BJJ might train for 3 or 4 hours a week.

20 hours requires something truly extraordinary—a level of physical and mental dedication and toughness that very few folks possess. 20 one-hour classes a week for ten years, though? That’s asking a tremendous amount… and it’s not even everything the 10,000 Hour Rule demands.

That’s because I’ve only been talking about showing up for class 20 times every week for 10 years. But the 10,000 Hour Rule demands deliberate practice.

Deliberate.

That means you can’t just show up for a class or practice something you’re good at for the umpteenth time. Instead, you have to place yourself in the areas where you feel uncomfortable. In order to hone a skill to the level of mastery we’re talking about, you have to feel like you’re not quite there right now.

You have to try to overcome weaknesses, and to find the areas just outside of your circle of competence.

One good way to do this is by drilling. You have a partner who creates the position you want to work on, and then you practice the move… only you don’t have to do the whole move if you’re doing deliberate practice. Instead, you might only practice a small portion of the full technique, so you can get ten times as many repetitions on the trouble spot.

You typically have a few minutes to do this, and then your partner will do their drill. The way our drills classes are currently structured is that you’ll switch partners after each partner goes, so you get a different body every time.

Suppose you do this for an hour, meaning you drill for 30 minutes, and your partner drills for 30 minutes. How should we count this toward our 10,000 hour goal? If we’re being honest, only 30 minutes of that hour should count.

Maybe rolling should count, right? I mean, it’s live sparring—going after one another.

Here, it really depends on how you’re rolling. You need to run lots of experiments if you’re really going to be leveraging the deliberate practice aspect of the Rule. I’ve been a black belt in BJJ since 2008, and although I can certainly still have challenging rolls with tough folks, if I want to work on specific things, I have to deliberately remind myself not to do the easy stuff.

You have to be willing to look like a clown when you’re rolling. You have to be deliberate.

So, after some 35 years of grappling, I have to ask myself: have I followed the 10,000 hour rule?

Let’s break it down. For my time in high school wrestling, I would indeed say that there was a lot of deliberate practice. Sure, lots of our time was spent hardening our spirits by physical conditioning, but more time was spent focusing on the fundamentals. I’m not sure how much of that I phoned in, and how much was deliberate, but maybe a quarter of my mat time was deliberate practice back then.

Five days a week, two hours a day (give or take) probably left me with 2 hours of deliberate practice per week, and I wrestled consistently for 3 years. That’s around 300 hours so far.

From 1997 until about 2010, my training intensity increased from a couple of hours a week to as much as 20 hours a week. Although I was at my gym for much more time than this, I don’t think it’s fair to pretend I was training more than 20 hours at any given point, and that might even be a stretch. 20 hours of jiu jitsu is an awful lot to do week after week, even for a conditioned veteran.

Since then, my training has waned as I’ve gotten older, and as more and more other things in life draw my attention and interest away from focusing on understanding jiu jitsu. Even still, from 2010 until 2023, I probably averaged about 10 hours a week of training.

That’s a lot of mat time, but how much of it was deliberate? Maybe a third, maybe half if I’m being generous. Let’s give me the benefit of the doubt and say that half of the time I trained has been deliberate.

30 years of training amounts to around 14,000 hours of mat time, or maybe 7000 hours of deliberate training.

I’ll let you know when I attain mastery.