What is “10,000 hours”
Best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell introduced and popularized the concept of 10,000 hours in his book Outliers, released in 2008. He says that to become an expert in any field, you need to put in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. He gives multiple examples of people who became better as the practiced more but to become an expert, you need to have a critical mass of 10,000 hours (or more) behind you. To put it in perspective, if you spend 20 hours a week learning a new skill, it will take you almost 10 years to fully master it.
It is interesting to note that while Malcolm Gladwell popularized this concept, it was first introduced by professor K Anders Ericsson of Florida State University. In his research, he studied professional athletes, musicians, and chess grand-masters to understand how much time is needed by them to become the absolute top of their game. The answer, he concluded is 10,000 hours of deliberate practice.
I don’t have 10,000 hours
If you are like most people, you will not have the time or patience to wait for 10 years or more to learn a new skill. In fact, just knowing the fact that it will take you 10 years to learn something new, creates a huge obstacle in even starting the journey.
The good news is that it doesn’t have to be 10,000 hours. In fact, it doesn’t have to be 1000 hours or 100 hours.
Josh Kaufman, bestselling author of books on business, entrepreneurship, skill acquisition, and productivity debunks this concept in his TedX talk and proposes that it takes only 20 hours to learn a new skill.
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He says that Ericsson’s research was not about practicing a skill to become an expert in it. He focused on high-performance professionals in extremely narrow fields and 10,000 hours is the time of deliberate practice they needed to reach the absolute pinnacle of their game.
This he says (and correctly so) is vastly different from trying to just become good at a skill (say learning to play the piano or learning how to cook) as becoming good at something is many notches below in proficiency, compared to becoming the absolute best in the world in a skill.
So is it 20 hours now?
It doesn’t matter.
The actual duration of deliberate practice you put in to learn a skill is immaterial. What is more important is the process you chose to learn the skill. Here’s a 4 step process at becoming good at a skill in much lesser time than 10,000 hours.
Step 1: Put an end-state to the skill
It is very easy to get completely lost in the depths of any new skill you are trying to learn. Hence, it is important at the very beginning to precisely articulate the skill you are trying to learn.
A good way to do it is to write down what is the end state - what do you wish to accomplish when you are done with your practice. It is important to be specific here.
So, I want to learn guitar is too broad and doesn’t state to what extent you want to learn the guitar playing techniques. So what are the better examples :
I want to learn the guitar to perform at my college fest
I want to learn the guitar to perform all songs of Guns and Roses
I want to learn the guitar to teach my niece how to play
You may comment here that these goals are too specific and you will not become an expert or know everything about playing the guitar by following this step.
And you are right. The key point you need to keep in mind is that you are trying to learn a new skill and become damn good at it, but you are not trying to be the world’s top-most expert in that skill. So you do not need to know the entire body of knowledge of that skill but only a part of it.
If however, you do want to become the world’s top expert, then 10,000 hours is the direction you are looking at.
Step 2: Constrain your knowledge sources
If you plan to become good at behavioral economics and you plan to read all 10,000 research papers written on the topic, then you are not going to make it. Having too much material at your disposal only delays the start of the journey to learn something new as the sheer volume of material can intimidate anyone.
You need to learn enough so that you can practice, reflect, course-correct, practice more, reflect… It becomes a feedback look that makes you better with every hour of practice.
Step 3: Remove distractions
As basic as it may sound, remove distractions. Look at the top 5 apps in your smartphone and if none of them fall in the category of productivity apps or work apps, deleted them. Or at least bury them somewhere so that these are not visible to you every time you look at your phone. Some tips here if you can’t delete the app
Block notifications from the app
Change the icon of the app or the app’s name
Remove the app’s widget
Log out from the app
Remove from the home screen
Step 4: Commit to a time frame
The 20 hours rule works because once you realize that it will only take 20 hours, it breaks your inertia of starting-up. Because 20 hours is manageable, it is something that you can almost touch & feel and you can see where the end state is. The end state is just a few days away and not weeks or months away.
What 20 hours also does is ensure that you put in at least that much time and do not give up as soon as you start. Let’s be honest, with the rigor of our daily lives, taking out time to learn something new can be very emotionally draining. Hence, putting it out there in the open that you are going to spend 20 hours on something, makes you stick to the learning regime.
I hope you find the above steps interesting. Do spend 20 mins on Johs Kauhman’s terrific TedX talk. It will be worth your while.
cheers,
Rohit
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