| Just posted above on K. Anders Ericcson and the book Peak is great. Main point is the 10,000 hour rule comes from Ericcson's study that the best violinists in the world practice about 7,000 hours by the time they are 18. They average between 3-4 hours a day. This last point is really interesting because the ceiling for what qualified as good practice consistently was no more than 4 hours. So if you do 4 hours of top notch practice / studying, it would seem like no matter your field you are done for the day. Continuing on, the 10,000 hour rule was stupidly expanded by 3,000 hours just to make it easier to remember, and additionally that number is COMPLETELY ARBITRARY anyway. The only reason violinists practice that much is because everyone else is competing that hard. Old, well defined fields like Violin or say Chess have pretty clearly defined ways on how you get better, meaning the "secrets" are somewhat known. Therefore the only way to get better is via practice, which of course everyone does, which drives up these insane numbers. In other fields which are much newer and far less defined, expertise is up for grabs and there are no well-defined broadly agreed on ways to get better. If you do 800 hours of the "right" practice you can be far ahead of anyone else, since no one really knows what's right. That being said, Ericcson's research still shows lots of correlation before time and skill, so alas no easy shortcuts. EDIT: between time and skill |