/lit/ - Literature

[Anonymous No.5014421]

Is the 10000-Hour Rule proposed by Malcolm Gladwell of any credibility?

>Gladwell repeatedly mentions the "10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.

[Anonymous No.5014455]

I don't understand why people praise this so much. All Gladwell did was put an arbitrary number on 'practice makes perfect'.

[Anonymous No.5014471]

>>5014421
Tulpamancers are the absolute embodiment of autism, and even they'll tell you that counting hours is a bad idea. Gladwell has exceeded the maximum limit of autism with this statement. I don't know how else I can respond except to check his >>5014455 dubs.

[syn No.5014519]

>>5014421
>Tulpamancers

Did not know that term. Looked into it. Mind blown. That's a thing that I'd done.

[Anonymous No.5014713]

drivel

[Anonymous No.5014742]

i believe he based it on a single study (of musicians, if i recall correctly) and then extrapolated that to all fields

thus the 10,000 hour rule is of no scientific credibility because it doesn't meet the rigorous standards of evidence demanded in science, but i think it's mostly fine as an anecdotal ball park figure

the point is that it requires a staggering amount of focused practice time to truly master anything of noteworthy complexity, and 10,000 hours is a good ballpark figure for how much time even if the lack of scientific evidence for the figure anally devastates /sci/ autists and the like whenever they hear it

also if i remember correctly in the book gladwell does give anecdotal examples of people in other fields (i.e. other than music) that took a similar amount of time to attain mastery in their fields

[Anonymous No.5014754]

>>5014742
But what people often forget is that not the duration, but the quality of training counts - extreme example: I won't become a new Rachmaninoff by pressing a piano key repeatedly for 10,000 hours

[Anonymous No.5014756]

I remember hearing on like NPR that the study was based on people who were the absolute best at their profession, like Chess Masters, and Carnegie Hall-playing musicians, but that just becoming proficient at something takes a fraction of that time.

[Anonymous No.5014759]

>>5014754
very true

[Anonymous No.5014829]

>>5014742
The original version stressed that it was 10,000 hours of "deliberate practice," which is practicing with specific short term goals in mind and usually involving a lot of drills and repetition.

[Anonymous No.5014887]

>>5014829
i guess i've mastered op's mom then

[Anonymous No.5015147]

I think it should be pretty obvious that, yes, practicing something diligently for 10,000 hours will probably make you pretty good at it. But that really has little to no value as any sort of advice. 'Just go practice for 10,000 hours' is not going to be realistically useful to anyone.

Do some people devote themselves that much to things? Yes, of course. But they do so because they simply love and obsess over what it is they do. I highly doubt any of the people in the case studies kept hour logs and exclaimed 'finally!' once they got to 10,000. This number is something that the author 'discovered', not something that anyone ever actually used.

So basically the claim is just that people who are really good at things tend to enjoy what they do enough to commit themselves to it. I think it would be misleading to imply that you can force yourself to practice 10,000 hours to achieve mastery, since that would basically be tantamount to forcing yourself to love something.