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More or Less
The 10,000 hours rule
00:09:34
Becoming a pro on practice alone – is that possible? Or do you need innate talent? a...
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- [00:00]
A
This is the short edition of More or Less, first broadcast on the BBC World Service. Thank you for downloading from the BBC. For details of our complete range of podcasts and our terms of use, go to bbcworldservice.com podcasts hello and welcome to More or Less on the BBC World Service. I'm Ben Carter and this is Dan McLachlan.
- [00:26]
B
The idea came back in 2009. I was visiting my brother in Omaha, Nebraska, and we decided to play a par three, nine hole course, which is par 27. And I had never really been on a golf course and went out and shot about a 57, which is horrible. It's 30 over par on an easy nine hole course.
- [00:45]
A
Back in 2009, Dan was a horrible golfer. He's quite a lot better now. And in this program we're going to find out why. And to do that, I have to take you all the way back to 1993. Whitney Houston was dominating the charts. Bill Clinton was a brand new president. And at the University of Colorado, a man called Anders Ericsson was about to publish an influential academic paper. Ericsson had become fascinated by the work of a group of psychologists in Berlin who had been observing violin students. Specifically, they studied their practice habits in childhood, adolescence and adulthood. All of the violinists had begun playing at roughly five years of age with similar practice times. However, at age 8, practice times began to diverge. By age 20, the elite performers averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the less able performers had only 4,000 hours of practice. The psychologists didn't see any naturally gifted performers emerge, and this surprised them, because if natural talent had played a role, it wouldn't have been unreasonable to expect to see naturally gifted performers emerge after, say, 5,000 hours. They made a direct statistical relationship between hours of practice and levels of achievement. Anders Ericsson in Colorado use this and other evidence to suggest that many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years. It's become known as the 10,000 hour rule and would later be popularised by the author Malcolm Gladwell. We'll hear from him in a minute. But it's a hopeful message, isn't it? Try hard enough and you will succeed.
- [02:39]
C
But wait, that was a study of a small group of violinists.
- [02:43]
A
This is David Epstein, who last year published a book called the Sports Gene.
- [02:47]
C
And these were violinists who were so highly prescreened, they were already admitted to a world famous music academy. So first of all, you have what statisticians know as A restriction of range, in this case so severe that this would be like studying basketball prowess by restricting your subjects to NBA centers, noticing they'd all practiced a lot and saying that's the only cause of their success, not practice, plus being 7ft tall. So you can't extrapolate any conclusions from that. And the other problem sort of with the paper, because Anders Ericsson has now come out very strongly against the 10,000 hours rule. He has a letter on his faculty webpage called the Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists. But he sort of helped facilitate a little bit of this misunderstanding by not including any measure of statistical variance in the original paper. He didn't show how much what the range was around that 10,000 hours or 10 years of practice for the best violinists. And it turns out there's actually a very wide range of the number of practice hours that it took to get to the same level. And that's a pattern that shows up in every study of skill acquisition, from running to piano playing.
- [03:46]
A
So David Epstein thinks that the study of Berlin violinists was flawed. He also thinks Ericsson's 1993 paper has been simplified chiefly by Malcolm Gladwell, whose hugely popular book Outliers includes a chapter called the 10,000 hour rule, making him largely responsible for introducing the idea to a mass audience. However, Erickson has distanced himself from the phrase the 10,000 hour rule. And in 2012 he became so perturbed by the way his original paper had been characterised that he wrote a rebuttal paper which questioned Gladwell's interpretation of his work. What do you have to say about that?
- [04:25]
D
Malcolm Ericsson has what I would call the hard position on this. He doesn't really think that a thing called talent exists. So when Erikson disagrees with the way I interpret his work, it's because I disagree with him. I don't take the hard position at all. I think that being very, very good at something requires a big, healthy dose of natural talent. The Beatles had masses of natural talent. I mean, McCartney and Lennon are geniuses. They were born geniuses. My point is it took a long time for that genius to bear fruit. Erickson wouldn't say that. You know, if you read some of his writings, he really is way over on the left hand side of this debate saying he thinks that the right kind of practice is sufficient. So I'm in the middle and I think Epstein's probably in the middle. Epstein might be a bit more of a talent person than me, but there's a continuum here and we're at slightly different places along it.
- [05:12]
A
Malcolm Gladwell One of the difficulties with assessing whether expert level performance can be obtained just through practice is that most studies are done after the subjects have reached that level. What would be great is if we could follow the progress of someone with no innate talent at a particular discipline who just chose to complete 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in. In that discipline. Remember Dan McLachlan, the hopeless golfer?
- [05:40]
B
After that time, in June 2009, I went back to my job and started working again. And I had concreted in my head this idea that I wanted to test my human potential and to see what was possible in life if you're willing to completely dedicate yourself to something new. And coworkers, once I announced that I was going to quit my job, started bringing books in, and I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers and Talent is Overrated, the Talent Code, and a number of other books that all had this idea of the 10,000 hours in them. And then I found that the man who kind of first came up with this concept was Kay Anders Ericsson. So I basically cold called him. And the first time we chatted, we talked for an hour about what the 10,000 hours meant and what's the difference between deliberate practice and regular practice, and then how to kind of structure my approach to this new endeavor. So I began the dam plan in April 2010, and now it's approaching four years, and I am almost exactly halfway. So I'm about 5,000 hours into the project and my current handicap is right at a 4.1. And the goal eventually is to get down to a plus handicap where I can actually compete in a legitimate PGA Tour event.
- [07:03]
A
Dan McLaughlin Four years from now, we'll let you know how he got on. David Epstein thinks he has a chance, but argues that professional sports stars seldom prosper unless they possess natural ability and learned skills. He cites baseball, where a study showed that the average player had 2013 vision, as opposed to 2020. What that means is that they see from 20ft what most people could only see clearly at 13ft. He uses a computer analogy.
- [07:36]
C
The hardware being someone's visual acuity, right? The physiology of their eye that they cannot change. The software being skills that they learn, or I liken it to downloading by many, many hours of practice and certain kinds of practice that allow them to interpret the body motions of a pitcher so that they can anticipate where the ball is going to go before it gets there, and that they are utterly useless without the software, no matter how good their vision is it's like a laptop with only the hardware but no programs on it. It's useless. But once they've downloaded that software, once they've learned those sports specific skills, the better their hardware is, the better the total machine is going to be.
- [08:12]
A
But here's another, much simpler point from Malcolm Gladwell. Maybe talented people just practice more and try harder at the thing they're already good at because they enjoy it.
- [08:23]
D
Imagine being in calculus class the first day and they teach in calculus and the teacher's at the board and is writing some equation and you look at it and you think, wow, that's the most beautiful thing I've ever seen. There are people who have that reaction. My father would be one of them. For him to go home and do two hours of calculus homework is thrilling. Whereas for the rest of us, it's beyond a chore. It's just a nightmare, right? And then he comes back to class the next day and he's done two hours that night and, and is really into it and everything is easier for him compared to the rest of us.
- [08:55]
A
Thanks to Malcolm Gladwell, David Epstein, and of course, Dan McLachlan. Somewhere out there, even as you hear this program, he's notching up the hours on a lonely fairway. We'll be back next week. Until then, if there's a number you want us to investigate, please email us at more or lessbc. Code. There are dozens of different podcasts now available from the BBC, including news, documentaries, science, business, arts and sport. For details of them all, go to bbcworldservice.com podcasts.