A friend of mine over at A Game Sport Psychology Consulting posted a reminder about the 10,000-hour rule. Mainly, it was a reminder that there is no such thing as a blanket 10,000-hour rule. The actual theory comes from a paper titled The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance (link opens PDF).
Many people (most?) interpret this rule to mean that if you put in 10,000 hours toward a subject you become an expert at it. However, that’s almost the exact opposite of what the study shows. Simply showing up and doing something does not make you an expert.
The key to the 10,000-hour rule is to apply deliberate practice which involves actively being involved in what you are doing, learning the good/bad/indifferent of the results of your actions, and reapplying these lessons again the next time. Deliberate practice means that your mind is actively engaged in what you are doing.
Let’s do some math around this rule. The average full-time employed person spends about 49 weeks a year (accounting for vacation and illness) involved in their job. Assuming a 35 hour work week (probably higher than what many work). That’s 1,715 hours per year put toward what they do. Assuming that 10,000 hours is all that is required to be an expert, in less than 6 years a person becomes an expert at their job.
I think it is fair to say that most people do not become experts at what they do every 6 years.
The natural objection would be that everyone else who started first is “more expert” because they have a headstart in hours invested. This still assumes that the only requirement is to show up and put in your time. In my experience, most people do not put deliberate practice into what they do day-in, day-out. Even those that try to put in deliberate practice aren’t able to keep the mental focus for long.
Deliberate practice takes real investment and mental energy. You know you’ve been putting it in when you feel mentally exhausted just from thinking. This is different from the physical exhaustion that comes from stress and activity.
It’s hard to put your mind to a topic over and over, day after day, year after year. It’s hard to truly become an expert because most of us simply don’t have the time. We have too many demands to respond to emails or talk people off the cliff. We are responsible for so much in our personal lives that our minds get tied up there even while at work. Stress forces us to simply make it through the day and not worry about also thinking about our mistakes.
Deliberate practice. Do you do it?