The 10,000-hour rule is wrong and perpetuates a cruel myth

> I am frustrated by the fact that I have to keep looking up syntax for particular loops or method calls.

Have you ever tried to deliberately memorize the syntax? Just repeating the same action for 10k hours doesn't make you an expert.

It's like how sportsman don't improve by competing constantly. They improve through deliberate practice. Work is like competing, you aren't trying to improve, you are trying to get stuff done.

Reality is cruel too I'm afraid :(. The article is probably right about the importance of genes but I'm not sure I agree with anything else it says about politics, social engineering, etc.

Reality is cruel too :(. While I am persuaded by the idea that nature may be as important or more so than nurture I don't agree with much of what this article says about politics, social engineering, etc. It says the 10k hour myth is cruel, but bucketing people into categories and then postulating on their potential contribution on the basis of science as dubious as the 10k hour rule is more so.

Given how poor science reporting usually is, the "10k hours" rule as understood by the general public is almost certainly not what the original research had shown. That said, IMO to first approximation the rule's not wrong. It's just that you hit diminishing returns fairly quickly, i.e. your skill grows logarithmically, and 10k hours is roughly where the linear-ish part cuts off for most people. Of course second-order effects ("talent") affect how quickly you reach the cut-off, or how ahead / behind the curve after 10k hours. So take it as a rule-of-thumb, rather than some fundamental law.

Another sentiment you touched on about "guys who have been alive less time than [you] have been programming who can run rings around [you]": you are that guy for some other people. At the minimum, you might as well be a wizard compared to people on the other side of the threshold (and IMO that's one reason why pop-culture representation of "hacking" looks so ridiculous). In Go (as in AlphaGo, not golang) I was encouraged to play against opponents that's slightly weaker, at my level, and stronger. I forgot the proportions, but the idea is that if you only play against weaker opponents you would never improve; only against even opponents you wouldn't improve as quickly; only against stronger opponents you would lose confidence and quit.

To close off with a Naruto analogy (b/c why not, I've already rambled for this long): you're like Rock Lee: he's clearly outclassed compared against the likes of Naruto, Sasuke, etc., but he's still one of the strongest jounin in Konoha, arguably the strongest hidden villages. I'm probably Shikamaru...

Assumes Correlation and Causation, ignores Social and Economic situations of the twins groups, doesn't account for the fact that identical twins tend to share (being geared towards) more experiences due to being perceived almost as a single "being", ignores cultural differences in upbringing of different-gender twins, doesn't account for indirect training (i.e. strategy, memorization, sequential steps etc. are parts of a Chess game), doesn't account for perception of time (Time passes slowly when we don't like what we're doing) and completely ignores training "quality" (Playing chess against newbies is useless as practice, playing against masters is enlightening).

It's ALSO not your "fault" that you do not excel at something. Your experiences ever since you were a baby shaped you, your tastes and pretty much determined your whole life.

Still, there is no talent, ask any great programmer, musician, illustrator or whatever, every single one of them will say he/she was shitty, but loved it, so kept doing it. This doesn't completely discards the possibility of genetic disposition to liking something, but undeniably everyone starts on even ground.

Obviously, being complex areas they are affected by many indirect skills, and the more something is loved, the safer it is to assume the indirect skills involved are also loved or at least liked, indirect skills matter. Clearly fiddling with computers and watching movies that involve technology is not programming, but will make you better at it.

In the end, the best explanation so far is that your tastes are the defining factor. And yes, it can be argued that tastes are genetic, but currently there's not nearly enough data to debunk the standing theory, we need more studies and we need better studies, taking all variables into account and actually monitoring the subjects throughout their lives.

Maybe in 50 years we'll find out where our tastes come from. Not that it actually matters since it's out of our control anyways.