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The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

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Re: The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

#41

Post by marcosdumay »

DanielStraight wrote: post #27
zxcvvcxz wrote: post #22

Given the 10,000 hour rule as generally true (at least in spirit), what's very difficult and seldom discussed is just how hard it is to get there at anything worthwhile once you're passed a certain point in life. Why? Because job. Having gone through college and taken work terms between years, I saw this first-hand: after you're done 9 to 5 for that paycheck (+food, +commuting, +exercise, +social life), good luck fin…

It's interesting you didn't mention family at all. Having kids is a huge commitment of time. I think a good take-away from your rant (plus the consideration of family) is that we need to be talking more about making time for things. Too often we talk a great deal about what can be done in a few hours a day, but when it comes to making that time, we just say, "If it's important to you, you'll make the time." We should…

> We should be looking at ways to maximize the use of very small chunks of time.

I'm not sure it can be done. The best way to maximize the use of small chuncks of time is to join them into rarer big chuncks of time.

Re: The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

#42

Post by quaffapint »

I have the constant conversation with my kids of just finding an interest - any interest and trying it. It's great when your kids like sports, etc, but when you have one's that find it very hard to come up with any interest they want to explore, I'd be thrilled with even 2 hours worth.

For now, it's us getting them trying things and they're middle/high school age, so they should be coming up with stuff on their own. I only hope someday it clicks and they find things they want to explore on their own.

Re: The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

#43

Post by harrisreynolds »

noahl wrote: post #6
TeMPOraL wrote: post #5

I have my own take on this - if you triple-Pareto the 10k hours rule you end up with 80 hours of work responsible for 51.2% of your skill. I round it up and call 100-hours rule: if you put one hundred hours of actual practice into something it might not make you an expert, but you'll be proficient and/or good enough to impress people around you. I started applying this to random things, and I think one could cut it d…

If we combine your rules of thumb with the original essay and the 10,000 hour rule, we get a rough order-of-magnitude scale of work and levels of ability: * 10 hours: familiar * 100 hours: proficient * 1000 hours: good * 10000 hours: expert Not perfect, of course, but it's sort of intriguing in its simplicity.

Yeah... I really like this too!

Re: The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

#44

Post by tannerj »

NDizzle wrote: post #31

This is a pretty solid rule. I've taken a similar approach with my kids, but they're not really old enough to report back any results. I didn't round down to 1k hours or look at 10k seriously. I've been trying to teach them that it's important to take the journey to get actually good at something. You pick up a lot of things on the way to becoming proficient. I let my oldest pick something to get good at this year. S…

I don't know about softball, but I played baseball from the time I was 4 until I was 19 and the biggest change in youth baseball has been monitoring pitch counts for youth pitchers. If I remember correctly, Softball pitchers usually have trouble with their knees while baseball pitchers have arm trouble. I still have arm trouble and I had parents who put my safety first and did the best they could to take care of my arm. Please do some research on the topic to make sure your daughter doesn't hurt herself. I only speak up because I saw it happen over and over again growing up. Youth sports are awesome, I got to travel all over the country playing, but I still have issues almost 10 years after quitting.

Re: The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

#46

Post by tbrownaw »

king_jester wrote: post #9

Is the 10,000 hour rule even true? I know this was popularized by Gladwell's book 'Outliers' but I had heard the study referred to in the book might not be accurate. Is it that 10,000 of practice is common to experts or that there are no experts without 10,000 hours of practice?

Being an expert means being noticeably better than non-experts.

This will depend on how much you practice, how well you practice, and whatever relevant innate abilities you have (appropriate personality, IQ, extra-sensitive hearing, tetrachromacy or color-blindness, etc). And also, on how well/much other people practice.

Apparently if you fudge things just right, you get most people either not practicing well or losing interest shortly before 10k hours.

Re: The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

#47

Post by jtheory »

DanielStraight wrote: post #27
zxcvvcxz wrote: post #22

Given the 10,000 hour rule as generally true (at least in spirit), what's very difficult and seldom discussed is just how hard it is to get there at anything worthwhile once you're passed a certain point in life. Why? Because job. Having gone through college and taken work terms between years, I saw this first-hand: after you're done 9 to 5 for that paycheck (+food, +commuting, +exercise, +social life), good luck fin…

It's interesting you didn't mention family at all. Having kids is a huge commitment of time. I think a good take-away from your rant (plus the consideration of family) is that we need to be talking more about making time for things. Too often we talk a great deal about what can be done in a few hours a day, but when it comes to making that time, we just say, "If it's important to you, you'll make the time." We should…

Being involved in raising your kids takes a huge amount of time.

BUT - the best way to raise kids is to bring them into your life, not leave your life to do kid things, so that huge block of time is not "lost" to your kids at the cost of your own interests.

Obviously not all projects are suitable to sharing with a 4-year-old (learning HTML? probably not), but more than you might think (getting exercise? yes. learning an instrument? yes. learning a foreign language? oh yes. photography, sketching, painting, sculpture? yes. training a seeing-eye dog? yes. house repair kind of things? many of them, yes).

Even pretty little kids can learn to work with dangerous tools (they'll be really good about following safety rules when they realize how much you'll let them do as long as they're safe).

I see lots of parents who think spending time with their kids involves sitting and watching some loathsome cartoon with them. Honestly, if you're creative about bringing them into your world, instead of you going into the (artificial, invented) childhood world that's been set up for them, it's better for everyone.

Re: The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

#48

Post by seren »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #22

Given the 10,000 hour rule as generally true (at least in spirit), what's very difficult and seldom discussed is just how hard it is to get there at anything worthwhile once you're passed a certain point in life. Why? Because job. Having gone through college and taken work terms between years, I saw this first-hand: after you're done 9 to 5 for that paycheck (+food, +commuting, +exercise, +social life), good luck fin…

You have not addressed something in your post, but maybe is is obvious : why do you want or need to become an expert ?

You can have a very fulfilling life being a jack-of-all-trade. In a fast moving word, I am not sure I would like to become a world expert in a shrinking domain.

I would say the vast majority of humain beings, both dead and alive, are no expert. So is this because you have an insatiable curiosity ?(but I don't think that being an expert is necessary the best to quench your thirst for knowledge) Do you want to stand out in a crowd ? To have a legacy ?

I am also kind of frustrated knowing that my time is limited, and it reduces somehow my options, but I have come to term with the fact that I won't be able to do "everything" during my time on Earth.

Re: The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

#49

Post by free2rhyme214 »

The rule? Solid. In practicality how many will follow this? Few. It's like telling someone how to get rich. You can literally tell someone but few will do the action required to get the results.

But then the few that do end up like Drew Houston or Aaron Levie when they apply their skills to business and if they fail they're more experienced than the average 20 something.

Re: The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

#50

Post by DanielStraight »

zxcvvcxz wrote: post #36
DanielStraight wrote: post #27

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's interesting you didn't mention family at all. Having kids is a huge commitment of time. I think a good take-away from your rant (plus the consideration of family) is that we need to be talking more about making time for things. Too often we talk a great deal about what can be done in a few hours a day, but when it comes to making that time, we just say, "If it's important to you, you'll make the time." We should…

Gahhh I'm not even that old, don't scare me with this family talk. >We should be looking at ways to maximize the use of very small chunks of time. I may not be able to commit even a single hour of dedicated time per day... but I can certainly do something for a few minutes here and there throughout the day which adds up to an hour. Sounds noble in theory, but in practice there are two problems: 1) you won't be enteri…

To point number 1, I tend to think of flow as helpful but not necessary. For some tasks, I'm not really sure flow applies at all. I mean, I'm pretty damn good at tying my shoes. I do it without even thinking about it. I don't think flow was involved in learning that; it's just muscle memory. That's a trivial example of course, but there are other factors than flow which influence the effectiveness of practice. I don't think we should just give up if we can't have flow.

To point 2, you're right of course, but we can't be world-class at more than 1 or 2 things anyway. There's still benefit to being pretty good at something. A great phrase I stole from a blog called All Japanese All The Time is "You can have, do or be anything, but you can't have, do and be everything." If you want to commit your whole life to being say... the greatest chainsaw juggler in history, that's probably achievable. But you aren't also going to be fluent in 10 languages, an expert computer programmer, a world-class guitarist, and a grandmaster in chess.

I'm alright with only being an expert in things I'm able to devote full-time efforts to. But I'd also like to be pretty good in other stuff. How can I take bits and pieces of time here and there to achieve that? That's what I'd like to see some research (formal or informal) on.

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