The Expert in a Year Challenge

My credibility: I had over a 2000+ USATT rating 8 years ago, was #1 under 18 in Texas, top 10 under 18 in USA. I trained in China (WuHan and Shanghai) for 2 summers at my peak. My training buddy and archrival is currently the USA national champion - Timothy Wang, originally from Houston who quit highschool to pursue the sport professionally in Europe.

The kid from my perspective is still an enthusiast (my perspective). Granted, he's playing tournaments and learning but there's another huge gap between where he is now and an "expert" or "pro" in the US.

There's yet another HUGE gap between the #1 in the USA and top 250 or "expert" in the world. Timothy went to the Olympics in 2008 and lost in his first match to a 14 year old from Korea: 4-0. The "expert" skill and experience difference is vastly different and is just a moniker that is being used in his marketing. =)

To get to where he is at in a year is commendable and definitely takes dedication - to get to an "expert" simply takes time and playing hundreds if not thousands of different players at tournaments, leagues, etc...

My father is the #1 senior TT player in the US based on the last senior olympics open in 2014. He is in his mid 60's and still poses a commendable challenge to the top 250 players in the US simply due to his play style, experience, and racquet/paddle (pips out and pen hold) - not saying he always wins the match, but he can typically take a couple games out of 7. Experts/pros adjust much quicker.

Anyhoo, table tennis is a great sport with little to no risk of getting a life threatening injury. It is relatively cheap and provides an amazing workout when played at the "enthusiast" level.

Love that he's bringing more awareness to the sport. It is under appreciated and typically exists in the Forest Gump/Balls of Fury/frat houses of the world.

You are such a hypocrite. If you are 250 in England it does not give you a compelling argument to consider yourself an expert at this SPORT unless there are 250 players from England, who are ranked in ITTF.

I guarantee you that a person, who is in top 50 in England is not even close in skill to the one, who is 250. In any sport there are "experts", who can teach the skill very well. They might not even be really good at this sport. Tons of amazing football coaches haven't been that good at football.

Expert in playing (competing) in any sport is the one who can prove not with his ranking but through his match averages against top 50, top 100, top 200 players in a certain sport. As I already mentioned, ranking system is completely flawed, especially for the bottom tier players.

Seriously, you are talking about doctors? Doctors receive very similar in the US (standardized) training and they don't spent 1 year to be an "expert". How about 12 years for cardio surgery? And, yes, all doctors are experts at what they do.

1) Yes you get better with practice 2) Some faster than others 3) Some with a higher peak than others 4) It is neither necessary, nor sufficient with 10 000 hours effective practice (some win the world championship in high jump after less than a year [Donald Thomas 2007], others will never become chess champions, or even ranked among the top 10 000, after 30 000 hours' dedicated practice) 5) Even the original study just put 10k hours as the AVERAGE practice time for THOSE few that eventually became masters (i.e. were super-talented), with a range of 3k-30k hours needed.

However, always good to see people wanting to expand their skill set through dedicated work - admirable

(but has NOTHING to do with the fundamentally flawed 10k hr roule)

I would love to know the psychology behind why that concept was so sticky given that it seems self-evidently worthless to know where the theoretical cap on self-improvement lies. I mean, how many things do we put 10k hours of practice in to?

The much better concepts from this world are:

* The deliberate part of deliberate practice. There are very different qualities of practice. Tim Ferriss is making a living on hunting down concepts around minimum effective doses of practice and his third book (Chef) is very good for this. These are all essentially finding more effective ways to practice so that you get more out of each hour.

* The experienced non-expert as an explanation (and pejorative) for everyone who has 10,000 hours of experience but isn't very good.

* Difficulty: the ideal practice difficulty is uncomfortable, falling between trivial and demoralizing.