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She talks about how deliberate practice is almost never enjoyable because you're trying to improve specific things, but it is how you attain mastery. The other side is "flow", when that mastery is display, and she mentions how it can look so effortless for top athletes, when it's almost definitely the result of hours and hours of deliberate practice.
I haven't read the book, but what I heard about it second hand is that 10k hours is about mastery, not success. You can be a master without being successful and visa versa. But mastery sure improves your odds of success. Of course 10k hours doesn't guarantee mastery either. I've put in that much on the golf course and still suck at it.
>You can be a master without being successful and visa versa . There's an awful lot of skill-less, successful people out there, more than everyone would like, I'm sure.
I'm reminded of Poul Anderson's short story The Man Who Counts.
Soft skills needn't be generally beneficial either, of course, any more than hard skills.
Grit by Angela Duckworth ( https://www.amazon.com/Grit-Passion-Perseverance-Angela-Duck... ) goes into deliberate practice quite a bit. She talks about how deliberate practice is almost never enjoyable because you're trying to improve specific things, but it is how you attain mastery. The other side is "flow", when that mastery is display, and she mentions how it can look so effortless for top athletes, when it's alm…
Shows many examples of how deliberate practice on the edge of your current ability is what equals mastery ( whilst also exploring the science behind it )
I find it remarkable that people seem to think that this implies a claim in the opposite direction: that thousands of hours of (any) practice results in mastery.
I never interpreted it as: just do something for 10000 hours and you'll be a master at it.
10k hours on anything will likely make you as good as you can be at something. Whether or not that is enough to become success depends on one's own ego and attachment to realizing if they're focusing on the better thing or not.
After 10,000 hours of doing something, I can't see anyone not having tried to improve themselves. I think it's basically impossible to do the same thing for that long without basic human nature taking effect and forcing that person to improve until they can't any more. At least, not organically. I'm sure you could put a gun to their head and force them to improve more, but that's not natural.
The observation is that mastery requires thousands of hours of deliberate practice. I find it remarkable that people seem to think that this implies a claim in the opposite direction: that thousands of hours of (any) practice results in mastery.
[1]Lots of people.
It tells newbies that they'll need to spend time and work hard to master the skill. It tells experienced people that they probably aren't the best they can be yet. And it tells masters to stop expecting newbies to be great and to let them have time to learn.
For those who don’t know already, the “10,000 hours” to attain expert-level mastery in any field or endeavor is false. The study that Malcolm Gladwell cites by Anders Ericsson only applied to violin performance, which is a narrow field that has measurable and quantifiable performance levels and hundreds of years of teaching history. I repeat this comment almost every time because 10k is both discouraging for the begi…
I think the author of the article is missing the point of the book. And assuming everyone else is missing the point of 10,000 hours of intentional practice.