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The 1,000-hour rule (2009)

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

#31

Post by NDizzle »

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. She went with fast pitch softball. (she's 8)

She's threw about a thousand pitches the first month with me having her get out there. Since then (I thought that was too much) she's been the one to get me out there to catch her and that number has settled on about 500 a month.

With how many pitches you get in a normal little league (farm league softball) game, she basically pitched about 5 years worth of seasons over summer.

It'll be fun to watch this next season. I don't think anyone will expect a 4' 50 pound girl to throw as hard as she does.

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

#32

Post by nervousvarun »

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…

Maybe I'm wrong but I interpreted the logic there as: Having kids is definitely an enormous time-sink but that is a choice. Without basic income having a job essentially is not.

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

#33

Post by kelukelugames »

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?

I agree. It's a bit too catchy.

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

#34

Post by thedufer »

systematical wrote: post #25

10,000 hour rule is a bit strange. I've been programming for 8 years doing so at work and at home. Working full time there are roughly 2,080 work hours in a year. 2,080 * 8 = 16,640 hours of programming. Now there is also all of that time spent programming in classes, on homework, on hobbies, and doing freelance work. That easily brings the amount of hours spent programming to 18,000. To account for all the time spen…

The 10,000 hour rule is often taken out of context. In Outliers, it is made clear that Gladwell means 10,000 hours of focused practice with the intent to improve. A small percentage of day-to-day programming fits that criteria (unless you're a researcher, or something along those lines). So you may have 16,000 hours of programming, but still be significantly short of the 10,000 hour rule.

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

#35

Post by hammock »

DanielStraight wrote: post #20
danielweber wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Could you explain "triple-Pareto"? (I might be messing up by parsing it as an economic term.)

The Pareto principle is that 80% of result comes from 20% of the effort. So 80% of the 10k hours worth of skill (8k) comes from 20% of the actual time (2k). If you continue multiplying the hours worth of skill by 0.8 and the actual hours involved by 0.2, you get 5120 hours worth of skill in 80 actual hours of practice. Of course, if you keep going, you get the first 800 hours worth of skill in less than a second (and…

"Half the money I spend on advertising is wasted; the trouble is I don't know which half." - John Wanamaker

The question is WHICH of those 80 hours account for 51.2% of the value of 10K hours of practice. It's not necessarily the FIRST 80 hours.

It's very possible you could get 8% of your skill in less than a second; it just might come at a lightning-strike eureka or moment of epiphany during hour 8,679.

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

#36

Post by zxcvvcxz »

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…

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 entering a state of flow on your tasks, and 2) you still won't be racking up the volume to get anywhere close to world-class.

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

#37

Post by goshx »

I believe there are three factors to consider:

- what you are trying to learn

- your ability to learn things on that particular area

- how you measure [familiar/proficient/good/expert/impress people]

The time it takes to get to those levels can vary a lot and you can't really use the same rule for all. It is almost like saying that if a group of people spent 5 years in college together and by the end of it all of them have the same level of expertise. We all know it doesn't work this way.

I think these X-hour rules are flawed unless they are very specific on the three factors I mentioned. The 10k hours probably works simply because it is a lot of time... not because everybody learns the same way.

EDIT: formatting

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

#38

Post by DanielStraight »

nervousvarun wrote: post #32
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…

Maybe I'm wrong but I interpreted the logic there as: Having kids is definitely an enormous time-sink but that is a choice. Without basic income having a job essentially is not.

I guess I took it a different way. My interpretation was basically... once you get to a certain point in your life, the amount of time required for your responsibilities is significantly higher than it was in your youth. Four hours per day is probably achievable for the average college student but incredibly unlikely for the average "adult", for lack of a better term.

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

#39

Post by berkes »

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…

I've always planned and managed to take two to four months per year off: between jobs, or simply blocking my freelance-agenda for a few (slower) months. During these months, I take on a personal project with a certain focus.

I don't force myself to release anything: though shipping is nice. I don't set any hard goal.

Just two, three or even four months of playing around and learning. A new Database-concept. Geocoding. TDD. A new framework or language.

This is not enough to become expert or even good at anything. But it allows me to keep up with the field and ever evolving technologies; I'm a webdeveloper, so my field is rather fast-moving.

And, because I plan this ahead, I can afford the time off (by asking a little more during the rest of the year) and I can actually tell clients "nope, I don't have time the coming X weeks".

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

#40

Post by tokenadult »

I like this submission a lot. It is consistent with the "expert performance" research literature pioneered by K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues in that it points out that lots of competent, gainfully employed adults are not "experts" (as rigorously defined in the expert performance research literature)[1] but are capable journeymen. We may as well all resolve ourselves, and all advise young people, to find something that we enjoy doing anyhow in our free time, something that is useful in solving problems other people experience, and practicing how to do it well enough to trade with other people for resources we can use to solve the problems we can't solve on our own. Better that we be competent journeymen rather than unknowingly incompetent.[2]

I like too that he links to Paul Graham's essay "What You'll Wish You'd Known,"[3] which everyone should read before finishing high school.

[1] http://graphics8.nytimes.com/images/blogs/freakonomics/pdf/D...

[2] http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/evolved-primate/201006/w...

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2702783/

[3] http://www.paulgraham.com/hs.html

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