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Rant: That 10,000 hour rule for expertise is way oversimplified
I read 'Outliers' last month and realized Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 hours thing is just about deliberate practice for violinists, not a magic number for everything. He pulled that from a 1993 study on elite musicians, and then people turned it into a universal rule. Why does everyone treat a narrow stat like gospel?
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morgan.jason3mo ago
The 1993 study from Berlin's music academy gets mentioned a lot, but people never talk about how it was specifically about how much time elite violinists practiced alone by age 20. I mean, they didn't even look at professional musicians or people in other fields, just students competing for orchestra spots. It drives me crazy how a single data point from one specific group got turned into this motivational business advice. Idk, it just feels like people want a simple shortcut so badly that they ignore all the actual messy details.
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johnson.river3mo ago
Wait, you're telling me that famous "10,000 hours" study was just about music students who hadn't even made it professionally yet? That really changes how I think about the whole thing, because I always figured they were studying concertmasters and soloists with decades of experience. It's wild how people took a very narrow snapshot of young people practicing and turned it into a universal rule for success in any field.
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phoenix_singh253mo ago
Oh come on, you're really going to pretend a study about elite music students doesn't tell us anything about success? Those kids weren't just any students, they were the best of the best, and they all logged similar practice hours to get there.
The fact that it became a pop culture rule actually proves the point more than it hurts it - people latched onto it because it matches what we see everywhere, from sports to coding to chess.
Sure the details got muddy, but the core idea that deliberate practice over time beats raw talent is still way more useful than telling people success is just luck or genetics.
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