Magic Numbers #3: 10,000
I have an ambivalent relationship with Malcolm Gladwell (a relationship of which he is naturally unaware). On the one hand, I love his ability to seize on apparently insignificant details (Goliath’s myopia, varieties of spaghetti sauce, the Norden bombsight) and draw interesting conclusions from them. On the other hand, it’s not a good thing that such a skillful writer and charismatic speaker manages to get things wrong in ways that a little critical reading of the data could have prevented. Gladwell attracted some criticism for his attribution of New York’s falling crime rate to Giuliani’s “No broken windows” policing when in fact New York’s crime fell more because crime across the whole of the developed world was falling. (To his credit, Gladwell admitted he “oversold” the idea.) What intrigued me more was that his famous “10,000 hour rule” was deflated by Anders Ericsson, the very person he got the idea from.
As a naturally lazy person, I was inclined to be skeptical of the 10,000 hour rule as soon as I heard about it. I was also reminded of my time as a music student. Gladwell’s claim was based on research by Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Röhmer that found the best students at a music school in Berlin had, on average, put in 10,000 hours of practice by the time they were twenty. What I observed, though, was that beyond a certain point, the amount of practice my fellow students put in didn’t correlate particularly strongly with their performance. Some people were just good, and only had to practice enough to stop their technique from getting rusty. Some people could practice all day and would never be more than competent, because actually being a great musician isn’t primarily about technique; it’s about feeling. (I’m speaking here as less-than-great musician; as my teacher at the time put it, “You’re playing virtuoso material, but you’re not a virtuoso yet.” Ironically, I was one of the ones who might have benefited from those 10,000 hours of practice.)
Another person I admire (but also take with a grain of salt) is Tim Ferriss. In The Four-Hour Chef, he points out the problems with the idea that 10,000 hours of practice are necessary to master any skill. Firstly, we can’t say anything on the subject without a clear idea of what we mean by “master”. Is your standard for mastering golf the best player at your local course, a national champion, or Tiger Woods? (Ferriss takes being in the top 20% world-wide, which I think is reasonable.) Secondly, the amount of effort, practice or talent necessary to master a skill varies according to the skill being practised. As Anders Ericsson himself points out, “Steve Faloon, the subject of an early experiment on improving memory, became better at memorizing strings of digits than any other person in history after only about two hundred hours of practice.” At a more modest level, I’ve used YouTube to relearn several skills, from peeling a banana to tying my shoelaces. I can say with some confidence that I’ve mastered them (except for folding fitted sheets — I’ve got a way to go there) but it certainly didn’t take 10,000 hours of practice. Usually it didn’t even take one.
Most importantly, Ferriss queries the cause-effect relationship. Remember that the data come from intensely competitive fields, as Ericsson says: “The reason that you must put in ten thousand or more hours of practice to become one of the world’s best violinists or chess players or golfers is that the people you are being compared to or competing with have themselves put in ten thousand or more hours of practice.” But as Ferriss notes, if you’re in a highly competitive field where everyone is practising like crazy, you are likely to practise like crazy too, regardless of how much practice you actually need to do. Maybe it’s not just that practice makes perfect but also that perfectionism makes you practice.
So why did the “10,000 hour rule” become popular? Firstly, people immediately ignored what Gladwell actually wrote and assumed that 10,000 hours of practice was not only necessary to master a skill but was also sufficient. If you want to become a brilliant painter, computer scientist, athlete or opera singer, just put in 10,000 hours of practice and you’ll get there. Naturally this can-do mentality is popular, but a moment’s thought will reveal that it is absurd. For those who think enough practice is all it takes to be an opera singer, I suggest watching Florence Foster Jenkins. As well as natural talent, circumstances determine not only whether 10,000 hours of practice produce the intended results but whether it is possible to put them in at all. Although Chapter 2 of Outliers is called “The 10,000 Hour Rule”, the examples Gladwell chose are also intended to illustrate the importance of luck: Bill Joy and Bill Gates both had access to computers at a time when they were scarce and the industry was taking off; the Beatles were lucky enough to get a regular gig in Hamburg.
Misplaced optimism aside, another reason for the popularity of the 10,000 hour rule is that 10,000 is a magic number. It’s big, but not impossibly big. Think about the Duke of York — not the one who likes teenage girls, but the grand old one with ten thousand men. If he’d marched ten men up to the top of the hill and down again, that would be unremarkable. If he’d marched a million men, it would have been absurd. Ten thousand men sounds about right. It’s the same with practice: we like to think in orders of magnitude. One thousand hours sounds like something anyone could do — only about 6 months of full-time study. 100,000 hours sounds impossible — more like fifty years of full-time study, which is Zen-level mastery. 10,000 sounds just right, as Goldilocks might say.
Of course the thing you apply this magic number to has itself to be in that order of magnitude. People are fond of telling us how many glasses of water we should drink a day, but 10,000 obviously isn’t going to work. On the other hand, 10,000 paces a day sounds just right. “Sounds” is the key word, though. The 10,000 figure comes from the father of the first popular pedometer, Y. Hatano, who called it manpo-kei, meaning “10,000 steps meter”. He published research to support the figure (coincidentally in 1993, the same year that Ericsson’s formulation of the 10,000 hour rule was published) but nobody really knows how many paces you should walk a day for optimal health; most recently, a range of 7–8,000 has been suggested. Whatever the science behind it, the product was taken up and marketed by Yamasa Tokei Keiki, and the 10,000 figure stuck because it sounds cool in Japanese.
But Japanese, like several languages, has a single word for 10,000 (man), and thus does not lead us to expect precision. After all, when the Chinese classics talk about “the ten thousand things” (wan wu), they do not mean that there are actually that number of things in the world. In contrast, when we write “10,000”, those zeros give the number a misleading scientific aura. Sometimes it is more accurate to be less precise. The next time you hear someone say “ten thousand”, just translate it as “oodles”, or “a bazillion”.
