You Don’t Need 10,000 Hours to Master a Skill. Here are 5+ Steps to Take.
You’ve probably heard the theory that it takes ten thousand hours for skill mastery.
It’s been a huge part of the self-development community since Malcolm Gladwell released his book “Outliers.”
If you’re like me you’ve run the math to determine how many hours a day for how many years you’ll have to spend in order to master the violin, yoga, martial arts, and everything else from writing to cooking.
In some ways, this has been empowering. I feel like I can pick up any task, give it twenty years and master it. In other ways, it’s been overwhelming. That’s a lot of practice.
But there’s good news. Malcolm is wrong.
You see he didn’t actually interview Anders Ericcson, the scientist whose work Malcolm based his 10,000 hour rule on. So he ended up misinterpreting the information. (Which is a discussion all its own, how journalists and self-help gurus handle scientific data.)
Let’s set the record straight, it’s not how much we practice but rather how we practice.
According to Anders Ericcson, there are two essential parts to practice (which he shares on theFreakonomics episode you can find here):
