The 10,000 Hour Rule — How much Practice Really Makes You a Master?

According to the author Malcolm Gladwell, it takes 10,000 hours of practice to be at the top in any discipline.

Is this true? Are 10,000 hours of practice enough to become a new Mozart, Federer, or Kasparov?

Well, it is a little bit more complicated:

Gladwell made this statement in his book “Outliers: The Story of Success”.

The problem with this rule is that Gladwell basically just summarized a study by the Swedish psychologist Anders Ericsson in a very superficial way.

In this study, Ericsson found that the best violinists at a Berlin music school had practiced an average of 7,410 hours by the age of eighteen.

So why not call it the 7410-hour rule?

It looks as if Malcolm Gladwell rounded up the number for marketing reasons because a 10,000-hour rule just sounds better than a 7,410-hour rule.

Gladwell also forgot to mention that at the age of eighteen the studied violinists were far from being among the best in the world.

On average, a musician reaches the top of the world at the age of 30, when he or she has already completed an average of more than 20,000 hours of practice.