In 2008, Malcolm Gladwell published a Outliers book with a world-changing rule of 10,000 hours. Becoming a bestseller, the book changed the beliefs of millions of people. According to Gladwell who actually built his idea on Andres Ericsson’s research, you need to perform one action for 10,000 hours to acquire a certain skill. This is a ‘tipping point of greatness’ in a certain skill or field that you may achieve if you spend the required time for repeating this action. The required time looks quite impressive: practice a skill for 90 minutes every day and in 20 years your will reach the desired result.
For a limited number of long-time learners, this approach became a life-determining goal. If you cannot master a skill in a year, it just means that you need 19 years more. However, the research conducted by Ericsson was quite inaccurate: the difficulty of a skill and strengths of a person who wants to acquire it were not taken into consideration. In …show more content…
In his official statement, he told: “Popularized but simplistic view of our work, which suggests that anyone who has accumulated a sufficient number of hours of practice in a given domain will automatically become an expert and a champion.”
In fact, by this statement, Ericsson denies all his results of the previous investigation. What does that mean for the supporters of 10,000 ideas? It means that an individual can spend 10,000 and fail to become a professional, and he can spend 1,000 and reach the perfect results.
Thus, the main problem of this approach lies in Gladwell and Ericsson’s impossibility to distinguish between quality and quantity. 1,000 quality hours are better than 10,000 hours that you’ve spent without dedication and desire to succeed.
4 strategies for effective skill