“It takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something”

A general rule states that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert an anything. The “10,000-hour rule” was developed from a 1973 paper in American Scientist by Herbert Simon and William Chase, who studied chess masters and noted that they had over 10,000 hours of chess play. “Chase and Simon (1973) estimate, for example, that the skill of chess masters is based on over 10,000 hours of practice” was cited in print in 1986. “It has been suggested that around 10,000 hours of practice are required to produce an expert, be it a chess master or a composer” was also cited in print in 1986.
 
Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson is sometimes credited for coining the “10,000-hour rule” in the 1990s, but Ericsson’s work showed that the quality of practice hours is more important than the number of practice hours. Malcolm Gladwell‘s Outliers: The Story of Success (2008) included an extended discussion of the 10,000-hour rule.
 
     
Wikipedia: Outliers (book)
Outliers: The Story of Success is the third non-fiction book written by Malcolm Gladwell and published by Little, Brown and Company on November 18, 2008. In Outliers, Gladwell examines the factors that contribute to high levels of success.
(...)
A common theme that appears throughout Outliers is the “10,000-Hour Rule”, based on a study by Anders Ericsson. Gladwell claims that greatness requires enormous time, using the source of The Beatles’ musical talents and Gates’ computer savvy as examples. The Beatles performed live in Hamburg, Germany over 1,200 times from 1960 to 1964, amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time, therefore meeting the 10,000-Hour Rule.
 
Wikipedia: K. Anders Ericsson
K. Anders Ericsson (born circa 1948) is a Swedish psychologist and Conradi Eminent Scholar and Professor of Psychology at Florida State University who is widely recognized as one of the world’s leading theoretical and experimental researchers on expertise.
(...)
Currently he studies the cognitive structure of expert performance in domains such as medicine, music, chess, and sports, investigating how expert performers acquire their superior performance through extended deliberate practice (e.g., high concentration practice beyond one’s comfort zone). He published an edited book with Jacqui Smith Toward a General Theory of Expertise in 1991 ...
 
Google Books
Cognitive Processes
By Lyle Eugene Bourne
Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall
1986
Pg. 356:
Chase and Simon (1973) estimate, for example, that the skill of chess masters is based on over 10,000 hours of practice.
 
Google Books
The Skilful Mind:
An Introduction to Cognitive Psychology
By Angus Gellatly
Milton Keynes, England” Open University Press
1986
Pg. 106:
Skills, of course, take a long time to acquire: it has been suggested that around 10,000 hours of practice are required to produce an expert, be it a chess master or a composer. But after all, 10,000 hours is less than three hours a day for ten years, so by the end of primary school children have had adequate practice to be experts at the skills of language.
 
Google Books
Surpassing Ourselves:
An inquiry into the nature and implications of expertise
BY Carl Bereiter and Marlene Scardamalia
Chicago, IL: Open Court
1993
Pp. 16-17:
Although differences in talent seemingly make it much easier for some people than others, we know that in general it takes a great deal of time and experience to become an expert. Ten thousand hours is the figure that John R. Hayes comes up with, having studied biographies of experts in many fields.
 
The New Yorker
AUGUST 21, 2013
Complexity and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule
BY MALCOLM GLADWELL
Forty years ago, in a paper in American Scientist, Herbert Simon and William Chase drew one of the most famous conclusions in the study of expertise:
 
There are no instant experts in chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters. There appears not to be on record any case (including Bobby Fischer) where a person reached grandmaster level with less than about a decade’s intense preoccupation with the game. We would estimate, very roughly, that a master has spent perhaps 10,000 to 50,000 hours staring at chess positions…

In the years that followed, an entire field within psychology grew up devoted to elaborating on Simon and Chase’s observation—and researchers, time and again, reached the same conclusion: it takes a lot of practice to be good at complex tasks.
(...)
This is the scholarly tradition I was referring to in my book “Outliers,” when I wrote about the “ten-thousand-hour rule.” No one succeeds at a high level without innate talent, I wrote: “achievement is talent plus preparation.” But the ten-thousand-hour research reminds us that “the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.”
   
Forbes.com
LEADERSHIP 9/25/2013 @ 9:39AM
Are You Wasting Your 10,000 Hours?
By DavidBurkus
(...)
If we want to true understand the heart of the debate, and find out if we’re wasting those 10,000 hours of preperation, then we have to go back to the original argument, and the research of K. Anders Ericsson. In his 1993 article “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance,” Ericsson and his co-authors present the idea of a required amount of preparation time and validate the 10-year, 10,000-hours, rule. But more of their work focuses on how world-class individuals are spending their 10,000 hours. Specifically, it isn’t just about 10,000 hours of doing the activity; it’s 10,000 hours of what Ericsson calls “deliberate practice.” According to the paper, “deliberate practice is a highly structured activity, the explicit goal of which is to improve performance.” Deliberate practice consists of specific training activities, drills, and exercises designed to stretch the individual’s skills and thereby provide growth.
   
The Huffington Post
Why The 10,000 Hour Rule Is A Myth
Posted: 10/07/2013 4:37 pm EDT Updated: 10/08/2013 11:52 am EDT
The following is an excerpt from Daniel Goleman’s new book, “Focus: The Hidden Driver of Excellence.”
The “10,000-hour rule”—that this level of practice holds the secret to great success in any field—has become sacrosanct gospel, echoed on websites and recited as litany in high-performance workshops. The problem: it’s only half-true.
 
If you are a duffer at golf, say, and make the same mistakes every time you try a certain swing or putt, 10,000 hours of practicing that error will not improve your game. You’ll still be a duffer, albeit an older one.
 
No less an expert than Anders Ericsson, the Florida State University psychologist whose research on expertise spawned the ten-thousand-hour rule-of-thumb, told me, “You don’t get benefits from mechanical repetition, but by adjusting your execution over and over to get closer to your goal.”
   
Fast Company—Design
March 12, 2014 | 4:30 PM
Scientists Debunk The Myth That 10,000 Hours Of Practice Makes You An Expert
A THEORY MALCOLM GLADWELL POPULARIZED IN OUTLIERS—THAT 10,000 HOURS OF PRACTICE CAN TURN ANYONE INTO AN EXPERT—PROBABLY ISN’T TRUE, A NEW STUDY SAYS.
By Shaunacy Ferro
Can 10,000 hours of practice really make you an expert at anything? The widely touted theory, highlighted in a 1993 psychology paper and popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, says that anyone can master a skill with 10,000 hours of practice. There’s even a Macklemore song about it, so that makes it real.
 
Twitter
Gabe Fonseca
‏@MrGabeFonseca
Supposedly it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something. I’m an expert at sleeping, watching TV, and surfing the internet.
9:58 AM - 18 Jul 2014
 
Smithsonian.com
The 10,000 Hour Rule Is Not Real
The biggest meta-analysis of research to date indicates that practice does not make perfect
By Rachel Nuwer
AUGUST 20, 2014
The 10,000 hour rule—first proposed by a Swedish psychologist and later made famous in Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers—states that exceptional expertise requires at least 10,000 hours of practice. The best of the best (the Beatles, Bill Gates) all amassed more than 10,000 hours of practice before rising to the top, Gladwell argued. So greatness is within virtually any person’s grasp, so long as they can put in the time to master their skill of choice.
 
A new meta-analysis, however, indicates that the 10,000 hour rule simply does not exist.
(...)
While this is the largest study to date to arrive at this conclusion, it’s not the first. Soon after Outliers was published, experts began calling foul—including the expert who supposedly coined the rule, Anders Ericsson.
 
Aljazeera
Can we auto-correct humanity?
Rapper Prince Ea shares his views on the ‘digital insanity’ that leaves many of us consumed by technology.
Prince Ea Last updated: 07 Nov 2014 12:43
(...)
Studies show that four years of our lives, on average, are spent looking down at our mobile phones. That’s 1,460 days, 35,040 hours, 2,102,400 minutes. What else could we be doing or pursuing with this time? As the old adage goes, it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something.