You can practice something for 10,000 hours and still be a bit crap at it

[noblegiraffe]

Interesting research challenging the '10,000 hours' claim that hard work is sufficient to be great at something.

digest.bps.org.uk/2014/06/30/exploding-the-10000-hours-myth-its-no-guarantee-for-greatness/

The hours practised by grandmasters in a chess study went from 832 to over 24,000 and there were players at intermediate level who had practised for longer than the average grandmaster.

I think people already knew this really, but the whole 'growth mindset' fad of recent years has been promoting the idea that anyone can be great at anything. Obviously if you work hard at something, you can get better at it, but there are also other factors at play.

I’ve always assumed it’s sheer dogged grit determination loads of practice on a daily basis circumstance facilities/equipment luck finances the right trainer/coach that gets you to the top but that you have to continue with all of the above to even have a remote chance of staying there.

surely it depends on the activity as well. excelling at most things is surely a combination of innate ability/skill plus hard work and discipline, but in different proportions dependent on the activity. I'm happy to be told otherwise by any rowing experts out there but i think what you need to excel at rowing is height and build, general athleticism in terms of lung power, co-ordination etc and then huge grit and discipline in training, diet and just pushing on - not high amounts of skill as such, as compared with e.g. football or gymnastics. if i've understood correctly that's why you get people like helen glover and the ex-army lady (heather stewart?) taking it up late and being very successful, in a way you don't with e.g. gymnastics or diving.

It's been a while since I read the Gladwell book, but my recollection is that 10,000 hours is part of understanding how some apparent geniuses have risen so far above their peers. Eg David Beckham and Jonny Wilkinson were both spot kick experts - the best in the world at the time. It's just not a coincidence (or something completely innnate) that they both also practised and practised and practised. Even by the standards of professional athletes they put in far more hours taking kick after kick after kick.

Of course they needed natural talent to start with, and it helps that spot kicking is something that can be practised on one's own with ease. But Gladwell never said that anyone who does something for 10,000 hours will be an expert, just that it's one way in which the very good can become the best

I've always been sceptical about growth mindset, but I read a general summary of it recently which seemed to be saying that Dweck's point wasn't that achievement is unrelated to inherent ability, but that people are more likely to succeed at things if they believe that hard work will get them there, rather than believing that they are limited by the scope of their natural abilities.

In other words what is important is not that it's actually true, it's the can-do attitude you get from believing it's true. And that I can well believe.

I have a very academically able dd who stubbornly refuses to stick at anything she's not immediately good at (like a musical instrument). She could definitely do with some growth mindset thinking.

onewhite - yes, I think you're right about rowing. The premise behind the "Sporting Giants" programme to find elite rowers was that they had to be tall and have a track record of success in another sporting discipline. The mechanics of how to row can be taught, having naturally long levers can't

“Growth mindset” has never said you can be good at anything. (Unless very badly implemented by your school).

It says you can always be better than you were.
So none of this “I’m crap at maths so no point trying” or “I’ll never be good at sport”.
It’s about silencing those voices and believing you can always get batter than you are now.

Quite obviously if you’re five foot nothing you’ll never be an nba player no matter how much you practice

The type of mentality you need to be an e.g. high level sportsperson does fascinate me. My DS was really into a TV programme called time crashers, where they sent minor celebs 'back in time' to a different historical period every week. They were normally servants or workers of some kind, not posh people. One of them was greg rutherford, the olympic long jumper. He really stuck out because regardless of the task they had to do (work on oyster flats, build fire and shelter, even waiting tables etc - all non-sporty things, though being fit probably often helped) he never let up. He just stuck at it until he'd cracked it and never got grumpy or discouraged unlike the others. Could just be his personality though!

I thought those "10, 000" hours were about applied and directed practice, not just doing it any old how.

So you can spend 10,000 hours trying to make a table, but if you never stop to reflect on your method or realise you need some further techniques, you will still end up with a rickety piece of furniture that falls to bits when you put a plate on it.

But then I don't really believe in talent. A lot of the time "talent" just means that a person has has an unusual level of supportive exposure to a skill or ability in their younger years.

I always remember a young lad I taught who was said to be very talented at the guitar, despite only taking it up a year previously. What most people didn't realise was that his grandfather was an old time guitar player for a folk band and the boy had grown up watching his grandfather and friend playing instruments. He'd been watching people play since he was knee high to a grasshopper.

The type of mentality you need to be an e.g. high level sportsperson does fascinate me

Sports people tend to do quite well in reality TV shows, and I think this is exactly as you say: to be good at sports takes a particular type of tenaciousness, which is apparently transferable to other aspects of life as well.

Very few of us will spend 10,000 hours practising something we're naturally rubbish at, so there won't have been any control groups to see whether this works for everyone/every skill. I assumed it was the other way round - someone might have natural talent as a musician, but there's no way they will make it professionally without 10,000 hours practise. A pp mentioned a music school where 2/3 of the time is spent doing music, about 30 hours a week. I'd be mightily surprised if those students hadn't been selected by audition in the first place.

I think Dweck’s message about growth mindset sort of got lost when it started to get transferred into more and more schools, Eolian. It happens with most things tbh.

I’m not sure it was supposed to be translated as every child will achieve equally. And I’m not sure it was something that we didn’t already know really.

The quote in the article linked to up thread - 'Ten thousand hours is the magic number for greatness' - doesn’t quite catch Gladwell’s position. In Outliers he introduces the idea in the context of musicians attending an elite music academy. He asserts that ‘... once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works’. So he does acknowledge that some innate talent is required in the first instance but it is what you do with that talent that’s crucial.

Outwith
I totally agree, at dd school there are 2 auditions for entry.
Yes, they go on ability, but not the exams passed, necessarily.
It's more about potential and the musical tests they do.
I don't know how they manage it but the teachers usually get it right ito admittance to the school.
Some do fall by the wayside, usually because they don't want to continue with the workload, it is like a boot camp in some respects.
What I do find interesting though, when it comes to auditioning for uni's or conservatoires those who have had the specialist education and those that haven't stand just as much chance as each other, if they meet the entrance criteria.
Which imo shows that it's the hours practice and good teaching that is important, innate ability will get you nowhere if you don't put in the hours of practice, wherever you go to school.

"The premise behind the "Sporting Giants" programme to find elite rowers was that they had to be tall and have a track record of success in another sporting discipline."

Interestingly, the successful subjects in one of Anders Ericsson's studies also happened to be reasonably serious athletes. So I suspect it wasn't just the physical attributes, but the mental training - they already knew how to train their bodies, how to follow a training programme, how to work on specific problems and get past them.

I wonder if it's perhaps culturally easier to accept the idea of training your body? I.e. the idea of having a personal trainer help you with setting up a routine, etc? (Okay there's exam tutoring, but that seems to be just for school kids, and aimed at passing specific targets "help me pass Maths GCSE" "help me get a scholarship", rather than "hey it annoys me how crap my mental arithmetic is - let me hire a tutor to give me feedback and help me improve my basic arithmetic fitness".

Wasn’t this an idea originated or popularised by Malcolm Gladwell?

I thought the theory was that people who are “great” at something have generally devoted 10,000+ hours to perfecting their talent, but they did start with natural aptitude. The practice doesn’t replace talent.

If it is something that requires muscle memory then the hours of practice have to be done with the right technique. Doing something incorrectly for 10,000 hours is n't going to result in improvement.

Agree. You could practice the piano for 10,000 hours all you like but if you had 3 fingers you wouldn't get very far. Otoh Rachmaninoff wouldn't have got anywhere doing 10 minutes a day.
Wow gillybeanz that's a lot of practice! They'll be getting on for their 10,000 by the time they leave school, assuming it's y7-13, and definitely if they do a music degree.
The whole 10,000 hours thing was of course simplified to make a nice headline, and is much more nuanced than that.

Outwith some innate talent is required in the first instance but it is what you do with that talent that’s crucial. yup, this.
Yy to the 10,000h needs to be done in the right way, or you just ingrain poor technique and mistakes.
So it's a mix of innate ability and practice, basically.

Dweck’s research that brought about the phrase ‘growth mindset’ was about motivation. She studied differences between those who sought out and enjoyed challenging/ stretch tasks and those who preferred/chose tasks they knew they could achieve. She discovered the main difference was belief about a capacity to get better/improve.
The key message from the research was- children make more progress when they are stretched/ challenged. In order for them to seek, enjoy and benefit from challenge, encourage them to recognise that their capacity to achieve/get better is not fixed.
The research was sound and like most good research, confirms common sense.

No, Dweck’s research isn’t sound as it has consistently failed to be replicated.

What hasn’t been replicated? The motivation research, conducted in the 80s and 90s was replicated, when the focus was on intrinsic v extrinsic. Researchers don’t seem that interested in motivation these days, new constructs have replaced it.

It's a myth that it's 10000 hours of just doing it. It's the type and nature of the practice. Deliberate Focused practice.
Gladwell popularised (e.g. dumbed down) someone else's work - I think it was Eriksson (?) and lost the point of it.

Totally agree - I could work on drawing and painting for 10,000 hours and probably become better than I am at the moment, but I still wouldn't be good.

As thrworldisfullofidiots says, it's not 10,000,000 hours of practice, it's 10,000,000 hours of a particular kind of practice.

And besides, 10,000 hours is 1 hour per day, every day, for over 27 years.