NURTURE
10,000
Hour Rule is
The
By Julailah Wahid
Outdated
It’s a conjecture that
has become academic
law, sacrosanct even.
But, new evidence has
suggested that tons
and tons of practice and
hours put in might not
necessarily make perfect.
Julailah explores the
obsolete idea of putting
your children through
hours and hours of
tedium practicum.
Be it mathematical problems or reading aloud, many
parents and teachers have emphasised the importance of
regular practice towards achieving success. In his book
Outliers: The Story of Success, author Malcolm Gladwell
reinforces this point with the 10,000 Hour Rule, claiming
that it takes approximately 10,000 hours of practice to
truly master a skill.
It all started with an old paper in American Scientist,
when Herbert Simon and William Chase drew a thoughtprovoking conclusion: “There are no instant experts in
chess—certainly no instant masters or grandmasters.
There appears not to be on record any case 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…”
Since then, psychologists and researchers all over the
world have conscientiously studied Simon and Chase’s
observation, and they always drew the same conclusion –
it takes plenty of practice to be great at complex tasks.
20
Family & Life • May 2014
THE CONCEPTUALISATION
Talent Takes a Backseat
While Gladwell acknowledges that no one becomes an
expert without innate talent, he states that in cognitively
demanding fields, there are no naturals.
“Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with
this view is that the closer the 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,” says Gladwell.
A 1993 study conducted by psychologist K. Anders Ericsson
and his colleagues found that the best musicians had
simply practised more across their lives than other
musicians. Students learning violin at the Music Academy
of West Berlin, Germany were classified into three groups:
the best – those who had the most potential to become
international soloists, the second best, and a third group
who were the least exceptional.
It was later discovered that the best musicians had
accumulated about 10,000 hours of practice in total,
followed by 8,000 for the second best and 5,000 for the
least accomplished. The elite had double the practice
hours of the less capable performers, suggesting a direct
statistical relationship between hours of practice and
outstanding achievement.
After all, if natural talent had a profound effect on
performance, some of the naturally gifted would emerge
at the top of the elite level with fewer practice hours than
everyone else. The data, however, showed otherwise.
According to Ericsson, there are no natural talents in
cognitively demanding fields. With enough practice, he
claims that anyone can achieve a genius-level proficiency –
it was simply a matter of putting in the time. These findings
would later serve as a catalyst for Gladwell’s research.