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I fully agree with you: the title is a sound byte and somewhat imprecise. Creating good titles has been an ongoing struggle for me. As an engineer, I want to be precise; as a writer, I want more readers. What I've learned over time is that something like "The 100-hour rule" performs way better than something like "the speed of knowledge acquisition decelerates rapidly."

Hopefully the post's gist is clear: it takes a long time to become a true expert/master, but much less time to surpass everyone who has zero knowledge about a field.

If it's only about surpassing people with zero knowledge in the field, I'd say it's probably closer to 10 hours with a good teacher. But that's if they're consecutive.

I don't think they always need to be consecutive. I've seen situations where, say you practice deliberately for one hour. You see some noticeable progress, but for maybe the last half of the time your progress slows or levels off. Then, you can go away for awhile (maybe a day or a week) and when you come back you seem to be much better.

Not all activities work like this, but some do. Good teachers, however, pretty much always help. :)

Hi there, thanks for the response. I actually don't mind the title--I've certainly been guilty of trying to increase my audience with a catchy title. I think the main reason I posted my comment was that even after reading your whole post, I still came away with "the 100-hour rule" sticking in my head pretty prominently. I think if I had written the article and chosen that title I would have tried to make people come away with a much stronger feeling about the fallacy of thinking about it in terms of "n hours" and more in terms of just deliberate focused effort.

There's nothing particularly magical about "100 hours" and the article indicated that.

It really is just saying that individuals _can_ make significant progress towards competency in a new skill by putting in a MODICUM of time, effort and attention.

> make significant progress towards competency in a new skill by putting in a MODICUM of time, effort and attention.

But even that is not always true. There are some activities where it's hard to see meaningful progress for awhile, but then once you've built up an adequate base you start progressing more rapidly.

These kinds of articles tend to be popular because they make people think that it's easy to learn new things. This is an inspiring idea and if it results in people learning more things then it might even be a beneficial thing to say. But I think it's more beneficial to promote the value of deliberate focused effort (hard work if you will), because some things simply don't come easily.

You're right that some things don't come easy and require hard work.

But how many folks fail to make progress, or check themselves out of even starting an endeavor simply because they've convinced themselves it is "too hard"?

Do we always need yet more reminders one must do "hard work" to accomplish something?

Many times just getting starting on a path is enough of a psychological win to increase motivation and later on achieve mastery.

Very insightful comment, thank you for posting it. Let me put a positive spin on it. While the unconditional variance is so large that the statement is meaningless, if you condition on your 3 factors, I think you can obtain a pretty good predictor.

For example, for the combination 1. activity = running, 2. person = world champion in cycling, 3. competence = sub-3-hour marathon, then you would expect the time to be around 100 hours. Lance Armstrong fits this combination. How long he trained, we can't know for sure, but the first google hit for (a free) marathon training program at the elite level [1] shows 85h total running time.

[1] http://www.yourmarathontrainingplan.com/free-training-progra...

The number of hours required for basic competence is HIGHLY dependent on three key things: 1. The particular activity 2. The abilities of the person 3. How much competence you consider "basic"

I think I'd put "environment" in at #3, maybe even #2. Where environment is a wide umbrella including the obvious (time and space to devote to study, quality of study materials and support) to the somewhat less so (your gender, your race, your affluence or lack thereof, the supportive/skeptical attitudes of your family and friends etc).

Environment is subject to limited control by an individual. But young, affluent people have the most control. Environment winds up being largely a matter of luck.

This environmental influence - which so often is matter of luck - is one subtlety that seems to get consistently left out of all these "10,000 hours" and "100 hours" type discussions. Even a clever person can spend 10,000 hours working at something under terrible conditions and have poor results. One doesn't have to be particularly bright to spend 10 hours under ideal circumstances and make real progress.

By leaving this out, we offer unwarranted support to a certain Utopian/libertarian/meritocratic mythos that is so popular in the software/startup field. And I think that's a shame. I think the field will ultimately be better off if it can view itself more clearly.

I had a suspicion there might be some factors I was forgetting. I think this is a really big one so thanks for mentioning it. I recently became more aware of this factor after spending some time with a couple less fortunate kids going into college for computer science. It's amazing how a small amount of well-placed guidance from an experienced mentor can have a dramatic effect. In this case it was three things:

1. Learn vim (or emacs)

2. Use Linux and the command line

3. Use git

One of the guys started this semester. He's already a bright guy and would have been near the top of his class without me, but those three simple things make him look like a magician to his classmates. In the course of getting helping him get set up with Linux I also became aware how much of an advantage my middle class upbringing gave me. Something relatively basic like having a decent laptop can actually be a big obstacle. $1000 is a lot of money to a lot of people. Now I'm sure some people will say that you don't need to spend $1000 to get started with a usable computer. That's true, but there are useful things that you can do with a $1000 computer that the much more affordable computers can't do.

Another anecdote. A few years ago I was in a climbing gym and I tried slacklining. It seemed impossible so I didn't do anything more with it. A few years later someone suggested that it does wonders for your balance so I decided I wanted to learn. Then by luck I happened to run across some people slacklining and over the course of a couple days I was able to spend some time with them practicing. Their guidance got me over an initial hump that seemed insurmountable from the outside.

So yes, "environment" should DEFINITELY be added to my list!

Maybe it becomes a little more agreeable if you flip it around: consider as "basic" whatever level people would reach after 100 hours of quality learning. Should someone with this kind of "basic" level in neurosurgery be allowed to even think of live subjects? Certainly not. But as one of the many possible squishy definitions of "basic", this would not be the worst.

An interesting discussion is the optimal distribution of those hours for different kinds of learning. Between the intensive trial&error of learning software tools and the slow motor skill buildup of learning a musical instrument I could see anything from two 50h weeks to fifty 2h weeks to be the best match.

> Maybe it becomes a little more agreeable if you flip it around: consider as "basic" whatever level people would reach after 100 hours of quality learning.

Yeah, I know what you mean. You certainly could do that. But I think that's less useful. If you use a specific number of hours as the benchmark you lose most of your relationship to useful levels of competence. I think each domain has natural levels of competence that have meaning, and it's probably better to keep the discussion oriented around that.

For a ukelele or guitar player, knowing enough to play the majority of pop songs is probably significant. For a piano or violin player maybe the bar for basic competence is a bit higher. For partner dancing it seems like the level you need to be to safely dance on a crowded public dance floor and make most partners feel comfortable is probably a pretty important level of skill to talk about. These levels are also personal. Maybe one budding pianist is happy with pop songs, but you're not going to be happy until you can play a full piano concerto. Perhaps your goal is just to be able to write a few computer programs, but a company hiring wants people who understand more about what it takes to maintain larger projects over a longer period of time.

When it comes down to how decisions are made in the real world nobody cares about how many hours you've practiced. It's all about what you can do.

I think it's meant as a convenient "rule of thumb" in juxtaposition to the more commonly known "10,000 hour rule" (which also has some controversy[1]). They are just saying you can be pretty good at something with 2 less orders of magnitude than mastery.

1. http://www.fastcodesign.com/3027564/asides/scientists-debunk...

There's also a huge amount of variance with underlying knowledge too. When you know something at a lower level and you want to work at a higher one, it's easier to pick up.

Say you want to teach someone who only knows x86 assembly C vs someone who only knows Python. Both will have their struggles, but the person who knows how a CPU works already will have an easier go at grasping lower level features needed for most software development quickly.

There indeed is a lot of variance and we really cannot generalize. Especially with the 'abilities of the person' which has the highest of the variances.

If you take the article with a bit of salt and step up the generalization ladder, the point is that skill expertise vs time grows exponentially... With the greatest productivity achieved in the initial time spent. Mastering skills on the other hand takes comparatively more time.

> If you take the article with a bit of salt and step up the generalization ladder, the point is that skill expertise vs time grows exponentially

I thought about saying something like this, but after some reflection I don't think it's true. The shape of skill vs time curves is not always exponential.

For instance, take Argentine Tango. It took me 9 months of consistent 10 hours / week practice to even reach a point where I felt comfortable going to the average public social tango event. In fact, in tango it's pretty widely recognized that the learning curve shape is very different for leaders and followers. For followers it typically looks like [1]. But for leaders it's more like [2]. (Time on the x axis, skill on the y axis.) I really think that in general it's probably more like a "multi-hump curve" [3] in the general case. I had a situation recently where I took one lesson with a tango teacher and in one hour he totally revolutionized my dancing. And this isn't me talking, people I dance with regularly said that.

So I don't think the rate of progress at a new activity is always exponential or even fastest at the beginning.

[1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/b/ba/Exponent...

[2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/88/Logistic...

[3] http://mightybyte.net/learning-curve.png

Something I've taken from my Argentine Tango journey is the importance of focusing on fundamentals. Figuring out what those fundamentals were took some time. Some skills definitely do have a slow ramp up period in the beginning.

Great job getting through that initial phase! The first year can be trying particularly for leads.

I did something similar. People started saying I was a natural at tango. No. I put in the time. Lots of it. Every day. Obsessed, constantly aware of the fundamentals on or off the dance floor. Having some basic talent only gets you so far.

Back to the thread.

I have a theory achieving mastery in any area can potentially accelerate mastery in another area. Related or not. The mastering of mastery I guess. Maybe our brains are able to learn more as we learn more. Accelerating the learning process?