Hacker News Reader

Comment by padraigf | Hacker News Reader

Bit of a straw-man argument. Ericsson's original research didn't claim that 10,000 hours of practice made you an expert. It was that no-one became an expert (in his studied domain of violin playing) without about 10,000 hours of practice.

The 10,000 hours of practice was a sine-qua-non to becoming an expert, but he never claimed it was necessarily sufficient.

View on HN

Right, it is not a bijection.

Expert -> (implies) 10,000 hours spent

10,000 hours spent does not imply Expert

As my music teachers said, practice makes permanent.

Fun fact: my text prediction will not let me Swype permanent at the end of the phrase practice makes... After the last p is started, there are no other options.

The self help industry often makes the promise that if you follow their recipes then success is guaranteed. I think a lot of people have bought into that. So it’s a little uncomfortable to think that even after following all the steps success is not guaranteed.

Sports is a little more realistic in that sense. I don’t think anyone believes that if you do exactly what Tom Brady did you will win the Super Bowl.

Oh yeah, and they can always hide behind the "if it doesn't work for you, you must've done something wrong / not followed the plan".

Such a nonsense article really. I know nobody that claims that 10,000 hours = makes you a top expert. Nonsense, just pure nonsense.

Here's one in this thread: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19163098

And another: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19162386

Malcom Gladwell pretty much made the claim that talent is a myth and having the passion to practice enough made you a top expert. He backtracked a bit on that, but the claim was out there and repeated in the media.

And there's an important point to it that I've heard from several other sources along the lines that expert performance happens when you combine interest and hard work. If you're interested in something, you'll do the type of work necessary to become an expert at it.

Too many people focus on aptitude/talent, thinking it's some kind of innate ability to perform better at a given task, but I take it as a tendency to enjoy a certain type of practice. For example, I really don't like drawing, but I forced myself to take a class, and I still suck. That's not because I'm naturally bad at drawing, but because I don't enjoy the process of getting better.

There's a huge difference between developers who have done programming for 10k hours but didn't enjoy it and someone who enjoys it. The first is unlikely to go any deeper than necessary and will always work in a similar role, whereas the latter will explore a variety of concepts and approaches and become capable of solving a wider array of problems. I don't think there's a great divide between good and bad programmers based on "talent", but quality of practice, which can usually be identified by enjoyment of that practice.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com