Comment by buzzcut | Hacker News Reader

Comment by buzzcut | Hacker News Reader

The 10,000 hours rule isn't someone's fantasy, it's based on an increasingly large body of evidence, but this article just dismisses the evidence with a wave of the hand and some assertions. A good selection of research is in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance. Other people here have mentioned also that it's a specific kind of practice that's called for, not just mindlessly amassing hours, but rather relentlessly working on your weak spots and on skills that are just a bit outside what you can currently do.

The Grandin book looks interesting, but this excerpt just seems lazy.

There is also the recent research on grit by Angela Duckworth who is demonstrating that success depends on perseverance. That observation probably seems pretty intuitive, but she's demonstrating it with research. The "I was hopeless" reaction to something hard is just a failure of grit. The author has no idea how they would do if the ground it out through the really tough parts.

I also find that when I talk to people about this they are often very resistant to this model of essentially talent-free skill development. It makes a lot people uncomfortable, and just seems wrong to them. I think maybe the notion that it's all innate talent absolves them of the need to work hard to develop advanced skill. Instead nature capriciously doles out talent and that's the story of why I'm not ...

I don't think it dismisses the evidence - it agrees with the idea that 10,000 hours might be required. It just states that it takes 10,000 hours for a talented person to become good at a field - that a person untalented in a field won't necessarily become a true expert given enough practise.

To me this seems intuitively obvious - people's brains aren't built alike, and if we're willing to accept that brains at the fringes (e.g. aspergers) are more attuned to certain tasks, it's not too out there to suggest variance within the 'normal' parameters too. Of course, proving it would require a complex test - one that (somehow) sorts people into attuned or unattuned on a given subject to begin with, and then makes them work for 10,000 hours on the subject.

Realistically, though, I suppose this question just isn't all that interesting. A lot of the time, the important part of the 'nature' component is simply what you're interested in. If you happen to have an interest in a subject, you're vastly more likely to put in the 10,000 hours. I'm a good computer programmer because I enjoyed and was good at it from the beginning, so I spent more time at it. I'm a terrible dancer because I spent maybe a hundred hours on it, sucked, and lost interest. Maybe if I'd spent a hundred times longer doing it I'd be a world beater, maybe not - but it doesn't matter, because my initial experience was enough to put me off. I imagine someone for whom it clicked more naturally would be vastly more likely to stay interested.

I see break dancing in your future!

Two points

1) That this seems intuitively obvious is precisely what I was referring to in my post. This is a scientific question, to the extent it can be answered and we should probably be unsatisfied with what appears to be obvious. The research, as I understand it, just doesn't bear out your observation.

2) I think why people stick with something is a super fascinating question. What's that all about? Why did you stick with programming and become good at it? Why do I find the same tasks utterly soul crushing and frustrating to the point of rage? Why do I persist in taking Latin as I am now? I've almost quit half a dozen times when it's gotten really hard, but I don't quit. There is something that keeps me coming back to it. I suck at it right now, but I'm not quitting, in fact, I've been working pretty hard at it. So to me that's the research I'd love to see: why do you stick with programming when I, despite numerous attempts, just don't like it and give up on it easily?

> This is a scientific question, to the extent it can be answered and we should probably be unsatisfied with what appears to be obvious.

That seems absolutely fair enough :-)

> The research, as I understand it, just doesn't bear out your observation.

The question is, does it contradict it, or does it just say nothing about it?

If the research suggests that all people have essentially the same level of ability to learn all tasks (given enough application), I'd be surprised. We know for a fact, for example, that IQ is quite highly heritable. Whatever you think about IQ as a means for measuring 'intelligence', that certainly suggests a genetic difference in the way people's brains work. That could at a minimum affect people's ability to quickly pick up (and thus enjoy enough to keep going with) new tasks, and at a maximum affect their ability to perform the task at all.

Now, obviously I don't know for sure the answer to these questions :-). The little research I've read in the past suggests that IQ is correlated with a base ability to perform a given task at all, but once you have that base level practise/application becomes the most important factor.

With respect to sticking with something, if natural talent isn't a thing that exists, inherent desire to stick with something becomes the new natural talent - after all, if someone finds programming fascinating it's always going to be vastly easier/more likely for them to put in their 10,000 hours than someone who has no such inclination.

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