The Key To Being An Expert

10,000 hours of training will make you an expert in any field.

Practice makes perfect, is a well-known saying. And the idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become very, very good at something — be it music, sports, or work-related — is a very persistent one that keeps popping up. But, does it hold any merit?

In 1993, Swedish psychologist Karl Anders Ericsson (1947–2020) researched how many hours violinists had practiced to reach their level of expertise. It turned out that the highest tier of violinists had practiced about 10,000 hours, which was more than the number of hours practiced by the lower tiers. Ericsson and his colleagues concluded that characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice for at least ten years.

Journalist Malcolm Gladwell (1963) described the 10,000 hours of practice rule in his bestselling book Outliers, declaring the 10,000 hours “the magic number of greatness”. Even though Ericsson distanced himself from this “popularized and simplistic view” of his work, the idea was picked up by people in sports and business alike and projected onto their world and has thus — unfortunately — taken root.

Practice is overrated