The (Ten Year) Overnight Success

This week in the Guardian, the author writes a pretty good article about the idea of mastery and practice vs. natural talent, and cites a really interesting study conducted in the early 90's comparing children who started learning a skill or developing a talent, and tracked their hours of practice.

From the article:

This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery...."

In other words, a key part of what it means to be talented is being able to practise for hours and hours - to the point where it is really hard to know where "natural ability" stops and the simple willingness to work hard begins.

It's interesting to me, that the 10 year figure is one we use anectdotaly quite often, in the "overnight success that took 10 years to achieve." We see it very often in the entertainment business, and I would say it's held true in my own experience as well.

Ten years of hard work, yields a degree of mastery that looks suspiciously like "natural talent."

Go figure.