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Can 10,000 hours of practice make you an expert?
By Ben Carter BBC News
A much-touted theory suggests that practising any skill for 10,000 hours is sufficient to make you an expert. No innate talent? Not a problem. You just practice. But is it true?
One man who decided to test it is Dan McLaughlin, 34, a former commercial photographer from Portland, Oregon.
"The idea came in 2009. I was visiting my brother and we decided to play a par three, nine-hole course," he says. "I had never really been on a golf course and went out and shot a 57, which is horrible. It's 30 over par on an easy nine-hole course."
Far from being discouraged by his apparent lack of any natural talent for golf, Dan and his brother started talking about what it would take to become a professional golfer. Dan soon decided he wanted to try.
"When I announced I was going to quit my job, my co-workers started bringing books in and I read Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Geoff Colvin's Talent is Overrated and The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle," he says. "These books all had this idea of 10,000 hours in them."
The 10,000-hours concept can be traced back to a 1993 paper written by Anders Ericsson, a Professor at the University of Colorado, called The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance.
It highlighted the work of a group of psychologists in Berlin, who had studied the practice habits of violin students in childhood, adolescence and adulthood.
All had begun playing at roughly five years of age with similar practice times. However, at age eight, practice times began to diverge. By age 20, the elite performers had averaged more than 10,000 hours of practice each, while the less able performers had only done 4,000 hours of practice.
The psychologists didn't see any naturally gifted performers emerge and this surprised them. If natural talent had played a role it wouldn't have been unreasonable to expect gifted performers to emerge after, say, 5,000 hours.
Anders Ericsson concluded that "many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years".
Ericsson then pointed out that 10,000 was an average, and that many of the best musicians in his study had accumulated "substantially fewer" hours of practice. He underlined, also, that the quality of the practice was important.
樂觀的人與成功
Does having an optimistic attitude lead to success?
Top business executives and psychologists sure think so.
At a recent Adweek panel, executives from consumer food company General Mills, media companies Good and Upworthy and a professor of psychology agreed that people who are optimistic are more likely to work hard to achieve their goals.
Liz Mascolo, the business unit director at General Mills, defines optimism as being able to focus on a positive outcome.
"It doesn't mean that you're necessarily shiny and happy at all moments of the day," she says. "But it does mean that you have an ability to look at a situation and while it might be tough, you're able to see around that corner and see the possibility...versus the difficulty."
Being optimistic goes far deeper than just positive-thinking, says Gabriele Oettingen, a professor of psychology at New York University.
"Optimism is defined as expectancy judgments that you can do certain things in the future," she says. These expectancy judgments are based on past experience, which means that being optimistic takes effort, she explains.
On the other hand, Oettingen describes positive thinking as simply daydreaming about the future and fantasizing.
The psychology expert says that optimistic people are more likely to invest, act and put effort into achieving whatever it is that they want to get done. "High optimism will predict high effort and success," she says.
Ben Goldhirsh, CEO of Good Worldwide, reiterates the importance of optimism in accomplishing goals. When discussing optimism, your "expectations kind of dictate outcomes," he says. "People are hungry to see their expectations elevated."
However, Goldhirsh also points out that "pragmatic idealism" is important. Dreaming big is great, he says, but you must also take practical steps to turn it into a reality.
So how does one use optimism to achieve an end goal in a realistic way? Mascolo says that it takes a concerted effort and requires you to continually look forward to your goals.
