By now, most of us must have heard about the “10,000-hour rule”. This was a theory propounded by the Canadian journalist and writer Malcolm Gladwell in his 2008 book Outliers.
For those who aren’t familiar with his proposition it’s that, given around 10,000 hours’ solid practice, almost anyone can become an expert in a particular sphere. The most often quoted examples that Gladwell gave were The Beatles and Bill Gates. In the case of the former, he claimed that the many 12-hour stints they spent playing in Hamburg nightclubs were what raised their game way above other bands of the time. For Gates it was the time he spent alone in his college room refining his programming skills.
Although the theory that this much practice almost inevitably results in perfection was adopted pretty much without question at the time, subsequent research has done a great deal to debunk it.
It’s research that has been carried out on both animal and human behaviour with one very influential study being run by Stanford University on macaque monkeys. The animals were trained to reach out for different coloured spots and rewarded more the quicker that they performed the act.
But, despite being tested over time, their reaction speeds proved to be very variable and showed no consistent increase. This was put down to the fact that differing amounts of brain activity at different times affect muscle control, something that is impossible to over-ride, despite how much practice is undertaken.
That’s not to say that practice serves no purpose. After all, it has a crucial role to play in familiarising us with new experiences, ideally in a low-risk environment, This is undoubtedly why many leading casino operators offer new players the chance to try out free online slots before they commit to paying actual stake money. This is especially useful to players given the plethora of choice of games available and their increasing sophistication. This means even the relatively experienced slots fan can benefit from a free trial period playing a new game.
While this is obviously a very different field to playing slots, research has also been carried out amongst student violinists by a team at Case Western Reserve University in Ohio. In their study, they found that in many cases the very best, or elite, violinists tended to practice less than their less accomplished peers. In numerical terms, the best were found to be 26% better than the rest, a statistic that the study judged to be unremarkable.
Similar studies in fields like athletics have put this figure of difference at around 18%. The conclusions that have been drawn from these statistics are that several other factors like genetics, innate ability and mental attitude account for it rather than sheer hard grind over many, many hours.
Of course, the whole argument does seem to hinge around the assumption that perfection should be the ultimate goal of practice. But, for most of us, practice in any field is generally carried out for pleasure as well as a gradual, if modest, improvement. And that’s going to take us far fewer than 10,000 hours.
