The Truth About the 10,000-Hour Rule

A study on violinists in the early 1990s inspired the idea that 10,000 hours of practice is the key to success

A. The so-called 10,000-hour rule can be traced back to a 1993 paper, 'The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance', co-authored by a Swedish psychologist and a US psychological scientist. The paper is one of the most cited in its field. Its most striking claim is that the difference between expert performers and normal adults is not due to innate talent, but rather is a reflection of the amount of deliberate practice they have undergone. 'Many characteristics once believed to reflect innate talent are actually the result of intense practice extended for a minimum of 10 years,' the authors wrote. They concluded: 'The maximal level of performance for individuals in a given domain is not attained automatically as a function of extended experience, but the level of performance can be increased even by highly experienced individuals as a result of deliberate efforts to improve.'

B. The study looked at three groups of violinists at the Music Academy of West Berlin, in Germany. The authors set out to find out what had caused the 'best' violinists to be better than the merely 'good' ones, who were in turn better than the 'least accomplished' ones. All of the violinists were asked how much they had practised, alone, with a teacher, and with others, every week, ever since they had first picked up a violin. What they found was that by the age of 20, the best violinists had practised an average of 10,000 hours, the good ones had practised 8,000 hours, and the least skilled had practised 4,000 hours. The psychologists concluded that what mattered was not the time spent obtaining any old experience, but the amount of time spent on 'deliberate practice', which they defined as an effortful activity designed to improve individual target performance. The authors also noted that the most accomplished individuals in their study had each followed the same learning structure, and had all acquired their skills in a similar way: 'All of the expert violinists had started playing at approximately five years of age, and had selected a music teacher who was a violinist. All of them had been admitted to a music academy by eight years of age, where they had been taught by skillful violin teachers. All of them had started solo practice at around the age of eight. All of them had been rated very highly by their violin teachers at the music academy, and had given their first public performance at around the age of eight.'

C. The theory of deliberate practice was popularised by the writer Malcolm Gladwell, who argued that talent is irrelevant to performance in his book Outliers, published in 2008. 'The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals", musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practising a fraction of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any "grinds", people who worked harder than everyone else, yet just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks,' he wrote. 'Their research suggests that once a musician has enough ability to get into a top music school, the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or she works. That's it. And what's more, the people at the very top don't work just harder or even much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.'

D. But while Ericsson and his colleagues had found a correlation between the number of hours spent on deliberate practice and the level of expertise achieved, their research didn't determine whether practice was the cause of that expertise. The idea that 10,000 hours of practice will make you an expert is appealing, not least because it suggests that anyone can achieve anything if they just work hard enough. But while practice is undeniably important, it is not the only factor that contributes to performance. In 2014, a group of psychologists led by Brooke Macnamara of Princeton University re-analysed data from all of the studies they could find on the relationship between deliberate practice and performance in various domains, including music, sports and education, and estimated that the average amount that practice contributes to mastery of these is just 12 percent. That leaves a lot of the variance in expert performance unexplained, which means factors other than practice must be involved.

E. In a rejoinder, Ericsson argues that Macnamara's analysis actually showed the opposite of what she claimed. In each of the domains she looked at, he says, practice was the single most important factor in predicting a person's level of expertise. The problem, he argues, is that Macnamara's analysis looked at the total number of hours of practice undertaken by the participants in the studies she reviewed, rather than the number of hours of deliberate practice. 'The paper is important because it shows that the amount of time with relevant experience is not a good predictor of attained performance,' he says. 'But it does not invalidate the body of research on deliberate practice, nor its utility as the most important predictor of expertise.'

The Case for Esperanto

Language lovers, just like music lovers, enjoy variety. For the latter there's Mozart, The Rolling Stones and Beyonce. For the former there's English, French, Swahili, Urdu... the list is endless. But what about those poor overworked students who find learning difficult, confusing languages a drudge? Wouldn't it put a smile on their faces if there were just one simple, easy-to-learn tongue that would cut their study time by years? Well, of course, it exists. It's called Esperanto, and it's been around for more than 120 years. Esperanto is the most widely spoken artificially constructed international language. The name derives from Doktoro Esperanto, the pseudonym under which L. L. Zamenhof first published his Unua Libro in 1887. The phrase itself means 'one who hopes'. Zamenhof's goal was to create an easy and flexible language as a universal second language to promote peace and international understanding.

Zamenhof, after ten years of developing his brainchild from the late 1870s to the early 1880s, had the first Esperanto grammar published in Warsaw in July 1887. The number of speakers grew rapidly over the next few decades, at first primarily in the Russian empire and Eastern Europe, then in Western Europe and the Americas, China, and Japan. In the early years, speakers of Esperanto kept in contact primarily through correspondence and periodicals, but since 1905 world congresses have been held on five continents every year except during the two World Wars. Latest estimates for the numbers of Esperanto speakers are around 2 million. Put in percentage terms, that's about 0.03% of the world's population — no staggering figure, comparatively speaking. One reason is that Esperanto has no official status in any country, but it is an optional subject on the curriculum of several state education systems. It is widely estimated that it can be learned in anywhere between a quarter to a twentieth of the time required for other languages.

As a constructed language, Esperanto is not genealogically related to any ethnic language. Whilst it is described as 'a language lexically predominantly Romanic', the phonology, grammar, vocabulary, and semantics are based on the western Indo-European languages. For those of us who are not naturally predisposed to tucking languages under our belts, it is an easy language to learn. It has 5 vowels and 23 consonants. It has one simple way of conjugating all of its verbs. Words are often made from many other roots, making the number of words which one must memorise much smaller. The language is phonetic, and the rules of pronunciation are very simple, so that everyone knows how to pronounce a written word and vice-versa, and word order follows a standard, logical pattern. Through prefixing and suffixing, Esperanto makes it easy to identify words as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, direct objects and so on, by means of easy-to-spot endings. All this makes for easy language learning. What's more, several research studies demonstrate that studying Esperanto before another foreign language speeds up and improves the learning of the other language. This is presumably because learning subsequent foreign languages is easier than learning one's first, while the use of a grammatically simple and culturally flexible language like Esperanto softens the blow of learning one's first foreign language. In one study, a group of European high school students studied Esperanto for one year, then French for three years, and ended up with a significantly better command of French than a control group who had studied French for all four years.

Needless to say, the language has its critics. Some point to the Eastern European features of the language as being harsh and difficult to pronounce, and argue that Esperanto has an artificial feel to it, without the flow of a natural tongue, and that by nature of its artificiality, it is impossible to become emotionally involved with the language. Others cite its lack of cultural history, indigenous literature — "no one has ever written a novel straight into Esperanto" — together with its minimal vocabulary and its inability to express all the necessary philosophical, emotional and psychological concepts.

The champions of Esperanto — Esperantists — disagree. They claim that it is a language in which a great body of world literature has appeared in translation: in poetry, novels, literary journals, and, to rebut the accusation that it is not a 'real' language, point out that it is frequently used at international meetings which draw hundreds and thousands of participants. Moreover, on an international scale, it is most useful — and fair — for neutral communication. That means that communication through Esperanto does not give advantages to the members of any particular people or culture, but provides an ethos of equality of rights, tolerance and true internationalism.

Esperantists further claim that Esperanto has the potential — were it universally taught for a year or two throughout the world — to empower ordinary people to communicate effectively worldwide on a scale that far exceeds that which is attainable today by only the most linguistically brilliant among us. It offers the opportunity to improve communication in business, diplomacy, scholarship and other fields so that those who speak many different native languages will be able to participate fluently in international conferences and chat comfortably with each other after the formal presentations are made. Nowadays that privilege is often restricted to native speakers of English and those who have special talents and opportunities for learning English as a foreign language.

What Esperanto does offer in concrete terms is the potential of saving billions of dollars which are now being spent on translators and interpreters, billions which would be freed up to serve the purposes of governments and organisations that spend so much of their resources to change words from one language into the words of others. Take, for example, the enormously costly conferences, meetings and documentation involved in the European Union parliamentary and administrative procedures — all funded, essentially, by tax payers. And instead of the World Health Organisation, and all NGOs for that matter, devoting enormous sums to provide interpreters and translations, they would be able to devote those huge amounts of money to improving the health of stricken populations throughout the world.