Does 10,000 Hours Of Practice Really Make An Expert?

It’s an attractive idea, not least because it implies that greatness is just a matter of grit. Want to be a musical maestro or the next Picasso? You can! All you need to do is practice.

It makes sense, really. Unfortunately, it’s simply not true.

Hunting 10,000 hours 

The idea that 10,000 hours is what it takes to become an expert at any given skill is one that, now, is as pervasive as the air we breathe. So it’s worth asking: where did it come from? Surely, this must be a figure with a vast body of research behind it?

Well, honestly, its history isn’t all that old. Its story – or at least, its popularity – really only goes back about a decade and a half, to the publication and subsequent memeification of Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers.

“For almost a generation, psychologists around the world have been engaged in a spirited debate over a question that most of us would consider to have been settled years ago,” begins chapter two, part two of the book. “The question is this: is there such a thing as innate talent?”

“The obvious answer is yes,” Gladwell wrote. “Not every hockey player born in January ends up playing at the professional level. Only some do – the innately talented ones. Achievement is talent plus preparation. The problem with this view is that the closer psychologists look at the careers of the gifted, the smaller the role innate talent seems to play and the bigger the role preparation seems to play.”

Citing a seminal study from the early 1990s – one that followed violinists at what was then the Music Academy of West Berlin – plus neuroscientist Daniel Levitin, who covered the same paper in his 2006 book This Is Your Brain On Music, Gladwell concluded that there is only one way to become an expert: 10,000 hours of practice.

“[Ericsson] and his colleagues couldn’t find any ‘naturals’, musicians who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing 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,” Gladwell 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.”

The rule “surfaces again and again in studies of expertise,” he added – before penning the fateful line: “In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.”

The problems with 10,000

To hear Gladwell and Levitin tell it, the 10,000 hour “rule” applies not only to musicians, but to chess grandmasters, basketball players, expert mechanics, and even master criminals. But does the claim hold up?

Well, not to impugn the two writers, but the problems with the claim turn up almost immediately. “Gladwell says, ‘To become a chess grandmaster, it seems to take about 10 years. Only the legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that amount of time’,” pointed out lawyer and writer Peter Shamshiri in a November 2022 episode of his podcast If Books Could Kill. 

But, he explained, “as a chess fan myself, that immediately jumped out to me as incorrect.”

Indeed, Magnus Carlsen, Bu Xiangzhi, and Sergey Karjakin all beat that limit, sometimes by more than two years – and when, in 2007, cognitive scientists set out to systematically measure the amount of time spent practicing by various chess masters, they found a range of results so wide as to render the whole question moot.

“The number of hours of deliberate practice to first reach ‘master’ status […] ranged from 728 hours to 16,120 hours,” noted psychologists David Hambrick, Fernanda Ferreira, and John Henderson in a 2014 article for Slate. “This means that one player needed 22 times more deliberate practice than another player to become a master.”

Other specific examples from the book fell similarly short. Gladwell cited The Beatles, who, he argued, achieved their greatness at least in part thanks to a rigorous eight-hours-per-night, seven-nights-per-week playing schedule during their two years in Hamburg. But his own numbers don’t corroborate that, totaling less than 2,000 hours even using very liberal estimates. Evidently, The Beatles speedran their 10,000 hours.

But here’s the question: if the 10,000 hours idea doesn’t add up, then are we all just at the mercy of innate talent? Luckily, research suggests not.

What’s the truth?

Here’s the thing about 10,000 hours: it’s a long-ass time. It’s the equivalent to about three hours’ practice, every day, for more than nine years total. Whatever you set your mind to, if you spend that long doing it, you’re going to end up pretty good.

But, fact is, there’ll probably be someone out there who’s better than you – even if they haven’t spent as long practicing. A 2014 meta-analysis of studies investigating the role of deliberate practice in honing expertise found that, yes, almost always practice correlates with skill – but “the correlations were far from perfect,” pointed out Hambrick, Ferreira, and Henderson. “Deliberate practice left more of the variation in skill unexplained than it explained.”

“For example, deliberate practice explained 26 percent of the variation for games such as chess, 21 percent for music, and 18 percent for sports,” they wrote. “So, deliberate practice did not explain all, nearly all, or even most of the performance variation in these fields.” 

Which naturally raises the question: what’s responsible for the rest of it? Well, it’s probably not what you’re hoping to hear, but, yeah, genes do play a role. Twin studies in the UK and Sweden, for example have found not only that drawing, reading and math, and musical ability are partly if not mostly genetic in origin, but in the latter case, that practicing more actually didn’t influence skill level at all. 

“[This] research has demonstrated that deliberate practice, while undeniably important, is only one piece of the expertise puzzle,” wrote Hambrick, Ferreira, and Henderson. “And [it’s] not necessarily the biggest piece.”

It is, perhaps, a discouraging conclusion to those would-be athletes or musicians among us – but is it really so bleak? Maybe not. 

“One important thing – that’s easy to misunderstand – is that this is looking at variance across people, not within an individual,” said Brooke Macnamara, lead author of the two meta-analyses we saw earlier, in 2016. 

“If a person practices, they will get better,” she told Vox at the time. “Almost across the board, practice should improve one’s performance.”

The lesson shouldn’t be that practice won’t help at all – and neither should it be that, with just the right amount of grind, you too could be a Michael Jordan or Yo-Yo Ma. “Eighteen percent is big,” Macnamara pointed out, referring to the proportion of athletic skill that could be attributed to practice. “We’re trying to argue against these ideas that [practice is] so important it accounts for nearly everything.”

And really, this should be a relief. After all, next time you flub a catch or accidentally reveal your chronically tin ear, you can rest assured: it’s not that you’re not trying hard enough. You just don’t have the right genes for that particular skill.