Has anybody here heard about the 10,000 hour rule?

Its funny cause when i read that part of the book I immediately jumped to martial arts as well. Its funny cause while he has said that very recently sayings have existed in the martial arts for centuries regarding the very same concept in both China and Japan albeit mostly in sword traditions. In the Chinese martial arts specifically referencing the Jin (straight sword) it is said it takes 10,000 days of training to master the sword. The Art of Iaido references that when one practices a movement 10,000 times only then have they grasped it's depth and feeling. I think that the modern mindset for training has become much more a piece of the whole person whereas in past eras training was life not training fitting into the life where you can fit it. The result is as with all things both positive and negative. On one hand you have watering down of the arts, on the other you have people who apply the arts to previously unrelated fields through the synergy of one's life.

A very good point to bring up!

Once you have been in martial arts for many years you will come to understand that statement. If you just started out or have been in martial arts only a few years this concept is hard to grasp because 10,000 hours or 10,000 times seems "so far away". It is true however, it does take about that much practice and more to understand your techniques. There really is that much to learn if you have the right teacher. There is more to that rule too. To simply 'put in time' to "get there" is really not enough either. You must practice seriously with serious intend and intend to make the technique better EVERY time you practice. Just mindlessly 'running' through your stuff is not going to work either not even after 10,000 times. We also have a Japanese saying that goes with this: "Practice makes permanent. Perfect practice makes perfect". Practice makes permanent, with other words if you constantly practice bad techniques you will be very good at bad techniques. Perfect practice does not exist since noone is perfect therefore there will be always room to learn more and knowing that will keep you humble and keep practicing.

Yup. Probably logged that in at the piano by the time I was sixteen or even earlier, having started at six. Allowing a month of not practicing four hours a day, I still get about 5500 hours just for the four years of conservatory undergrad.

Fact: that 10,000 hours, in some skills, is like a high school diploma.

Fact: Although an adult can learn and remember more readily, there is no real substitute for a constant training from early childhood. Things become almost natively informed, habitual and reflexive. The cumulative time spent over the period of childhood to adolescence is a huge advantage over anyone having starting later, though in itself it is no guarantee of later fruition or success.

Fact: how you go about that 10.000 hours, how you are thinking when putting in the time, how you are or are not concentrating, how much of that time you are doing whatever it is correctly are tremendous factors in the variability of the outcome.

All the above factor in on qualifying those 10.000 hours. As a glib statement it is merely quantitative, and the 'formula' may work as a decent estimate if one hopes to become an outstanding public accountant, or businessman perhaps, but even then....

Resonant 'neat' phrases make good copy, are 'thrilling' on the liner notes, and make easy promotion and notoriety possible. They may have a little shred of truth in them, but they are fundamentally glib.

There's nothing like a self-made millionaire or a quasi self-made born with the silver-spoon in its mouth Trustafarian writing a book to make the public believe the author is also a wise teacher and good writer, and that the reader just has to read the book to change their life.

Hope this helps temper thoughts as to those 10,000 hours. Just had to throw into this thread the standard "Caveat emptor,"*

The use of that number 10.000, in Asian cultures to this day, and in many other antique cultures, was a linguistic convention: it was understood to mean "Countless, or Forever." [ Hail to the Emperorr! May he live ten thousand years! ]

* http://www.google.com/search?q=caveat+emptor&sourc...

Best regards.

No I have not heard of that but that is an interesting thought and martial arts is a very good analogy to this I think. I can remember times in my life when I easily studied four hours per day three to four times per week to develop and hone my skills. Training for fighting and competing was also easily that and more but at least half of that was just working on developing things I already knew or for conditioning.

When I also think of certain techniques and developing them to a high level it certainly applies I think. I can remember practicing my punches and reverse punches so many times for so long and today I have an excellent punch because of that. It certainly has its application in martial arts I think and is one of the keys for anyone to develop their skills and understanding of them to a high level.

10000 Hour Rule Summary

The 10,000 hours rule has been debunked last month. Hard work only accounts in success for about 12%. You can go online and search related information.

Sounds like something I should read. The math sounds right. I have been doing TKD for sixteen years and find lots of things to work on. I go 3 or 4 times a week for 2 hours, with some forms done on the off days, buy nowhere near what he is calling for. Maybe I'm halfway.

I am a huge fan of Malcolm Gladwell. I enjoyed ALL his books.

And the 10,000 hour rule is a powerful icon of the focused dedication of time and effort toward the mastery of a skill.

However, I have to poke at Gladwell's reasoning here, just a little.

I am a licensed psychologist, working mainly in applied cognitive and learning areas. And we look at performance as a combination of innate ability, effort, and environmental conditions and stuff, just as Gladwell does. But one of the things that we commonly do, is to consider individual differences normatively--that is, how the person stacks up "relative to" others in their peer group or comparison group.

So when I look at something like the 10,000 hour rule, something jumps immediately to mind.

How or when do we say that someone is "really good" at something? A "master"? An "expert"?

Well, we typically do that on the basis of comparison to others who are practicing in the same field. We say that A is really great at Skill 1 if he can beat B, C, D, E, .... Y. and Z at it. For instance, if Skill 1 is Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu, then let's say that A can tap most people on the mat 10 times out of 10, and taps everybody at least most of the time. We'd say he's an expert at BJJ. If Skill 2 is guitar-playing, he can play the hell out of the guitar, more smoothly and technically than people who haven't trained or played so long. Then we look at him and say, "Wow, that guy is a MASTERFUL guitar player!"

Without really thinking about it, all along, we've been comparing his mastery to a norm group.

So 10,000 hours isn't a magic number.

10,000 hours simply means that you've been doing Skill 1 a hell of a lot longer than most other people. For most hobbies and disciplines, it means you've been doing it pretty hard about ten years. The folks who have been doing ANYTHING for 10,000 hours are together in one tier. The guys who have been doing the same thing for 5000 hours are pretty good, but clearly a cut below. And the guys who have been doing it 2000 hours are decent, but way less skilled than the guys at 5000 hours, and the guys at 700 hours have some skill, but much less than the guys at 2000, and so on.

If you keep in mind that mastery is implicitly judged on the basis of normative comparison (comparing people with others), you realize that the 10,000 hour rule is kind of tautological: It's really saying that "if you do something a lot more hours than nearly anyone else, you'll be better at it than nearly anyone else. At least, you'll be better than all the people who did it a lot less time than you did".

Let me show how silly the "rule" is in two ways:

First, how do we define a "skill"? Is MMA a skill, or is it three? Is it stand-up fighting (kickboxing) plus clinch fighting (greco, dirty boxing), and ground (no-gi submission)? Or do we have to add in "ground and pound", "sprawl", etc. as separate skills?

How many hours do we need in "each" of these in order to "master" MMA? 10,000 apiece? Or 10,000 total? Or is it simply that when you've been training hard with good coaching for 10,000 hours, you will have learned the skill set better than 99% of all the people who will ever step on the mat?

Another thing is that we know perfectly well that the 10,000 hour rule breaks down with respect to natural ability. BJ Penn got his BJJ black belt in a ridiculous 3 years. Another guy I know, trained full-time (owned a JKD school) and got his in 17 years (I believe this is the record for slowest BJJ black belt).

If you use the 10,000 hour rule to motivate yourself, to remind yourself that the hours you put in from day to day matter, that consistency and persistence matter, then great. But it's not good science.

Sorry, Malcolm.

Yes, but you need to understand where that 10,000 hours number actually came from. Every culture has its own way of grouping numeric digits and representing a very large quantity. For example, when counting in English we group them by 100s so that 100,000 is one hundred thousand, and 100,000,000 is one hundred million. In the old Chinese numeric system, that grouping is done in 10,000 AND the number itself also represented in the minds of the ancient people something huge or countless. In English, we use for hyperbole "millions" as in "millions of times" when we just mean countless times and not literally 1,000,000 times. In Chinese, they would say ten thousand ten thousand times (10,000 x 10,000) or wan-wan.

If you think about it, a 10,000 hour rule does not make sense because it is basically saying if you do anything for 10,000 hours regardless of whether you are doing it right or wrong you will master it. If this is the case, then all you have to do to master anything in life is to pickup a book or dvd and just following it for 10,000 hours.

At an average of 2 hours a day (Nobody with a life trains in martial arts for 4 hours a day unless their career is martial arts or fighting) it would take 5000 days or 13.7 years to do this.

You can achieve success in business in much less time then this, many people have. People have achieved great success in boxing and MMA in less time then this.

I don't agree.