The 10,000-hour rule

The 10,000-hour rule is the idea that people at the top of a field got there with about 10,000 hours of practice. The writer Malcolm Gladwell gave the rule its name in his book Outliers, which came out in 2008.

The rule is not a fixed law. Getting very good at something hard does take years of practice. But the hours are different from person to person and from skill to skill, and no number of hours has been found that makes everyone an expert.

10,000 hours is about 27.4 years at one hour a day. Divide 10,000 by the hours you practice in a day to get the days, and the days by 365 to get the years.

A full-time week of practice is 40 hours. Kept up for 52 weeks a year, it reaches 10,000 hours in about 4.8 years.

The 10,000-hour rule comes from a study of violin students done in 1993. Malcolm Gladwell built the rule on that study in his book.

In the study, a team led by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson asked violin students at a music academy in Berlin how much they had practiced alone (the study is here). The students their teachers rated highest had practiced the most: about 10,000 hours each, on average, by the age of twenty.

Gladwell later wrote that he never meant practice was enough without talent, and that the idea does not fit every field (Malcolm Gladwell, 2013).

The 10,000-hour rule is partly true. Practice matters a great deal, but the number is not a law.

The researcher behind it said the number is not special.

Ericsson wrote about the rule himself, in a book called Peak (a part of it is here). He made three points.

• The 10,000 hours were an average. Half of the ten top students had practiced for fewer hours than that by twenty.
• The students were still students. Pianists who win international competitions have probably practiced for 20,000 to 25,000 hours.
• The study never showed that anyone who practices for 10,000 hours becomes an expert.

Ericsson also said what the rule gets right: getting very good at something hard takes years of effort.

One review of many studies estimated that practice explains part of the difference.

In 2014, three researchers put the results of many studies of practice together (Macnamara, Hambrick and Oswald, 2014). Some people in a field are more skilled than others. The review estimated how much of that difference goes with how many hours each person had practiced. Its estimate changed from field to field.

The three researchers concluded that practice is important, but less important than people had claimed. Ericsson did not agree. He said the review had counted kinds of practice that he never meant (Ericsson and Harwell, 2019).

Far fewer hours are enough to get much better at something. The 10,000 hours were only ever about people at the very top of a field. Ericsson wrote that a few hundred hours of practice will almost always make you much better (Ericsson and Pool, 2016).

People who teach give far smaller totals too. One guitar teacher puts the first chords at about 20 hours and an intermediate level at about 1,000 hours (Classical Guitar Shed, 2023). See how long it takes to learn guitar and how long it takes to learn a language.

Deliberate practice is practice aimed at one thing you cannot do yet, with a way to see your mistakes. Ericsson gave it the name, and wrote that an hour of performing is not the same as an hour of practice (Ericsson and Pool, 2016). As he describes it, deliberate practice has three parts.

Work on something you cannot do yet.

Pick the part that is just too hard for you today. Playing what you already know is fun, but it does not make you much better.

Follow a plan from someone who knows the skill.

A teacher, a coach or a good course can tell you what to work on next.

Find out what went wrong.

Record yourself, check your answers, or ask a teacher. You can only fix a mistake you know about.

For why a little practice on most days adds up, see the power of consistency. For giving practice your full attention, see deep work.

Each source below was read for this page. Two could not be read in full: the review of many studies (its summary only) and the first violin study (its summary and the parts on the students’ hours).

1. Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T. and Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363 to 406.
2. Gladwell, M. (2013). Complexity and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule. The New Yorker, August 21.
3. Ericsson, A. and Pool, R. (2016). Malcolm Gladwell got us wrong: Our research was key to the 10,000-hour rule, but here’s what got oversimplified. Salon, April 10 (adapted from the book Peak, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt).
4. Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z. and Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: a meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608 to 1618.
5. Ericsson, K. A. and Harwell, K. W. (2019). Deliberate practice and proposed limits on the effects of practice on the acquisition of expert performance: why the original definition matters and recommendations for future research. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2396.
6. Mathews, A. (2023). How Long Does it Take to Learn Guitar? And How to Go Further Faster. Classical Guitar Shed.