Breaking the 10,000-hour rule

Why is Olympic gold medalist, Shaun White, affectionately known as the “flying tomato,” the only skateboarder to land a front-side, heel-flip, 540 body varial or Armadillo? How long should it take Cam Newton to learn the Carolina Panthers’ offense? Why did Yo-Yo Ma, Itzhak Perlman and Vladimir Horowitz become virtuosos on their respective instruments when others who practiced just as hard did not?

Even if you control for unusual endowment or aptitude, world-class performers clearly learn faster than others. Can the rest of us nongeniuses learn faster too? Most people would say yes and I agree. I dare say we haven’t reached terminal learning velocity in any field. How much faster can we learn? I’m convinced that increasing learning speed is one of the great frontiers of our time. For many reasons, we need to bring people to competency, if not mastery, more quickly.

The other day, I was in the gym rebounding balls for my 14-year-old son. As I stood below the basket dishing the ball back to him while he worked on his shot, I asked him who the best three-point shooter in the NBA was. He said Ray Allen of the Boston Celtics. I asked him how long it would take to be able to shoot like Ray Allen. Would it take 10,000 hours? — which is roughly equivalent to 15 years of year-round basketball practice and game time. My son’s response was telling, “I don’t see why it needs to take that long.” My sentiments exactly.

A group of psychologists — including most notably the late Benjamin Bloom and more recently Anders Ericsson — has done empirical studies to figure out what it takes to achieve mastery in a particular field. The results are fairly consistent. It takes at least 10,000 hours of practice to achieve world-class performance in almost any field of endeavor. This 10,000-hour rule, made popular in Malcolm Gladwell’s book, "Outliers," focuses on a threshold-time requirement.

So can we break the so-called 10,000-hour rule? Ericsson tells us that not only do we need the 10,000 hours, but we also need to engage in “deliberate practice,” which he defines as “considerable, specific and sustained efforts to do something you can’t do well.” So genius is a combination of natural endowment, outside support and deliberate practice. But can we make our deliberate practice even better and cut into that 10,000-hour requirement? Can we become even quicker studies?