For example, a chess player with 10,000 hours of practice will make far less money than a moderately good copywriter, making me wonder whether reaching that level of expertise is all it’s cracked up to be.

I encourage people to read the original journal on this topic. It is titled The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance by K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer. The research methodology they used to lead to this 10 000 hour rule conclusion is not very concrete.

The research was done at Music Academy of West Berlin where only musicians were studied.

To cut a long story short, students varying in skill were interviewed and asked to fill out information in order to obtain data. For instance, much of this included estimating (yes, estimating) the amount of time spent on music and other activities they have done in a week. This also included the music students (not researchers) rating (from 1-10) how relevant other activities such as cleaning or sports were to music practice. Statistical methods were then used to calculate these raw numbers eventually leading to them to conclude that the most skilled musicians put in at least 10 000 hours of practice.

Only music students were involved in the research. No other activities such as sports, writing, fine arts, languages and so on were studied.

The researchers did not actually track their subjects for 10 000 hours over a number of years. Thus, there was nobody to even evaluate their progress from start to finish. It seems like they did not observe the quality of practice or how much was practice was done in a given time. Who knows? What if the students did not accurately recall their practice time from the past? What if some exaggerate or underestimate the amount of practice they put in. What if some of them did not tell the truth about the age they started playing music? This leaves a lot of room for error and inaccuracies.

From a less than convincing study involving just musicians, people are already generalising that 10 000 hours are needed in order to have expertise in any area. Different subject areas vary in difficulty and so does what is considered “expert”. How can one just place a magic number of 10 000 hours needed to become proficient in anything?

All this is an example of bad science.

Malcolm Gladwell is a good writer but he is not a researcher. Yet, he oversteps his boundaries when he discusses matters related to expertise. He can craft together a well written piece of work that sounds convincing but is based at best on anecdotes and not hard facts (this reminds me of Professor Phillippe Rushton and his poorly researched work Race, Evolution and Behaviour). This, combined with bad science can be dangerous. If Google is any indication, look at how many people are just blindly accepting the 10 000 hour rule as gospel. Many of them have no idea where all this started nor do they further research the topic.

Gladwell used The Beatles to illustrate the 10 000 hour rule. A lousy example as they did not demonstrate exceptional musical skill. There are bands out there that have far greater skill than The Beatles do but are far less known.

Yes, one needs practice to become skilled. But to say one needs 10 000 hours in any area? Furthermore, I don’t think there is good evidence to disprove talent being a factor. Well, I could go on about this but before any of this can be accurate and conclusive, a lot more research is needed.