The secret to success is very simple: practice. Although most people think that world class performance requires huge talent, research shows that 10 years (or 10,000 hours) of practice can make anyone a top performer in pretty much any field, from sports to music to business.

The talent myth is very easy to believe when you look at people at their peak. People forget that Michael Jordan was cut from his high school basketball team, or that Abraham Lincoln lost numerous elections, or that Barbara Blackburn failed typing in high school (she went on to become the world’s fastest typist, with a peak of 212 wpm).

The good news is that practice makes perfect, so anyone has a chance. Just put in your 10,000 hours, and you’ll make it. But I’ve heard a lot of people citing this statistic lately, and they tend to miss one critical point: not all practice counts. Fortune Magazine reveals what it takes to be great:

“So greatness isn’t handed to anyone; it requires a lot of hard work. Yet that isn’t enough, since many people work hard for decades without approaching greatness or even getting significantly better. What’s missing?

The best people in any field are those who devote the most hours to what the researchers call ‘deliberate practice.’ It’s activity that’s explicitly intended to improve performance, that reaches for objectives just beyond one’s level of competence, provides feedback on results and involves high levels of repetition.

For example: Simply hitting a bucket of balls is not deliberate practice, which is why most golfers don’t get better. Hitting an eight-iron 300 times with a goal of leaving the ball within 20 feet of the pin 80 percent of the time, continually observing results and making appropriate adjustments, and doing that for hours every day – that’s deliberate practice.”

So before punching your time card and starting to count your 10,000 hours, make sure you’re doing the right kind of practice. Undeliberate practice doesn’t count, which is why it’s possible to work in the same office for 30 years without becoming good at anything.

At my high school graduation, one of the speakers told us what it takes to become an expert. Just read about your topic of choice for an hour a day. After a year, you’ll be a national expert. After five years, you’ll be an international expert. And I heard someone say that reading six books on any subject will make you an expert.

These feats take far less time than the 10 years or 10,000 hours mentioned about, but I guess we’re talking about different levels of expertise.

The 10,000 hour rule comes from Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success. I haven’t read it yet, and I haven’t found out exactly what the 10,000 hour rule applies to.

To be a great blogger, do you really need to blog for 10,000 hours? Or do you just need 10,000 hours of writing experience? Or 10,000 hours of experience in your subject matter? To be a great programmer, do you need 10,000 hours of experience with one particular language, or does all experience count? Does 10,000 hours of reading the news make you an expert of world events, or is that too broad?

Do you know? Do you have 10,000 hours of experience in anything?

Photo by Jason Gulledge

Personal development blogger Steve Pavlina is considered by many people to be a great example of an overnight success. His blog achieved an income of $40,000 per month after only two years. But most people who create blogs fail to make any profit at all, and give up in frustration. Why?

In his article titled Skill, Steve gave what I think is the best answer to that question:

“There are several ways to answer this, but perhaps the most obvious answer is that most new bloggers give up within the first six months. The web is littered with abandoned blogs. But six months is nothing. It takes six months just to get your bearings in the blogosphere.”

In his first 6 months, he made $167, which by his estimates works out to 17 cents per hour. If you don’t have a blog, you probably think 17 cents per hour doesn’t sound like much, but believe me, it’s way above average! And it grew exponentially from there, reaching extraordinary levels after two years.

But many people don’t realize that it actually took Steve far longer than two years to get to that point. Before he started his blog, he read 700 personal development books. He also had experience with writing articles (some paid, some unpaid). He also had ten years of experience in running a computer games business, where he learned many valuable lessons in entrepreneurship after turning $20,000 in cash to $150,000 in debt. These were the dues he paid before he earned the privilege of making 17 cents an hour.

Compare this to an anonymous blogger I heard about last September. This person had written to Darren Rowse at ProBlogger with some questions about his make money online blog, and Darren replied with a video post. The anonymous blogger’s letter went something like this:

“Darren, thanks for your great blog. I’m amazed at how much money you’ve made from blogging, and I’ve decided to do the same. I’ve just started my own blog on how to make money online, and I’ll have some really great tips. I have some questions though, because this is my first blog. How do I set it up? How do I find advertisers and make money quickly? And what tips should I write about?”

Amazingly, Darren almost managed to keep a straight face in his video reply, something I sure couldn’t have done. Coming from nowhere, this person is starting a blog in an overcrowded niche, with no experience in the subject, and asking how to be an overnight success when he doesn’t even know what to write about.

Let’s look at this in a more visual format:

Given the difference in the dues each blogger paid, is the difference in their results unexpected, or unfair?

In the Fortune Magazine article What it takes to be great, Geoffrey Colvin points to research indicating that hard work is far more important than natural talent. This applies to sports, music, chess, business, and pretty much every other field. People don’t become an overnight success just because they stumble into a field they were born for.

“Reinforcing that no-free-lunch finding is vast evidence that even the most accomplished people need around ten years of hard work before becoming world-class, a pattern so well established researchers call it the ten-year rule…And as John Horn of the University of Southern California and Hiromi Masunaga of California State University observe, ‘The ten-year rule represents a very rough estimate, and most researchers regard it as a minimum, not an average.’ In many fields (music, literature) elite performers need 20 or 30 years’ experience before hitting their zenith.”

When people reach the highest levels of success at a young age, we might think they were an overnight success, when really they just started early. Bobby Fischer became a chess grandmaster when he was only 16, but after 9 years of practice. Tiger Woods won the U.S. Amateur Championship when he was only 18, but after 15 years of practice.

The article went into more detail about the link between practice and performance:

“Evidence crosses a remarkable range of fields. In a study of 20-year-old violinists by Ericsson and colleagues, the best group (judged by conservatory teachers) averaged 10,000 hours of deliberate practice over their lives; the next-best averaged 7,500 hours; and the next, 5,000. It’s the same story in surgery, insurance sales, and virtually every sport. More deliberate practice equals better performance. Tons of it equals great performance.”

How are you reacting to hearing this? Are you disappointed that you can kiss your chances of overnight success goodbye? Or are you inspired to know that there’s no reason you can’t reach any level of success you desire if you’re willing to put in the work?

Check out this video of Tim Nolan, a world record holding professional juggler and basketball entertainer. He does insane tricks like chucking a basketball, letting it bounce a few times off the walls, then off the backboard, into a trampoline, off the backboard again, and then through the hoop.

He can do the juggling stuff on demand because he’s put a lot of years into it (and you can clearly see that some of what he does is at the limit of his ability). And he can do some of the basketball tricks on demand, like the over the head shot (he wouldn’t do it in front of an audience if he couldn’t get it within a few attempts).

But I think many of his basketball tricks depend a lot on luck. Just a guess, but I don’t think he’s that much better at some of these tricks than you or I would be. The difference is that he was willing to make jillions of attempts before it worked. Have you ever given up on something because it didn’t work the first time, or the tenth time, or the hundredth time, or the thousandth time?