10,000 Hours Rule

Let’s talk about the final lie and that is the very famous 10000 hours rule now for those that don’t

know this 10000 hour rule was popularized in the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell.

But it actually stems from a 1993 study looking at a violinists.

And this study was all about what makes a violinist an expert and what makes it violinists.

Just a good violinist.

So that is what’s the difference between the top masters when it comes to violence and the ones who

were just ok or good enough.

And this 1993 study was really exciting because what it reported was that those who were considered

elite were the ones who practiced the most.

This idea of deliberate practice which we’re going to get into the technique section.

So the answer was simple simply just practice more the more you practice the better you get.

That’s it and it sounded nice right.

As humans this was a nice concept to understand because the idea was if you put in 10000 hours into

a skill then you become a master of it however over the years even though this concept has become really

popular.

Many studies have actually debunked this and a recent study in 2016 combined all these studies and look

at this original study to analyze it and see if it was accurate.

And it turns out that it wasn’t really yes practice matters.

We can’t forget that practice is a very important part of improving a skill.

However there are many different factors involved things like genetics your past history like your upbringing

your school your friends your personality actually contributes to how good you can get at a topic and

that doesn’t sound exciting right.

Because it sounds like we have less control over what we can learn with the 10000 hour rule.

We could say that hey anybody can do anything that they want which is just such a nice thing to hear.

But unfortunately the truth of the matter is that we don’t play in an even playing field in this world.

When you think that it’s unfair that you want to play basketball by your short well that’s life.

Life is unfair.

Not everybody starts at the same level.

When you think it’s unfair that somebody with wealthy parents can go to a really nice school go to expensive

schools like Harvard.

Well that is not fair but that is life.

Everyone has advantages and disadvantages and it’s unrealistic for us to think that everyone is starting

at the same place.

But I don’t want to leave this section making you feel like well I have less control over my future

my skills and my learning because in fact knowing this actually helps us because what we’ll learn in

this course is the idea that you don’t have to be the hardest worker you don’t have to be the person

that puts in 80 hours a week of work.

We’re going to focus on efficient learning and efficient learning is all about learning smart instead

of just banging our head working as hard as we can and exhausting ourselves in the process.

We focus on efficient learning.

What are the things that we can do so that instead of just blindly studying something for 10000 hours

how can we Shawn that period how can we use the things that we have to our advantage and knowing that

we don’t play on an even playing field.

How can we strategize and how can we use different techniques to actually get to a place where we become

masters.

So the good news is that although it’s not as simple as just practicing we can use the upcoming sections

in the course to actually develop skills that allows us to learn efficiently versus learning hard instead

of going to the gym for two hours each day.

We can get the same results with 20 minutes each day.

It’s the same principle.

The idea of efficient learning and we’re going to dive deeper and deeper into this topic for now.

Take a break and I’ll see you in the next video.