10,000 Hour Rule and the Inevitability of Consistent Conscious Effort
Talent is a farce. The greatest of the greats were not born that way. The greatest musicians, writers, sports players, entrepreneurs and polyglots all got there the same way: through consistent conscious effort.
The 10,000 hour rule states that it takes 10,000 hours of conscious effort to become the best of the best. After 10,000 hours, the brain will have made enough connections and conclusions to form a crystallization of experience and understanding. Things click, time stops, and you begin to glow with an aura of brilliance… well, metaphorically speaking. After 10,000 hours, you get it like no one else gets it.
This idea was originally introduced by Malcolm Gladwell in the book “Outliers” which I highly recommend. He details many examples of how effort leads to success, such as with Michael Jordan, who was cut from his high school basketball team, but due to incredible effort was able to become a legend. Other mentions include the Beatles and Bill Gates, both of whom hit 10,000 hours before becoming famous.
It’s not just any 10,000 hours of practice that will elevate you to greatness, but 10,000 hours of consistent conscious effort, which means turning off auto-pilot and actually trying hard to improve. Passive practice doesn’t work; when you’re passive, you don’t correct your mistakes nor do you challenge yourself enough. You need to constantly be challenged in order to grow. Got that 2ft jumper down? Well try it while running, then with someone guarding you. Don’t practice grammar and vocabulary that you have already mastered – you should be moving on to new material long before previous material is mastered as it all reinforces each other.
Conscious effort breeds results. Everything always seems difficult or impossible at the beginning, but as long as you put in conscious effort and the time, results will come. You will get in shape, you will learn that language, and you will become a great entrepreneur as long as you put in the work. Method and materials are important for deciding how effective your effort is and may cut down that 10,000 hours a bit, but still there is no substitute for putting in time.
Even without Anki or other learning techniques, you can still achieve fluency in a language. Consistent conscious effort will get you there regardless. Luckily, you don’t need 10,000 hours to fluency, of course unless you are trying to become native and beyond. You may need just 2,000 hours (80/20 rule).
10,000 hours is just 20 hours a week for 10 years, meaning that you can become the next Mozart in 10 years if you start now and practice only 3 hours a day. In language learning, it may be just 3 hours a day for 1 or 2 years depending on goals and methods. When you break it down like that, it seems very doable.
Traditionally, people focus on genius and luck when defining why someone is successful. 99% of the time when someone hears me speak Chinese they say “you must be a language genius, I couldn’t do that.” This is rubbish. I put in at least 2 hours of work everyday for 2 years, and then have since been speaking the language constantly. I didn’t just blindly and passively copy text out of a workbook either – I was always pushing myself in the language. Intelligence doesn’t determine success.
I don’t know about anyone else, but to me 10,000 hours of focused attention and practice is much more impressive and praiseworthy than talent. With Facebook, twitter, movies, video games, cell phones, and millions of other distractions right at your fingertips, being able to say no to the world and yes to practice has become exponentially difficult. It’s no longer enough to meet up with someone once or twice a week to be considered a good friend; now you have to text, tweet and Farmville for hours a day in order to stay in the loop. It’s easy to say “I’m just going to take a break today” and indulge yourself in entertainment, so those resolute few shine even brighter.
Stop planning, and start doing. Those 10000 hours aren’t going to accumulate on their own. Even if you don’t believe that some abstract number like 10,000 will help you achieve greatness, I hope at least that people start realizing that you need to do the work to see the results.
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Flo
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http://beyondbounds.org/ Jason Sharp
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http://beyondbounds.org/2010/11/sentence-mining-an-essential-tool-for-language-learning/ Sentence Mining: An Essential Tool for Language Learning | Beyond Bounds Blog