10 hours of effort does not guarantee success

The “10 Hour Rule” (stating that just this amount of practice guarantees resounding success in any of your endeavors) has become almost a biblical revelation, reprinted on numerous sites and read out like a prayer at practical seminars on how to become an ace in that or otherwise¹. However, this is only part of the truth. After all, if, say, you are zero in golf and every time you practice this or that swing or hit, you make the same mistakes, 10 hours of training will not help you. You, as you were, will remain zero, except perhaps aged.

Florida State University psychologist Anders Eriksson, whose research on professional competence was the basis for empirically deriving 10 hours, told me this: “There is no point in mechanical repetition, you need to change technique every now and then to move closer to the goal. It is necessary to tune the system, pushing its boundaries, and on the way to perfection, you can allow yourself to make mistakes at first.” Unlike sports such as basketball or football, in which certain physical characteristics (height and weight) are desirable, in mental activity, according to Eriksson, almost everyone can achieve the highest skill.

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• What is the main secret of success?

Eriksson believes that the secret to victory lies in “purposeful practice,” in which a specialist mentor coaches you through months and even years of a well-thought-out preparation plan, and you give your best. Countless hours of study are a necessary but not sufficient condition for high achievement. It is important how exactly specialists work out this or that technique. For example, in his widely cited study of violinists (the most successful of whom practiced over 10 hours), Eriksson states that musicians focused entirely on improving a particular aspect of their performance that their mentor pointed out to them.².

Conscious practice always involves feedback that allows you to recognize and correct mistakes, which is why dancers use mirrors. Ideally, this feedback comes from someone with a professionally trained eye, which is why all world-class athletes must have a coach. If you study without receiving feedback, you can not even dream of the top lines of the world tables. So, not only the volume of training is important, but above all feedback and concentration.

Understanding how to improve a particular skill requires a top-down focus. The plasticity of the nervous system, the strengthening of already existing networks of neurons and the formation of new ones to support the skill in which we practice, requires our focused attention. If the exercise occurs when we are focusing on something else, the brain cannot use the system corresponding to a particular activity. Absent-mindedness cancels out hours of training, and those who watch TV during classes will never reach the heights of mastery. Absolute focus appears to speed up the brain, strengthen synaptic connections, and expand or shape networks of neurons for a particular activity. At least that’s what happens at first. However, as you become proficient in a new activity, through repeated practice, control shifts from a downward mechanism that requires conscious focus to an upward connection that allows us to do something without any effort. In this phase, we do not need to think – we do the work automatically.

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• Train your attention

And this is where the paths of amateurs and professionals diverge. For amateurs, it is enough that at some point their actions begin to be carried out according to the bottom-up mechanism. After about 50 hours of practice (skiing or driving a car), people reach a “fairly tolerable” level, where they move more or less freely from one movement to another. They do not feel the need for concentrated practice and are content with what they have already learned. No matter how long they practice in this ascending mode, if they make any progress, it will be only slightly. In contrast, professionals are constantly working with downward, focused attention, deliberately thwarting the brain’s urge to automate this or that activity. They actively focus on moves that still need to be worked on, fix things that don’t work, visualize the perfect execution, or work on the details given by a venerable coach. The top performers are always improving: if at some point they settle for what they already know and give up hard training, their game becomes more of an upward trend and their skills stop improving. “The professional constantly and consciously cuts off any automatism, focusing on results that exceed his current level of training,” says Ericsson. “The more time professionals can devote to deliberate practice with full concentration, the more developed and honed their skills will be.”³.

For details see a book D. Goleman “Focus. About attention, distraction and success in life” (Corpus, 2015).

¹ The 10 hour rule was made famous by Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller Geniuses and Outsiders (United Press, 000). And Daniel Goleman previously wrote about the study that inspired the book, the work of Anders Eriksson, a cognitive scientist at the University of Florida (D. Goleman “Peak performance: why records fall”, New York Times, 2014/11.10.1994/XNUMX)

² K. A. Ericsson et al. «The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance», Psychological review, 1993, № 47.

³ K. A. Ericsson «Development of elite performance and deliberate practice» в книге: J. L. Starkes, K. A. Ericsson et al. «Expert Performance in Sports: Advances in Research on Sport Expertise» (Champaign, IL: Human Kinetics, 2003).