Is the 10,000 hour theory accurate?

• June 7, 2011, 10:08 AM ET

Can the ’10,000 Hours’ Theory Be Tested?
By Christopher Shea

The psychologist Anders Ericsson developed, and Malcolm Gladwell monetized popularized, in “Outliers,” the idea that expertise is all about practice: You, too, can become Bill Gates (at least the talent part) or Tiger Woods if you spend 10,000 hours writing code or hitting a golf ball.

As Charles Q. Choi notes, at Scientific American, some people are placing awfully large bets on the proposition that the theory is correct: One commercial photographer has quit his job to spend 10,000 hours on the golf course, on the assumption that this will give him the abilities of a pro.

But there are lots of people who have played sports, or an instrument—music is another field in which the 10,000-hour rule supposedly applies—who stubbornly think that there is something ineffable that has to accompany the hard work: call it aptitude, talent, a “gift.”

Choi interviews the psychologist Christopher Chabris, co-author of “The Invisible Gorilla: How Our Intuitions Deceive Us,” who suggests that resolving this debate may be beyond the reach of science:

The ideal experiment to address this question would have thousands of volunteers each spend 10,000 hours practicing a randomly assigned skill to see if they indeed become experts afterward.

That’s quite the logistical challenge (though Chabris does suggest that smaller-scale studies involving talents in which skill is objectively measurable, such as chess, might make some headway on the question).

But imagine volunteering for such a study and getting assigned figure skating, whittling, or the tuba, only to discover, a decade later, that talent matters, after all.

Source: http://blogs.wsj.com