Here’s How Much Practice You Need to Become the Best in the World

What does it take to become the best at something? The answer may not lie in early childhood practice or in lifelong, laser-focused dedication. Instead the path to becoming exceptional at a skill might look a lot more like meandering.

That’s according to a new paper, published today in Science, that seeks to untangle what it takes to excel across different disciplines, from sports to chess to classical music. Somewhat counterintuitively, performers who showed the greatest promise in their discipline as children rarely went on to reach the pinnacle of their field as adults.

The findings blow up the “10,000-hour rule,” the idea that if someone spends 10,000 hours deliberately practicing a skill, they will master it, says Brooke Macnamara, an associate professor of psychology at Purdue University, who co-authored the new analysis. The rule, which was popularized in the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is based on a 1993 study of top-performing violin students. These students had each accumulated an average of 10,000 hours of practice by age 20. Yet they were not world-class performers, Macnamara points out.

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The results came as a surprise to Zach Hambrick, a co-author of the research and a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy,’” he says. “I had never thought about the relative benefits of training in one discipline versus training in multiple disciplines. Expertise is, by definition, specific.”

Read the whole story (subscription may be required): Scientific American