Editor’s note: This article was first published in July 2014. Coca-Cola is described as starting to be overvalued “today”, and Bill Gates is described as the richest man in the world, both as of then.
Building on Aristotle’s old saying that “we are what we repeatedly do”, the 10,000-hour rule of practice is attributed to Malcolm Gladwell, the man who put forward a brilliant theory showing that Goliath was the weak one when he faced David.
Gladwell’s theory rests on the principle that a person needs a minimum of 10,000 hours of deliberate practice in their profession to reach the level of professional mastery that will help them succeed in their career.
Gladwell has always maintained that putting in those 10,000 hours of deliberate practice early on was what turned the Beatles into the greatest band of all time, just as those 10,000 hours helped Bill Gates become the richest man in the world.
But now a new Princeton study says that the 10,000 hours of practice do not carry the same weight in every subject or skill we want to develop. They help, but they do not guarantee success over someone else with less practice but other “ingredients”.
The Princeton researchers concluded that when those 10,000 hours of practice are analysed across different areas (sport, professions and so on), the edge you can gain over your rivals averages around 12%.
(Read: What you can learn today to help you succeed over the next five years)
Thousands of hours of deliberate practice only predict a person’s success in fields with stable structures, such as chess or tennis, among others, because the rules never change and it is all about practising and practising.
The problem is that in business the rules keep changing for entrepreneurs, and you will probably have to make decisions every day that you were not prepared for the day before.
In more unstable fields, practice only makes you better; it does not make you perfect, because you will never be 100% prepared for situations that have not yet happened. That is where success requires, besides practice, passion, drive, action and talent, not to mention resilience, the ability to learn from failure and come out stronger.
According to this study, 10,000 hours of practice would give you the following advantage:
- In games, 26%.
- In music, 21%.
- In sport, 18%.
- In education, 4%.
- In your professional career, 1%.
If your job consists of stamping documents or answering the phone, 10,000 hours clearly will not give you an edge; they will just wear you out.
Of course, you should not underestimate an 18% advantage in sport or in stock-market returns either. What’s more, a 1% edge marks the difference between winning and losing, and therefore the difference between success and failure.
But what about seizing the opportunity?
Both Gladwell and the Princeton study forget about the value of opportunity. And be careful: having an opportunity does not necessarily mean being luckier because, as the saying goes, “only those who are awake when the hour comes make their dreams come true”.
Some people miss an opportunity because they are still preparing or training to go out tomorrow in search of the very opportunity they are turning down today. So being decisive is probably more important than hours of practice, and so is a tolerance for taking risks.
If Bill Gates had been born 10 years later, would his 10,000 hours of practice have helped him become a multibillionaire businessman? Probably not, because Steve Jobs (Apple) would have had the market sewn up, and Microsoft would probably not have been able to break in.
If Warren Buffett were 20 today, could he make the hugely profitable investments he made in his day? At this stage of the market I have no doubt he would make money, but even Coca-Cola is starting to look overvalued these days. You have to seize the opportunity.
So, besides the 10,000 hours of practice, which I fully agree are necessary in, for example, the sales profession, what other skills or ingredients do we need to gain a competitive advantage in our careers or in business? That, I think, is a great question.
Further reading
- 5 keys to achieving excellence in everything you set out to do
- 3 steps to learning to stay calm under pressure
- Decision-making and willpower: how to avoid wearing down these assets
- 6 unfair advantages other people may have over us that we can do nothing about
Featured image: Bea Phi, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons.
