I’ve been hearing many folks mention the 10,000 hours Malcolm Gladwell noted are required for mastery. Unfortunately, more often than not, I’m hearing it used more or less as a weapon, at least when it comes to passing the notion on to kids. “You know, it takes 10,000 hours to master something so no, you can’t skip practicing today!” or “Get going – you’ve got a lot more hours to go!”
But it’s not the sheer quantity of hours spent that leads to mastery. You have to not only spend the hours, you have to spend them a particular way. David Shenk, in The Genius in All of Us, describes the research of expertise expert (!) Anders Ericsson: “…it was observed that the uppermost achievers not only spent significantly more time in solitary study and drills, but also exhibited a consistent (and persistent) style of preparation that Ericsson came to call ‘deliberate practice.'” Deliberate practice, Shenk goes on to explain, is “the type of practice where the individual [italics mine] keeps raising the bar of what he or she considers success.” Continue reading
Filed under: On Kids and Learning | Tagged: anxiety, capacity, choice, doodling, exploration, inquiry, learning, mastery, motivation, pathfinding, practice, resistance, success | Comments Off on 10,000