The 10,000 Hours Myth and What It Really Takes to Develop Expertise

Detail from Artemisia Gentileschi’s *Self-Portrait as the Allegory of Painting* (1638-39).

The ten thousand hours myth – the idea that it takes about ten thousand hours of practice to become an expert – is alive and well. I heard it once again on the metro several months ago: “All I need,” the guy said to his friend, “Is to put in my ten thousand hours.”

The so-called “Ten Thousand Hour Rule,” popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, and repeated ad nauseam by the press and in popular culture, is a sticky one. What makes it so appealing?

Ten thousand is easy to remember and it seems to promise a simple cause and effect. Although Gladwell did not claim that time alone would turn one into an expert, the “rule” has been widely misinterpreted to mean that most anyone can become an elite-level expert at most anything by simply putting in ten thousand hours of practice. It’s comforting to think that you too could be a golf pro or Broadway star if only you put in the hours. At the same time, the almost ridiculously high number makes it easy to let yourself off the hook from actually doing it.

10,000 Is Not a Magic Number

The number ten thousand was plucked from studies showing that people who had achieved a high level of expertise in a cognitively complicated field had put in many hours of practice. In their classic study of expertise in chess, for example, Herbert Simon and William Chase estimated that grandmasters had spent roughly 10,000 to 50,000 hours studying chess positions. And a study of violin students at the Berlin University of the Arts, done by Anders Ericsson and his colleagues, found that the best students – who, incidentally were not yet as proficient as most professional violinists – had put in an average of 10,000 hours of practice by the time they were twenty years old.

Neither of these studies suggest that simply putting in high numbers of practice hours will automatically make a person an expert. Nor do they suggest that all fields are the same. In fact, achieving mastery in a less complicated field may take much less time.

When it comes to expertise there is nothing magical about 10,000 hours.

There is also nothing magical about experts. Experts are simply people who have become very knowledgeable about or skillful in a particular area.

The truth is that we are all experts in some things – like speaking a language, navigating complex social systems, and coordinating our physical movement well enough to run or jump. The difference with this type of expertise is that so many people have it, it doesn’t seem special.

It's Not All About the Hours

Exact numbers aside, a major disservice of the “ten thousand hours” meme is that it reduces expertise acquisition to a numbers game and brushes aside everything else. Yet when it comes to getting better at whatever it is you want to do, how you practice is as important as how long you practice.

If you want to become an expert in something, putting in the practice hours is not enough – you must also practice with intention, attention, and feedback. It can also help to understand something about the process of building expertise – what exactly are you achieving with all that practice?

Whether in areas like chess and music or in more everyday realms, the differences between novices and experts and between experts who are good and those who are excellent are – literally – mostly in their heads. Expertise is largely a function of the brain and is dependent not just on how much one knows about a specific topic, but on how that knowledge is organized and integrated – in other words, expertise depends on high quality mental models.

The Magic of Mental Models

A mental model – also called a cognitive map, or knowledge structure – refers to the physical circuitry in the brain that encodes information about our experiences with things and concepts and the interrelationships among them. These models start out small, tentative and inaccurate. But as we gain more and more experience, they become sophisticated complex structures that both store and give us access to a vast amount of information.

Mental models are what make it possible for us to quickly recognize things, access relevant information and past experience, make predictions and decisions, and solve problems. And the more detailed and accurate our models are, they better and faster we tend to be at those things. (Of course, experts also make mistakes – sometimes big ones – but that’s the subject of a different post.)

Highly sophisticated mental models allow a chess grandmaster to look at a board and, in the face of an almost infinite number of possibilities for moves and countermoves, make the move that will win the game. They allow an experienced physician to sift through a large collection of symptoms, ask the right questions, and make a correct diagnosis. And they allow an artist to reach for just the right brush and make just the right stroke to effortlessly achieve what they are after.

Mental models also underlie expertise in fields like sports or dance that we might think of as mostly physical. Sport-specific physical fitness is a cornerstone of athletic expertise. But the best athletes don’t just train their muscles, they also work to develop strong mental models related to their sport. They analyze their form and performance, learn a wide range of routines and strategies, and study their opponents. They use their mental models to effectively and efficiently move their bodies, to make predictions, and to respond seemingly without thinking. Physical training gives a rock climber hand strength, but it is their mental models that allow them to look at the terrain and automatically form the correct grip for the next move up the mountain.

If model building sounds like a lot of work, that’s because it is. The brain builds mental models incrementally and over time. This makes sense because it means that our mental models end up being a sort of average, based on many different experiences in a wide range of contexts rather than being founded on what might have been a one-off or outlier experience. But this incremental construction also means that there are no real short cuts to mental models – they can’t be given or consumed whole, they must be constructed piece by piece.

A Beginner’s Guide to Model Building

Happily, for those of us trying to learn something new there are ways to facilitate the construction of mental models. And these strategies apply whether you are striving to become a solo career caliber violinist or whether you just want to get better at something.

Here are some take-aways from the literature on expertise and mental models:

Put in the Time

I know I said that gaining expertise isn’t all about hours spent, but developing expertise is an incremental process. You can’t get around the fact that in order to get better at something, you need to spend time practicing it.

By practicing, I mean really engaging. Chess players practice not just by reading about games, but by recreating them on the board and analyzing the moves. Writers show up and write. Artists get themselves to the studio.

Practice With Awareness

Awareness and attention are power tools of mental model construction.

If a violinist practices by playing a piece ten times and making the same sloppy mistakes each time, their brain will tend to lock in the sloppiness rather than improve upon it. If, on the other hand, they listen carefully and focus on fixing problem areas, improvement will come.

Bringing awareness to your practice isn’t just about identifying and correcting mistakes. The “blind drawing” exercise when learning figure drawing is a good example of how awareness can be used in a non-critical way to improve your skills. In the context of life drawing, “blind drawing” means drawing the model while looking at them but not at your pencil and paper. It forces you to become more aware of the actual form of the model and the relationship between what you see and the physical act of drawing. Whether the drawing is good, bad, or unrecognizable is beside the point. The value in the exercise is in activating and refining your mental model of the human form.

The idea of bringing awareness and attention to one’s practice may not sit well with artists and others who strive to enter a flow experience, free from the constraints and impositions of directed thought. There are certainly benefits to a more spontaneous and fluid way of working. Letting your thoughts travel undirected through your mental models can often yield new discoveries and connections – but this assumes the presence of models in the first place. From this perspective, practicing with awareness and working intuitively are complementary processes. Both have a role in extending mental models.

Work With a Teacher

It is no surprise that students with better teachers tend to progress faster than others. Teachers can guide the construction of mental models by focusing your efforts, providing relevant exercises, keeping you accountable, and helping you get unstuck.

Teachers don’t even have to be people. Books, videos, and observation of experts can all be good teachers, as long as you remember that the real learning happens when you practice applying what you have been taught.

When it comes to art, I’ve been taught in many ways – classes, books, YouTube videos, watching other artists work, studying artworks, and experimenting on my own in the studio.

Seek Out Useful Feedback

Feedback is an excellent way to reality-check your mental models, correct mistakes and misconceptions, and point out areas for improvement. And the best type of feedback for constructing mental models is – not surprisingly – constructive feedback.

Constructive feedback involves comments, advice, and suggestions that are targeted and useful. It can also mean asking questions to bring in a new perspective or to get you thinking. The “good job” positive feedback that many artists get from friends and social media, while nice, isn’t necessarily helpful. And the negative tear-them-down-so-you-can-build-them-back-up feedback that is still found in many art schools can do more harm than good.

With respect to art, I have found that good constructive feedback outside of the classroom takes some effort to find. I have sought out feedback from mentors and fellow artists who I trust and who are willing to go beyond positive comments. I also use sources of feedback other than people. For example, I look at my works in progress in a mirror so that I see them from a different perspective and I spend time reflecting and writing about my work.

Fill In the Gaps

Our mental models rarely develop in a straightforward way. More likely, as construction progresses there will be gaps and areas that need shoring up. Targeting and addressing these problem areas can help flesh out your mental models.

When my violinist son was around fifteen, a teacher in a masterclass pointed out that he was playing with a lot of underlying physical tension that should be addressed if he wanted to play with more ease and avoid injury. Based on this interaction, he was motivated to spend about six months putting repertoire aside and working intensively with a teacher who had expertise in the physicality of playing. The resulting jump in his overall playing ability, as well as his awareness of how he uses his body while playing, would never have happened without this targeted attention.

Less dramatically, several years ago I consciously focused on addressing what I felt were gaps in my self-curated art education by seeking out workshops in color and composition.

Get Out of Your Comfort Zone

If you spend all your time practicing what’s comfortable, your resulting mental models won’t have as much breadth as they could and this translates to a smaller skill-set and a more limited perspective. Working just outside your comfort zone or trying things that are just outside your reach, on the other hand, can push your models toward greater breadth and complexity.

Putting myself in the middle of a Spanish conversation that I can’t quite keep up with is exhausting, but I inevitably learn more than I would by comfortably studying a vocabulary set. Likewise, saying yes to art opportunities that I haven’t quite felt ready for has been a way to turbo-charge my skills.

A key here is not being so far out of your depth that you sink rather than swim. Putting yourself in a situation for which you don’t have any mental model to hang on to can lead to confusion and the kind of failure that sets you back or makes you want to quit altogether.

Your Road to Expertise

The general consensus among studies in expertise is that if you have a lot of natural talent, you still have to work hard to become an expert. And if you don’t have a lot of natural talent, you can still become an expert through hard work.

You may never become an Olympic swimmer or a chess grandmaster – we don’t all have the same capabilities or opportunities. You may never become famous – that depends not just on skill but on luck, timing, and circumstances. But you can become excellent.

People have a tremendous capacity to learn and to improve their performance throughout their lifetimes. And if these are among your goals, the right kind of practice can help you achieve them.

What mental models would you like to build?