Developing an expertise in 10000 hours (instead of watching TV for seven years)
Paul D. Fernhout
developing the multiple types of expertise to be a good Virgle pioneer (or
whatever it is called someday :-).
"Success Not Just a Matter of Talent"
http://news.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=08/11/15/1636209
"The Guardian has an interesting article based on a new book (Outliers: The
Story Of Success, by Malcolm Gladwell) which examines some persons of
interest to computer technology (Bill Joy, Bill Gates and Steve Jobs,
amongst others). It examines reasons for their successes and strongly
suggests a link between practice (10,000 hours by age 20 being the magic
milestone) and luck. This maybe an obvious truism, but the article does give
interesting anecdotes on how their personal circumstances led to today's
technological landscape. It points out that many of the luminaries of the
current tech industry were born around 1955, and thus able to take advantage
of the emerging technologies. "
Embedded link:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell-outliers-extract
Key passage from that Guardian article:
"""
In the early 90s, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson and two colleagues set
up shop at Berlin's elite Academy of Music. With the help of the academy's
professors, they divided the school's violinists into three groups. The
first group were the stars, the students with the potential to become
world-class soloists. The second were those judged to be merely "good". The
third were students who were unlikely ever to play professionally, and
intended to be music teachers in the school system. All the violinists were
then asked the same question. Over the course of your career, ever since you
first picked up the violin, how many hours have you practised?
Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time -
around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly
the same amount - about two or three hours a week. But around the age of
eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as
the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours
a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up,
until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By
the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of
practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had
totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over
4,000 hours.
The curious thing about Ericsson's study is that he and his colleagues
couldn't find any "naturals" - musicians who could float effortlessly to the
top while practising a fraction of the time that their peers did. Nor could
they find "grinds", people who worked harder than everyone else and yet just
didn't have what it takes to break into the top ranks. Their research
suggested that once you have enough ability to get into a top music school,
the thing that distinguishes one performer from another is how hard he or
she works. That's it. What's more, the people at the very top don't just
work much harder than everyone else. They work much, much harder.
This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum
level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In
fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for
true expertise: 10,000 hours.
"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers,
ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals," writes the
neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten
thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a
week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true
world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes
the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true
mastery."
This is true even of people we think of as prodigies. Mozart, for example,
famously started writing music at six. But, the psychologist Michael Howe
writes in his book Genius Explained, by the standards of mature composers
Mozart's early works are not outstanding. The earliest pieces were all
probably written down by his father, and perhaps improved in the process.
Many of Wolfgang's childhood compositions, such as the first seven of his
concertos for piano and orchestra, are largely arrangements of works by
other composers. Of those concertos that contain only music original to
Mozart, the earliest that is now regarded as a masterwork (No9 K271) was not
composed until he was 21: by that time Mozart had already been composing
concertos for 10 years.
To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about 10 years. (Only the
legendary Bobby Fischer got to that elite level in less than that time: it
took him nine years.) And what's 10 years? Well, it's roughly how long it
takes to put in 10,000 hours of hard practice.
Ten thousand hours is, of course, an enormous amount of time. It's all but
impossible to reach that number, by the time you're a young adult, all by
yourself. You have to have parents who are encouraging and supportive. You
can't be poor, because if you have to hold down a part-time job on the side
to help make ends meet, there won't be enough time left over in the day. In
fact, most people can really only reach that number if they get into some
kind of special programme - like a hockey all-star squad - or get some kind
of extraordinary opportunity that gives them a chance to put in that kind of
work.
"""
Despite that last paragraph, this note isn't meant to be discouraging. :-)
A total of 10,000 hours is achievable for most people (maybe not parents of
small children :-) in their spare time of three hours a day for 10 years in
whatever you care about -- if you sacrifice watching most TV. :-)
From:
"Television & Health"
http://www.csun.edu/science/health/docs/tv&health.html
"According to the A.C. Nielsen Co., the average American watches more than 4
hours of TV each day (or 28 hours/week, or 2 months of nonstop TV-watching
per year). In a 65-year life, that person will have spent 9 years glued to
the tube. "
So, TV viewing on average is consuming enough time per person in the USA to
develop a world-class expert level skill about every seven calender years in
any talents that person has. That would be about five or six significant
areas of expertise in a typical life time just by the time spent watching TV
on average. It might be ten or twelve areas of expertise if one expertise
supports another. All done in your spare time as a hobby, perhaps while
working as a janitor to pay the bills. :-) See:
"The Joys of Janitorhood: Reflections on a low status career field"
http://www.unconventionalideas.com/janitor.html
Of course, that very fact it is possible to be a "Renaissance Man" or
"Renaissance Woman" in your spare time is perhaps part of the very reason
why TV still exists and is promoted and accepted, as it prevents most people
from reaching the level of skill many people had two hundred years ago in a
variety of things they needed for independent survival (writing was more
complex too then, just look at Shakespeare. :-) From:
http://www.homeschoolnewslink.com/homeschool/columnists/gatto/aconspiracy.shtml
"I’ll bring this down to Earth. Try to see than an intricately subordinated
industrial/commercial system [unlike proposed for Project Virgle or
OpenVirgle :-) ] has only limited use for hundreds of millions of
self-reliant, resourceful readers and critical thinkers. In an egalitarian,
entrepreneurially-based economy of confederated families like the one the
Amish have or the Mondragon folk in the Basque region of Spain [or is
proposed for Mars], any number of self-reliant people can be accommodated
usefully, but not in a concentrated command-type economy like our own. Where
on earth would they fit? In a great fanfare of moral fervor some years back,
the Ford Motor Company opened the world’s most productive auto engine plant
in Chihuahua, Mexico. It insisted on hiring employees with 50 percent more
school training than the Mexican norm of six years, but as time passed Ford
removed its requirements and began to hire school dropouts, training them
quite well in four to twelve weeks. The hype that education is essential to
robot-like work was quietly abandoned. Our economy has no adequate outlet of
expression for its artists, dancers, poets, painters, farmers, film makers,
wildcat business people, handcraft workers, whiskey makers, intellectuals,
or a thousand other useful human enterprises—no outlet except corporate work
or fringe slots on the periphery of things. Unless you do “creative” work
the company way, you run afoul of a host of laws and regulations put on the
books to control the dangerous products of imagination which can never be
safely tolerated by a centralized command system. "
And if that isn't enough:
"Unhappy People Watch More TV"
http://science.slashdot.org/science/08/11/15/192222.shtml
Especially this comment:
http://science.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1030805&cid=25772137
Of course, the internet can also be a big time sink. :-)
Note that no one is saying in the first article that a base level of talent
isn't important too (like enough in the music case to get into music school,
or whatever it takes to be a programmer). Or access to the tools or
situations you need to work on a skill. But almost everyone has some talent
or interest in some area, and I'd expect many people tend to want to work in
areas where their talents are if they are given an opportunity and the
flexibility to try a few things and freely choose something that's a good
match. So, some people just will never make good rocket scientists or good
theoretical physicists, but they might in 10000 hours of experience become
hydroponics experts, or sought-after mediators, or whatever else they could
be (and vice versa, like the person with a talent for mathematical orbital
mechanics might end up unable to keep plants growing lushly in a Martian
greenhouse because they are always looking through the glass panes at the
galaxies and stars and planets and moons and asteroids. :-). And the
important thing is that for many or most people, they can do this even in
their spare time as a hobbyist or "professional amateur".
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Professional_amateurs
"The 20th century witnessed the rise of many new professionals in fields
such as medicine, science, education and politics. Amateurs and their
sometimes ramshackle organizations were driven out by people who knew what
they were doing and had certificates to prove it. This historic shift is now
reversing with Pro-Ams: people who pursue amateur activities to professional
standards are increasingly an important part of the society and economy of
developed nations. Their leisure is not passive but active and
participatory. Their contribution involves the deployment of publicly
accredited knowledge and skills, and is often built up over a long career
involving sacrifices and frustrations."
Naturally, if you can devote full time to developing expertise, it only
takes about five years of eight hours a week day (forty hours a week) and
you can have other hobbies and a family life and weekends to goof off too.
:-) So, there is still something good about working on stuff you love for
pay. But I'm pointing out it is not the only way to develop significant
expertise in many areas if you really want to.
Of course, there is another issue of belonging to social networks who help
each other learn, but with Google to find like-minded peers and the internet
to organize such groups, this is more and more possible for professional
amateurs too.
By the way, John Holt suggests non-professionals musicians don't "practice",
but that they "play". (He suggests professionals are the ones who "practice"
in a disciplined way.) Which is a more fun way to look at learning something
to a significant degree of expertise -- as "hard fun".
"Hard Fun" by Seymour Papert
http://www.papert.org/articles/HardFun.html
My own comment on a thread about that first article: :-)
http://slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=1030761&cid=25776449
--Paul Fernhout
http://www.openvirgle.net/
http://sourceforge.net/projects/pointrel/
http://groups.google.com/group/openmanufacturing