You might have heard of the so-called “10,000 Hour Rule”, according to which an individual must undertake at least 10,000 hours of “deliberate practice” in an activity in order to become an expert – or to become “world class”, whatever that currently means – in that activity.
The writer Malcolm Gladwell first promulgated this rule back in 2008. He looked at elite performances in a range of fields and came to the conclusion that 10,000 hours of practice was a remarkably consistent benchmark for those who were among the elite at what they did.
This was sort of echoed by Andrew Denton, who spoke at the closing of the FPA Congress in Adelaide last year, when he said the thing that he believes separates the very best from the rest is, first, extraordinary innate talent, and second, a willingness to work much, much (much!) harder than the next person.
Unsurprisingly, the 10,000 Hour Rule has been gleefully misinterpreted by the mediocre among us. It’s now taken to mean that anyone who practises anything for long enough – in fact, for at least 10,000 hours – will become very, very good at it, and it explains why teenage boys are, on average, experts at masturbating.
Deliberate practice
But “deliberate practice” is a key term in this context. It means not just mindless repetition; it’s the kind of practice that deliberately and regularly pushes the practitioner to the limits of his or her abilities, thus inexorably expanding those abilities (that’s where the teenage boy example collapses).
But I recently, and perhaps belatedly, came across a 2014 Princeton University study that made me think again. Called Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions – A Meta-Analysis, it analyses the impact of deliberate practice across a range of different domains.
And its authors conclude, roughly, that deliberate practice explains about 26 per cent of the variance in performance for games, 21 per cent for music, 18 per cent for sports, 4 per cent for education, and less than 1 per cent for professions.
The authors conclude that deliberate practice is “important, but not as important as has been argued”. Or at least, it’s not as important as might be thought in all areas. In a profession, for example, it apparently counts for very little and is “not statistically significant”, the authors say.
Slightly unobtainable?
It occurs to me that it’s also slightly unobtainable in a professional context – in financial planning, anyway. After you’ve done your university degree and your Certified Financial Planner studies, which will take between five and six years, very roughly, you reach a certain level of expertise. Development from that point comes not through the work you do every day but more so through continuing professional development (CPD).
And at the minimum rate of CPD prescribed by the FPA – that is, 120 hours over a three-year period – it would take about 250 years to rack up 10,000 hours.
And it would also mean sitting through 250 FPA congresses.
