It is one of the most quoted numbers in our field: ten thousand hours of practice, and you are an expert. The research behind it paints a richer picture. There is no fixed number of hours that turns anyone into an expert. Practice matters a great deal, and how we practice matters just as much.

It is easy to see why people love the number. It is simple, it is fair, and it tells everyone that hard work pays off. It goes back to a 1993 study of violinists at a Berlin music academy by Anders Ericsson and his colleagues. By age 20, the best students had accumulated far more hours of deliberate practice (focused, effortful practice designed to improve specific skills) than the less accomplished ones, on average about ten thousand.¹ The figure was an average for one group of musicians, not a threshold. Years later, Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers (2008) turned it into a popular rule for everything, a reading Ericsson himself later disputed.

In 2014, psychologists Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald brought 88 studies with more than 11,000 participants together. Deliberate practice explained 26 percent of the differences in performance in games, 21 percent in music, 18 percent in sports, 4 percent in education and less than 1 percent in professions.² Their conclusion: practice is important, though less important than often claimed. Ericsson disputed how broadly the meta-analysis defined deliberate practice, and that debate continues.

For those of us who develop people, practice stays the factor we can influence most directly. Ericsson's work describes what makes practice effective: clear goals, immediate feedback, tasks just beyond current ability and a teacher or coach who designs them.³ That is his model of expert learning, and it matches what many of us see in our own programs.

Talent Takeaway

When someone on the team seems stuck, it helps to ask two questions before adding more hours: What exactly are they practicing? And who tells them how it went? Ericsson's own book is full of ideas for both.

¹ Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406. https://doi.org/10.1037/0033-295X.100.3.363

² Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608–1618. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614535810

³ Ericsson, A., & Pool, R. (2016). Peak: Secrets from the new science of expertise. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt.