Exhibit A in the talent argument is a study done in
the early 1990s by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson
and two colleagues at Berlin's elite Academy of Music.
With the help of the Academy's professors, they divided
the school's violinists into three groups. In the first group
were the stars, the students with the potential to become
world-class soloists. In the second were those judged to
be merely "good." In the third were students who were
unlikely to ever play professionally and who intended
to be music teachers in the public school system. All of
the violinists were then asked the same question: over the
course of your entire career, ever since you first picked up
the violin, how many hours have you practiced?
Everyone from all three groups started playing at
roughly the same age, around five years old. In those first
few years, everyone practiced roughly the same amount,
about two or three hours a week. But when the students
were around the age of eight, real differences started to
emerge. The students who would end up the best in their
class began to practice more than everyone else: six hours
a week by age nine, eight hours a week by age twelve, sixteen
hours a week by age fourteen, and up and up, until by
the age of twenty they were practicing—that is, purposefully
and single-mindedly playing their instruments with
the intent to get better—well over thirty hours a week. In
fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers had each
totaled ten thousand hours of practice. By contrast, the
merely good students had totaled eight thousand hours,
and the future music teachers had totaled just over four
thousand hours.
Ericsson and his colleagues then compared amateur
pianists with professional pianists. The same pattern
emerged. The amateurs never practiced more than about
three hours a week over the course of their childhood, and
by the age of twenty they had totaled two thousand hours
of practice. The professionals, on the other hand, steadily
increased their practice time every year, until by the age of
twenty they, like the violinists, had reached ten thousand
hours.
The striking thing about Ericsson's study is that he
and his colleagues couldn't find any "naturals," musicians
who floated effortlessly to the top while practicing a fraction
of the time their peers did. Nor could they find any
"grinds," people who worked harder than everyone else, yet
just didn't have what it takes to break the top ranks. Their
research suggestes that once a musician has 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. And what's more, the people at the very top don't
work just harder or even much harder than everyone else.
They work much, much harder.
The idea that excellence at performing 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 the magic number for true
expertise: ten thousand hours.
"The emerging picture from such studies is that ten
thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level
of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in
anything," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. "In
study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction
writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master
criminals, and what have you, this number comes up
again and again. Of course, this doesn't address why some
people get more out of their practice sessions than others
do. But no one has yet found a case in which true worldclass
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."
I'll try to bring him here when i have to chance
