Mastery how many hours

Made popular by Gladwell's book, Outliers: The Story of Success , the principle states that in order to become world class in any field, you need 10, hours of deliberate practice.

But what if you don't have the time? What if the 10, hours you need could be shortened to a simple 20 hours? When learning curves are sloped and you don't have all the time in the world, here's what you can do to streamline the learning process. No matter how lofty a goal or skill is, it's important to break it down into pieces you can actually manage. Figure out which tools and skills you need behind each step, then get going. The principle holds that 10, hours of "deliberate practice" are needed to become world-class in any field.

When psychologists talk about deliberate practice , they mean practicing in a way that pushes your skill set as much as possible. In " Outliers ," Gladwell contends that early access to getting 10, hours of practice allowed the Beatles to become the greatest band in history thanks to playing all-night shows in Hamburg and Bill Gates to become one of the richest dudes around thanks to using a computer since his teen years. But a new Princeton study tears that theory down.

What's really surprising is how much it depends on the domain:. The best explanation of the domain dependency is probably found in Frans Johansson 's book " The Click Moment. I n it, Johansson argues that deliberate practice is only a predictor of success in fields that have super stable structures. For example, in tennis, chess, and classical music, the rules never change, so you can study up to become the best.

But in less stable fields, like entrepreneurship and rock and roll, rules can go out the window:. So mastery is more than a matter of practice. Actually, he says he still has never talked to him, and only found out the book cited his work when it hit the shelves. This is a brief recap. To hear the voices this story works better as audio , listen to the podcast episode. Jeffrey R. Young jryoung is the higher education editor at EdSurge and the producer and co-host of the EdSurge Podcast.

He can be reached at jeff [at] edsurge [dot] com. This story is part of an EdSurge series about learning engineering. These stories are supported by a grant from Schmidt Futures , which had no influence over the content in this story. Read our ethics statement here.