Debunking the "1,000 hours of practice" myth

Posted by JBfrom
Nov 12, 2011 at 08:06 AM

?At age 13 the award-winning musicians practiced 13.7 hr per
week (Ruoff, 1981), an amount close to the 12.2 hr estimated by our best group and higher than the 8.8 and 6.2 hr per week estimated by the good and music teacher groups, respectively. At age 17, the practice of the award-winning musicians averaged 15.5 hr per week (Kaminski et al., 1984) compared with the 19.2,16.8, and 9.1 hr per week estimated by the best, good, and music teacher groups. The agreement between the estimates of our best violinists and the award-winning violinists? diary data is reasonably close and is consistent with the hypothesis that the best violinists practice more than the good violinists during early adolescence and more than the music teachers during the ir entire developmental period.?

The adolescent angle is an interesting added dimension.

I agree, the questions raised in the comments are enough to cast the entire article into doubt. I’m not going to read the original paper so I’ll leave it unresolved.

It’s my feeling that the conclusions he reaches are sound, with regards to the need for deliberate over non-deliberate practice, and focused sessions, and the importance of relaxation.

With regard to app selection:

“I am not at all clear how you are relating this article to ?lightweight? apps not being able to achieve your stated objectives - long-term concentration and accumulation combined with continual prioritized deliberate action.”

If one accepts that practice must be deliberate rather than spontaneous, then one needs to plan, track and store one’s progress. This requires at the minimum a continually functional task prioritization system to give detailed direction to each day’s practice.

More generally, since deliberate action beats random action, the more focus and prioritization one can bring to one’s life, the better, which is an argument for a comprehensive info workflow. It seems also that relaxation is important to performance, which argues for elimination of all stress points. Whether a lightweight or clunky app can fit into the workflow depends on the spot it is intended to fill, but these are the criteria the overall system must meet.

I included criticism of overly complicated apps in the adjective “clunky”. I disagree that software plus workflow cannot assist single-session focus, or focus over weeks and years. In my view, the Pomodoro technique is a way of enhancing willpower and focus by creating artificial barriers. Good workflow and software selection can mimic this barrier-creating effect, and do so even more effectively, rendering Pomodoros a superfluous willpower and attention drain, and needlessly limiting.