Practice Doesn't Always Make Perfect - 10,000 hour rule broken

Practice Doesn't Always Make Perfect - Scientific American

In 1993 psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues [Ericsson- Deliberate Practice PR93.pdf] argued that
success was not a matter of talent but rather what they termed
deliberate practice, an idea that Malcolm Gladwell popularized as the
“10,000-hour rule” in his book Outliers. Still, the role of
deliberate practice—activities designed with the goal of improving
performance—remained controversial.



To try to sort things out,
psychologist Brooke N. Macnamara of Princeton University and her
colleagues reviewed 157 experimental results connecting total time spent
practicing to ability in sports, music, education and other areas. On
average, practice time accounted for just 12 percent of the variation in
performance. Practice had the biggest effect on games such as chess—it
explained 26 percent of the differences in performance—but it had almost
nothing to do with ability in academic classes or professions, such as
computer programming. The more rigorously each study judged its
subjects' ability—such as by having experts evaluate their
performance—the less total practice time mattered.

Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education, and Professions: A Meta-Analysis - Macnamara-et-al.-2014.pdf



Complexity and the Ten-Thousand-Hour Rule - The New Yorker

The point of Simon and Chase’s paper years ago was that cognitively
complex activities take many years to master because they require that a
very long list of situations and possibilities and scenarios be
experienced and processed. There’s a reason the Beatles didn’t give us
“The White Album” when they were teen-agers. And if the surgeon who
wants to fuse your spinal cord did some newfangled online accelerated
residency, you should probably tell him no. It does not invalidate the
ten-thousand-hour principle, however, to point out that in instances
where there are not a long list of situations and scenarios and
possibilities to master—like jumping really high, running as fast as you
can in a straight line, or directing a sharp object at a large, round
piece of cork—expertise can be attained a whole lot more quickly. What
Simon and Chase wrote forty years ago remains true today. In cognitively
demanding fields, there are no naturals.