Neither 10,000 Hours of Practice Nor “Grit” Guarantee Mastery or Success

Popular ideas such as extensive practice for mastery and “grit” or determination to achieve success are being challenged by research.

Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson has studied elite performers in music, chess and sport for decades, and he says the main distinguishing characteristic of experts is the amount of deliberate practice they’ve invested – typically over 10,000 hours.

This is painstaking practice performed for the sole purpose of improving one’s skill level. Best-selling authors like Malcolm Gladwell, Daniel Pink, Matthew Syed and legions of self-help and management experts, have taken Ericsson’s results and distilled them into the uplifting message that genius is grounded almost entirely in hard work.

“Ten thousand hours is the magic number for greatness,” wrote Gladwell. “[There was] nobody who had reached the elite group without copious practice, and nobody who had worked their socks off but failed to excel,” wrote Syed.?

The 10,000 hour proposition has of recent years been challenged.

How long is 10,000 hours? It’s roughly 5 hours of full time practice per day at 2,000 hours per year for 5 years. If you practice 10 hours a week, it will take you 20 years to get to expert level according to the theory.

A team led by?David Hambrick??associate professor of psychology at?Michigan?State University,?have published a forceful challenge to the 10,000 myth. They found six studies supplying this information, published between 2005 and 2012, and involving collectively over 1000 players from around the world.

David Hambrick and colleagues decided to study musicians and chess players. It helps that both skills are amenable to such analysis because players can be ranked almost objectively. So in their?research, which was published in the journal?Intelligence,?they reanalyzed data from 14 studies of top chess players and musicians. They found that for musicians, only 30% of the variance in their rankings as performers could be accounted for by how much time they spent practicing. For chess players, practice only accounted for 34% of what determined the rank of a master player.

“It’s clear from this data that deliberate practice doesn’t account for all, nearly all or even most of the variance in performance in chess and music.” Two-thirds of the difference, in fact, was unrelated to practice. And while one player took two years to become a grandmaster; another achieved that level only after 26 years, giving them huge variance in the hours of practice they did.

Hambrick says his goal in conducting the research was to expose some of the complexities of the interaction between practice and proficiency, and with his latest results, he hopes to fight unrealistic expectations fostered by theories like the “10,000-hour rule.” He says his research does not support “the egalitarian view that anyone who is sufficiently motivated can become an expert.”?

Hambrick’s team performed a similar analysis with past studies involving hundreds of elite musicians – mostly pianists. Based on eight past papers, they found deliberate practice accounted for 30 per cent of the variance in music performance, as measured by formal tests, expert ratings and rankings. Again there was evidence of wide variation in the amount of practice completed by different musicians. The take-out was clear – some people failed to achieve the highest level even after completing substantially more than 10,000 of practice; others achieved the highest level with only relatively modest practice.

“The bottom line,” write Hambrick and his colleagues, “is that deliberate practice is necessary to account for why some people become experts in these domains and others fail to do so, but not even close to sufficient.”?

What else matters?

Another relevant factor, they say, is starting age. This correlates with amount of completed practice, but crucially, it remains a predictive factor even after subtracting the influence of practice. “This … suggests that there may be a critical period for acquiring complex skills,” the researchers said.

Other relevant factors include intelligence, and working memory capacity (the latter is also correlated with elite performance level even after subtracting the role of practice completed); personality; and genes.

Other Studies on Practice

In another massive study by Brooke N. Macnamara and colleagues, published in?Psychological Science, the largest meta-analysis in the field found practice?is not the major contributor to achieving mastery. The researchers concluded “We found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions. We conclude that deliberate practice is important, but not as important as has been argued.”?

The researchers go on to explain that other factors contribute to attaining mastery: “One may be the age at which a person starts serious involvement in a domain. This evidence suggests that there may be an optimal develop- mental period for acquiring complex skills, as there seems to be for acquiring language. Research suggests that general intelligence and more specific abilities may also explain some of the variance in performance that deliberate practice does not. General intelligence which is highly stable and substantially positively predicts perfor- mance in a wide range of domains, including music, chess, academics, and virtually any occupation. Working memory capacity—the ability to maintain information in the focus of attention —is an example of a specific ability that may predict performance differences.”?

In a study published by Michael P. Lombardo and Robert O. Deaner in?Peer J,??they studied the 20 Olympic champions and the 20 fastest American sprinters in U.S. History and U.S. national collegiate champions in sprints and hammer throwers to determine the efficacy of hours of practice. They reported: “Many scientists agree that expertise requires both innate talent and proper training. Nevertheless, the highly influential deliberate practice model (DPM) of expertise holds that talent does not exist or makes a negligible contribution to performance. It predicts that initial performance will be unrelated to achieving expertise and that 10 years of deliberate practice is necessary. We tested these predictions. Sprinters recalled being faster as youths than did throwers, whereas throwers recalled greater strength and throwing ability. Sprinters’ best performances in their first season of high school, generally the onset of formal training, were consistently faster than 95–99% of their peers. Collectively, these results falsify the DPM for sprinting. Because speed is foundational for many sports, they challenge the DPM generally.”??In other words hours and hours of practice was not the reason for superior performance.

The Grit Proposition

Leading grit researcher and author of the book?Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance,?Angela Duckworth?defines grit?as “perseverance and passion for long-term goals.” In a nutshell, her research has found that students with high levels of grit are more successful in both?academic and non-academic pursuits.

However, there are some problems with her research.

• We don’t know how to teach it, and Duckworth is the first to admit?this. So how can schools expect students to develop something that they’re not sure they can teach and students can learn, let alone grade them on it? It’s an unfair proposition for both students and teachers alike.
• Part of the challenge is that it’s not known whether a person’s level of grit can change. Grit is understood by researchers to be a?stable personality trait, possibly part of the trait of “conscientiousness.” What this means is that a person’s level of grit generally remains the same over time.?Yet while?developmental psychologists agree?that a child’s personality becomes more stable as he or she goes through certain developmental stages, research on?personality traits in adults?suggests that these traits may actually change gradually over the lifespan. However, much is predicated on other factors, such as environment, the process of identity development, and interactions with other people.
• Grit requires a passion for long-term goals.?Not a lot of students come to school with?this?in place. So the next question is whether or not schools can help students create these goals. And the answer is… maybe. Researchers who created a program to help students?cultivate hope?found that the first step was having students figure out what goals were important to?them—not to their parents or their teachers. Otherwise, students had a hard time staying motivated to reach their goals.
• Emotions play a critical role.?Grit involves two psychological resources: self-discipline and self-control, both of which require the ability to manage emotions and thoughts. Yet the research on grit rarely, if ever, mentions the importance of emotions—and this is where the dark side of grit comes in. According to a?U.S. Department of Education report?on grit, “persevering in the face of challenges or setbacks to accomplish goals that are extrinsically motivated, unimportant to the student, or in some way inappropriate for the student may potentially induce stress, anxiety, and distraction, and have detrimental impacts on students’ long-term retention, conceptual learning, and psychological well-being.” In other words, encouraging or forcing students to be “gritty” may, in some situations, do more harm than good.

New research from experts at Tel Aviv University and Ariel University, Israel, used representative samples, meaning the sample population isn’t restricted to a range of intelligence, as it was for many past studies. With a broader sample population and analysis of more factors, they found that?the effect of grit on success was negligible. Intelligence contributes 48 to 90 times more than grit to educational achievement, and 13 times more to workplace success, whereas conscientiousness contributes twice as much.

Similarly, studies conducted in educational contexts, such as?a twin study on reading comprehension, showed that intervening indirectly on grit is not as effective as working directly on the desired skill – in this case, reading comprehension. Another research paper published this year demonstrates?that grit does not necessarily translate to academic attainment?for students with low-IQ scores or delays in general cognitive ability. This dismantles one of the central promises of the glittering grit paradigm, that it could help level the playing field for disadvantaged students.??

Final Thoughts

Both the 10,000 hours proposition and the grit research illustrate how quickly helping professionals and the media can popularize theories without subsequent validation by other research. Their application to people needing help with achieving goals and success could do more harm than good.