- Joined
- Jan 22, 2014
- Messages
- 624
- Reaction score
- 102
What exactly are people "falling for?"
Keeping track of your hours, setting goals, measuring progress - these are all proven methods to accelerate improvement, learn more quickly, and get closer to your full potential.
Who wants to get better? Don't fall for that trick!
I don't think that was the main thrust of his argument. Keep in mind the main thrust of this thread (from 2013, a few years after "Outliers" was published), was "how many hours to black belt?" Which is inherently a dumb question.
Merely hours by itself is not sufficient to make you better. Approaching your training logically, with goals (short, medium, and long), measurements to track those goals, discipline to stick to your plan, attentiveness to your training sessions, and training with intent/aliveness/intensity, are all factors infinitely more important than raw hour tracking.
The Malcolm Gladwell 10k hours = Mastery concept is bullshit, other studies have confirmed it's just as arbitrary as it sounds, and many have exposed arbitrary decisions to get to "10k hours", or just flat out incorrect data in Gladwell's methods. The concept that people "fall for," is that if they just show up, even if they only put in 1/1000000th of an effort, they'll eventually reach mastery. Practice, unfortunately, doesn't make perfect. Perfect practice makes perfect.