The Specialist’s Guide to Expertise

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You’ve probably heard of the 10,000-hour rule.

As it is most commonly stated, the rule says it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at any skill.

Author Malcolm Gladwell popularised this rule in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success.

It’s catchy, it’s motivational, but it’s also a misleading misconception.

The rule is an oversimplification of findings from a famous 1993 study by the late Swedish psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. In fact, Ericsson himself disagreed with Gladwell’s presentations of his findings.

The study highlights that experts do not derive their skill from innate talent, but from the amount of time they spent practising.

So far, so true.

However, the 10,000-hour rule leaves out an important aspect of Ericsson’s findings. Developing expertise isn’t simply about the amount of time you spend practising, but it’s crucially about how you practice.

Developing expertise is about so-called deliberate practice.

But practising deliberately, in the sense of Ericsson’s research, is something more specific than the mundane name suggests.

Also, putting a specific number on it was entirely Gladwell's invention.

In this article, I’ll explain why it doesn’t merely suffice to practice more, and how you actually have to practice a skill to get better.

Don’t just practice

Merely doing something more often doesn’t automatically make you better at it.

This becomes apparent once you stop and think about it. Take driving a car, for example.

When you started learning how to drive as a teenager, you quickly improved with every lesson. Every hour you were driving, you gained better control of the vehicle and felt noticeable more secure navigating the traffic on the road.

However, over time, your improvement stagnated.

You’ve probably been driving almost daily for years, raking up more and more “practice hours,” but you wouldn’t say you’re a better driver than you were last year.

It’s the same thing with most things we do on a daily basis, like cooking or typing on a keyboard. You don’t just get better.

But why not?

Practice purposefully

Skill is not about innate talent. The amount of time you practice plays a key role.

This is what Anders Ericsson and his co-authors showed in multiple studies.

But it’s not as “easy” as practising for 10,000 hours.

It’s all about how you spend those 10,000 hours.

In their aforementioned paper, the researchers conducted a study on violin students at Universität der Künste Berlin, and found that, on average, the more students had practised throughout their lives the better they played.

For the study, violin students were put in three different groups based on their current playing abilities: the good, the better, and the best.

As it turns out, the better students had practised on average more hours throughout their lives than the good students, and the best students had practice on average even more than the better students.

This is where the 10,000 hours come from.

The best students were only a couple of years away from accumulating 10,000 hours of practice, and being ready to play in high-performing orchestras around the world.

However, the research doesn't directly talk about this number. Gladwell extrapolated it from the data. There is no hard-and-fast rule around the number 10,000.

It just sounds good.

So, what’s the difference between your driving skills and the students’ violin skills?

Well—while you practised naively, they practised purposefully.

In a nutshell, purposeful practice, as Ericsson defines it, means practising with

• full attention,

• clearly set goals,

• a plan for reaching those goals,

• a way to monitor your progress, and, most crucially,

• it requires you to push yourself out of your comfort zone.

That’s why you don’t get better at most things you do (not that you would want or need to). After you reach an acceptable level of skill, you stay in your comfort zone.

But while trying hard is necessary to become skilful, it isn’t enough.

There are a few more ingredients missing to make purposeful practice deliberate.

Practice deliberately

No one develops extraordinary skills without putting in tremendous amounts of practice.

But there’s more to expertise than time and hard work. That more is information and guidance—which leads us to the gold standard for improving performance: deliberate practice.

Deliberate practice is purposeful practice that is informed by the expertise and guidance of established expert performers.

It knows where it’s going and how to get there.

First, deliberate practice requires a field that is already reasonably well-developed, like playing the violin or chess or race car driving.

Second, deliberate practice requires a teacher who can provide practice activities designed to help a student improve their performance.

In particular, deliberate practice is informed by the best performers’ accomplishments and by an understanding of what these expert performers do to excel.

However, in the real world, becoming skilful is not as clear-cut as the definition of deliberate practice suggests.

Easier said than done

In pretty much any area, people have a tremendous capacity to improve their performance, as long as they train in the right way.

This is the main point Ericsson stresses again and again in his 2016 book Peak, which summarises his findings from 30 years of research for the general public.

In other words: practising any skill works like lifting weights. No matter who you are or what you do, you won’t get strong in a week. It takes months and years.

You only get stronger by spending quality time under tension.

In his book, Ericsson tells a lot of stories about elite violin students and chess prodigies. Chances are, you’re neither.

So, how useful is all this information about deliberate practice for your daily life—really?

In my experience, it’s very useful, although there are some noteworthy drawbacks.

Put simply: most areas aren’t as clearly governed by rules as playing a classical violin or competing in a game.

Most of life isn’t that formal.

It’s harder to define what makes you a better writer, cook, programmer, scientist, teacher, therapist, or sales person. It’s harder to get clear, immediate, and trustworthy feedback in those areas as well.

Often, expertise isn’t standardised or easily identifiable.

However, this doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try your hardest to get better if you want to.

Which leads us to my final question for this article: Why would you want to?

What about motivation

In other words, how do you keep up motivation for 10,000 hours or more?

Ericsson just scratches the surface of this big topic in Peak, and he doesn’t give a satisfying answer.

But he conjectures that genetics play a big role.

No one has identified a way to predict "innate talent" or found gene variants that predict superior performance⁠. But genetic differences likely manifest through factors that influence practice, such as enjoyment of an activity or ability to focus⁠.

Deliberate practice tells you how to spend your time on a particular skill to get good at it. But it doesn’t tell you why you would want to spend time on the skill in the first place.

This is where a principle called match quality comes into play.

It will be the topic of my next article.

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