I was reading a book some days ago and I found that one of its chapters includes the next paragraph:
You do deliberate practice to improve your ability to perform a task. It's about skill and technique. Deliberate practice means repetition. It means performing the task with the aim of increasing your mastery of one or more aspects of the task. It means repeating the repetition. Slowly, over and over again, until you achieve your desired level of mastery. You do deliberate practice to master the task, not to complete the task.
Although it wasn't the first time that I did read those ideas, I got surprised because it wasn't a book on music or guitar, it was a book on programming: "97 Things Every Programmer Should Know", Kevlin Henney (Ed.), O'Reilly, 2010. Here is a link to Safari Books.
The chapter is written by Jon Jagger and it is about "deliberate practice." He speaks about the importance of practice and how many hours of practice are needed to become a master. Also he mentions several quotes. Probably the most important is to Peter Norvig (co-author of one of the most referenced books on Artificial Intelligence and the current Director of Research at Google). Norvig says "it may be that 10,000 hours…is the magic number." As Jagger says, 10,000 hours is a lot (he says "about 20 hours per week for 10 years").
Is it applicable to music? Are 10,000 hours a good number? Are 5,000 enough? What do you think?
Nuno it's funny you brought this up because I was reading I beleive a psychology article and there was a reference in there about the 10,000 hrs needed to master something. I guess it was a study done by some psychologists and they came up with that number.
Sounds like a good enough number to be, you have to remember that is the average. If you were a prodigy it might take 1/5 the amount of time or if your like most of us...we ain't never gonna get there.
"It's all about stickin it to the man!"
It's a long way to the top if you want to rock n roll!
As a working programmer, I almost never get a chance to practice the same algorithms over and over. I'm thinking up new ways to do things all the time. There isn't much in the way of muscle memory involved here, although there are certainly "best practices". It also makes it difficult for me to master anything - I'm more of a jack-of-all trades.
10,000 hours has been kicked around for a while. As above, everyone goes at a different speed, and we all have different goals. But it's not unreasonable to say that it might take 10 years to become a master of your trade.
