10,000 Hours or Less - Outliers

[straysweeper]

I've been reading on Outliers, and I have come across the question, while he has all this research on believing that someone needs 10,000 hours to become an expert or master something.

Do you agree this is the only way?

[AfteraDream]

This looks really logical to me. Take Michael Jordan for example. He knew he wanted to be basketball player form early age and he was first in gym at the morning and last to leave in the evening. He played and he played and he played. At home, at school... I really believe he has put even more than 10000 hours.

[rocksupreme]

When you've been doing something for about 100 hours and you start to get a feel for it, you think "Wow! I know soooo much!" You feel like you know a lot compared to where you were when you started. But there are deeper layers, and those deeper layers are the way of mastery.

When you've been doing something for around 8000 hours and feel like you still have much to learn, Gladwell's 10000 hours will begin to make more sense.

[MyEyeIsOpen]

Originally Posted by straysweeper

I've been reading on Outliers, and I have come across the question, while he has all this research on believing that someone needs 10,000 hours to become an expert or master something.

Do you agree this is the only way?

It's not a matter of agreement or belief -- the data strongly suggests that expertise == 10,000 hours of concentrated practice. So go do it.

[Brutha]

It depends a bit on what you mean by being an expert.
Do be quoted as an expert on a topic by the media you need to have your self marketing right but don't need real skill.
There are a lot of people who are also successful because they had luck and where at the right place at the right time.

10,000 is also just a number. How much time you have to put in generally has much to do with how much time your competition is put in.
If you are in some new area where the best people have only 4000 hours of expertise you yourself will be an experts after 4000 hours as well.

Then there also the possibility to change the rules of a given game. If you play a given game differently then everyone else you might reach expertise a lot earlier because you aren't competing on the area where the other people have their 10,000 hours experience.
That's a bit how Tim Ferriss operates. Maybe you could say however that Tim spent 10,000 hours learning learning.
It's also the reason why the best chess and go players aren't the oldest players.
Einstein did his great work when he was 25 (probably with 10000 hours of experience) and there the saying that science evolves from grave to grave because it takes new people to come up with new ideas.

[pauldickinson]

I think the general message is just put a lot of time in to become an expert!

[ruchirkc]

I never liked that theory. I mean, 10,000 hours basically means 6-7 years if you put in 5 hours a day into the activity...

I liked the Tim Ferriss example, he surely didn't require 10K hours to become an expert at the things he describes in his book/blog...

And if that 10K number was true, care to explain how some guy is an expert at social media marketing, when the field itself didn't exist 7 years ago?

And some of these people mastered more than 10 languages. That would, according to the 10K theory, require about 70-80 years to master all the languages...

[Brutha]

And some of these people mastered more than 10 languages. That would, according to the 10K theory, require about 70-80 years to master all the languages...

Who do you think mastered 10 languages? Most people don't master a single language and still make spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes in their native language.

And if that 10K number was true, care to explain how some guy is an expert at social media marketing, when the field itself didn't exist 7 years ago?

You don't know whether the guy has prior experience at other marketing efforts that he could use in social media marketing.

[AfteraDream]

Originally Posted by ruchirkc

I never liked that theory. I mean, 10,000 hours basically means 6-7 years if you put in 5 hours a day into the activity...

I liked the Tim Ferriss example, he surely didn't require 10K hours to become an expert at the things he describes in his book/blog...

And if that 10K number was true, care to explain how some guy is an expert at social media marketing, when the field itself didn't exist 7 years ago?

And some of these people mastered more than 10 languages. That would, according to the 10K theory, require about 70-80 years to master all the languages...

Tim Ferris is a bad example, I liked his book at first but later I realized that he cheats. that's how he won that fighting event (loose weight and get in easier category and then gain back the weight and be stronger and bigger than anyone..) That's just not cool...

[straysweeper]

I really like how Outliers is presented. 10,000 hours for a expertise or mastery is an empowering thought. Saying that if you were to spend 10 years doing anything then you would master it. I haven't read the whole thing, but I would take a guess it doesn't take into effect geometric returns. If you learn from someone who spent 20 years, you gain the experience of that 20 years in a faster amount of time. NLP modeling techniques were based on this. This also goes to the idea of Master Mind but in another way, imagine learning various different things through out your life, thus leading to something unique that never existed before, such was what Brutha was mentioning. You didn't spend the 10k in that one subject, but relating subjects. Talent or aptitude which can be part genetics and childhood experiences.

Again If you think of it, what we learn in Elementary & Middle school now is probably things that were taught in college a century ago.

[Brutha]

Tim Ferris is a bad example, I liked his book at first but later I realized that he cheats. that's how he won that fighting event (loose weight and get in easier category and then gain back the weight and be stronger and bigger than anyone..) That's just not cool...

Cheating is violating the rules. Tim Ferries didn't do anything that's forbidden but searched for strategies how he can compete without

And some of these people mastered more than 10 languages. That would, according to the 10K theory, require about 70-80 years to master all the languages...

No it wouldn't as different languages aren't necessarily separate skills.

Additionally Wikipedia is what it is and doesn't really separate in that list fluency from mastery. Fluency needs for most people around 1000 hours and maybe 300 with all sort of mnemonics.

Wikipedia claims mastery for Emil Krebs, Ali Ufki and perfect knowledge for Giuseppe Mezzofanti.
Wikipedia sources a German document for the claim about mastery for Emil Krebs which doesn't say mastery but 'beherrscht' with just doesn't translate as mastery in this context but is a lot weaker.
Ali Ulki lived from 1610 to 1675 which isn't really a time where you can trust report about such abilities much and wikipedia doesn't have a source for that claim.
That leaves you with one person being Mezzofanti which also lived some time ago (funny how all those people are long dead) from whom we also don't know exactly how good he was speaking his languages.

[AfteraDream]

Originally Posted by Brutha

Cheating is violating the rules. Tim Ferries didn't do anything that's forbidden but searched for strategies how he can compete without
No it wouldn't as different languages aren't necessarily separate skills.

Additionally Wikipedia is what it is and doesn't really separate in that list fluency from mastery. Fluency needs for most people around 1000 hours and maybe 300 with all sort of mnemonics.

Wikipedia claims mastery for Emil Krebs, Ali Ufki and perfect knowledge for Giuseppe Mezzofanti.
Wikipedia sources a German document for the claim about mastery for Emil Krebs which doesn't say mastery but 'beherrscht' with just doesn't translate as mastery in this context but is a lot weaker.
Ali Ulki lived from 1610 to 1675 which isn't really a time where you can trust report about such abilities much and wikipedia doesn't have a source for that claim.
That leaves you with one person being Mezzofanti which also lived some time ago (funny how all those people are long dead) from whom we also don't know exactly how good he was speaking his languages.

So manipulating your weight and then showing up heavier than a competitor can be is not cheating?

[ruchirkc]

Originally Posted by Brutha

Who do you think mastered 10 languages? Most people don't master a single language and still make spelling mistakes and grammar mistakes in their native language.

I gave the link to the page that lists the people...

You don't know whether the guy has prior experience at other marketing efforts that he could use in social media marketing.

M. Saleem is an example. You can check his about page here:
a little about me – by muhammad saleem - social media maven

As far as I can tell, no marketing background... And don't say economics is somehow related to social media

If the 10,000 hour rule was true, then the vast majority of the internet gurus are scammers because most don't fulfill the experience requirements

[ruchirkc]

Originally Posted by AfteraDream

So manipulating your weight and then showing up heavier than a competitor can be is not cheating?

No, by the rules, its not.

[AfteraDream]

Originally Posted by ruchirkc

No, by the rules, its not.

Then honor is not on the guy's list of values...

[ruchirkc]

Here's what Seth Godin wrote wrote about the 10,000 hours [link] (And I agree with his post, to some extent):

For me, though, some of the 10k analysis doesn't hold up. The Doors (or Devo or the Bee Gees) for example, didn't play together for 10,000 hours before they invented a new kind of rock*. If the Doors had encountered significantly more competition for their brand of music, it's not clear that they could have gotten away with succeeding as quickly as they did. Hey, Miley Cyrus wasn't even 10,000 hours awake before she became a hit.


Doc Searls and Scoble didn't blog for 10,000 hours before they became the best, most important bloggers in the world. Molly Katzen didn't work on her recipes for 10,000 hours before she wrote the Moosewood Cookbook either.


*(There were bar bands in Buffalo, where I grew up, that put in far more than 10,000 playing mediocre music... didn't help. Hard work may be necessary, but not sufficient).

[Brutha]

I gave the link to the page that lists the people...

That page lists three people with have the characteristics that you described and I said something about all three.
Being fluent in twenty languages doesn't mean you have mastered twenty languages because mastery is more than fluency.

As far as I can tell, no marketing background... And don't say economics is somehow related to social media

Economics is about uses statistics to do understand large pills of data.
I don't exactly know what what you do when you do social media marketing but it could well be doing data mining.

If the 10,000 hour rule was true, then the vast majority of the internet gurus are scammers because most don't fulfill the experience requirements

Is that any news?

A lot of people are also simply successful because of luck. The idea that expertise and success are the same thing is often untrue. And I take this just as another time to recommand reader Nassim Taleb's the Black Swan

Then honor is not on the guy's list of values...

Tim Ferriss doesn't try to follow the same processes that others use to win.
There are people like Sirlin who wrote book about how that's the way you should play games.

[songwriter]

I've read part of the book, on a big store.

The Beatles part is true (they spent moths playing 8 hours a day). They reached like 10000 hours. And it's true almost no band reaches that in their whole career. And they reached that before being 20.

They speak about composing in the Beatles and Mozart. Well, none composed for 10000 hours. I guess no-one has composed for so much. But The Beatles needed to compose 100 songs (almost of all them never recorded) to achieve their unique level.

[ruchirkc]

Social Media Marketing & Social media marketing - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Nothing to do w/ mining data.

The Seth Godin link pretty much says what I wanted to say...

[Curtis2011]

Any man is an expert if he is farther along the road than you are, and you are an expert if you are farther than he is.

"Expert" is relative.

[Addict]

I never liked that theory. I mean, 10,000 hours basically means 6-7 years if you put in 5 hours a day into the activity...

I liked the Tim Ferriss example, he surely didn't require 10K hours to become an expert at the things he describes in his book/blog...

I've read both Outliers (and Blink) and the 4 Hour Work Week. I don't think they conflict that much. Tim stresses the 80/20 principle. He'll often say how easy it is to achieve 90-95% fluency in a foreign language (which is good enough for travel), but 99% fluency will take a decade.

Also, I HATE when people say Tim cheated and use this example:

Tim Ferris is a bad example, I liked his book at first but later I realized that he cheats. that's how he won that fighting event (loose weight and get in easier category and then gain back the weight and be stronger and bigger than anyone..) That's just not cool...

It's not like you found this out after the fact. Tim brings it up in the book to demonstrate a point. That everything other than the rules are negotiable, and he did follow the rules. I don't think Tim is a bad example. He's just shooting for results. He doesn't necessarily need to be the best in the world to do that.

The message of Outliers in contrast is that to be among the best in the world, it takes 10,000 hours. What's important is figuring out if that's what you really want (because of course that's a lot of time).

[Brutha]

Nothing to do w/ mining data.

The links you gave described nothing about how someone who does social media marketing actually works but described the end product.
Understanding about the needs of the customer and what the customer thinks about your product is sometimes important in marketing and it requires data mining these days in a time with a lot of information.
Testing whether social media approach A or B is more effective also requires data mining.

[ruchirkc]

Originally Posted by Brutha

The links you gave described nothing about how someone who does social media marketing actually works but described the end product.
Understanding about the needs of the customer and what the customer thinks about your product is sometimes important in marketing and it requires data mining these days in a time with a lot of information.
Testing whether social media approach A or B is more effective also requires data mining.

It just explains it there man. Here let me quote it for you:

Utilizing social networking and user-generated content platforms to promote a product, service or content. Often involves creating and participating in a dialogue with the target audience, rather than forcing an advertisement upon them. SMM can also include creating and promoting viral content that is meant to be shared by users. Many marketers are not comfortable with the lack of control over social media but when approached properly, social networks can be extremely effective channels for building product evangelism, reputation management or corporate branding.

So, a social media marketer just makes viral "content" (and by content, here I mean stuff such as widgets, software programs, plugins, and normal blog-posts) and then uses the various social media channels to promote it. It might involve a bit of copywriting, and yes knowing the needs of the people who you want to target to is important, but its not part of economics...

How does SMM involve A/B testing? It's not like Google AdWords where you test the conversion rate. SMM is mostly used for branding purposes and building buzz, in general. SMM isn't used to make money (directly, at least).

And even if someone wants to A/B test (for god knows what), that doesn't make it that someone w/ a degree in Economics will have an edge over others. Most sensible people use software programs to do that automatically...

[ruchirkc]

And the point I was trying to make is that the 10,000 Hr "rule" is just a made-up one. You can argue all you want about SMM and how it somehow ties into Economics, but I can show you 1001 examples, where the said expert didn't take 10K hours to become an expert.

And you didn't even respond to part earlier where I said (unless I count your "Is that any news?" as a response):

If the 10,000 hour rule was true, then the vast majority of the internet gurus are scammers because most don't fulfill the experience requirements

[AfteraDream]

Originally Posted by Addict

Also, I HATE when people say Tim cheated and use this example:



It's not like you found this out after the fact. Tim brings it up in the book to demonstrate a point. That everything other than the rules are negotiable, and he did follow the rules. I don't think Tim is a bad example. He's just shooting for results. He doesn't necessarily need to be the best in the world to do that.

He cheated, the rule is you have to be at certain bodyweight to compete in one certain class. He just used a loophole. Don't defend him because he admitted it, still doesn't make it honorable and acceptable...at least for those with moral standards... Had he competed in the class where everyone was his bodyweight he would have had his butt kicked...

You say he shoots for results, but the end doesn't justify the means...

[Addict]

NO. He didn't cheat. When he weighed in, they put him in the weight class of his current weight. It's a common practice.

[ruchirkc]

Originally Posted by AfteraDream

He cheated, the rule is you have to be at certain bodyweight to compete in one certain class. He just used a loophole. Don't defend him because he admitted it, still doesn't make it honorable and acceptable...at least for those with moral standards... Had he competed in the class where everyone was his bodyweight he would have had his butt kicked...

You say he shoots for results, but the end doesn't justify the means...

Here's a quote from a post of his:

The kickboxing anecdote was controversial because those who cried foul have never competed in weight-class-based sports. This post will also therefore serve as a primer for armchair critics who should do more due diligence. Cutting weight is a prerequisite for elite competition in such sports — period.

Source: How to Lose 30 Pounds in 24 Hours: The Definitive Guide to Cutting Weight

Fact is, what he did is common. Research it...

[rocksupreme]

There are a lot of bad examples on this thread.

Language learning is a skill in itself. After learning one language, it's easier to learn others. 10,000 combined hours of language study would make anyone a polyglot.

Re: Tim Ferris's weight manipulation. It's not cheating, and it's not dishonorable. Doing crazy stuff to make weight has been a part of boxing, wrestling, and martial arts competition as long as there have been weight classes. Ferris did some research and used every technology available to achieve fantastic results, but he's no more of a cheater than any other high level athlete (all of whom will take any advantage allowed by the rules of their chosen sports).

The doors? Are you kidding me? I have much respect for Seth Godin, but nobody ever said the Doors were experts. They were a great band, but not because they were expert musicians. Nobody ever said that Kurt Cobain was a great guitarist or singer, but he made his impact in other ways.

Expertise, winning, and influence are all different things.

Social media is new. In new fields, expertise is relative. People who have done the most of something with the greatest results are more expert than others. If you wanted to become a social media expert from scratch now, you'd have a lot of catching up to do, and tis would require putting in lot of hours every day until you (after a period of time) were able to get better results than current experts.

10000 hours isn't a rule. All rules have exceptions anyway. What this number gives us is a guideline for assessing how much work we will have to put in to achieve mastery of a given subject of skill. It doesn't mean that doing something for 10000 hours entitles us to fame or success - just that we'll be really, really god at it.

[AfteraDream]

Originally Posted by ruchirkc

Here's a quote from a post of his:

Source: How to Lose 30 Pounds in 24 Hours: The Definitive Guide to Cutting Weight

Fact is, what he did is common. Research it...

Still doesn't make it honorable in my mind. If everyone else starts jumping from the roofs, will you be going to too? According to this you will...

[ruchirkc]

Originally Posted by AfteraDream

Still doesn't make it honorable in my mind. If everyone else starts jumping from the roofs, will you be going to too? According to this you will...

Moral standards are subjective.

If everyone else starts jumping from the roofs, will you be going to too?

This isn't the question of if someone else does it, you do it.

Though, its kind of funny that all of the criticism I've heard about Ferriss's kickboxing example comes from armchair critics. I have yet to see one from someone who's actually in the field...