Did this make it into any of our discussions of how to study?

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

I don't know, but your link makes me feel better about my mediocrity, too. Thanks.

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- Brady
Want to see videos of low-dan mistakes and what to learn from them? Brady's Blunders

The so-called 10000 hour rule comes from Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, which is actually about people who are phenomenally good at something, not just expert. And it must be said that this ten thousand hour rule is merely a guideline, ball-park figure, rather like a go proverb, and so should be taken with a grain of salt.

Here’s what Malcolm Gladwell said about the 10,000 hour rule ...

“In fact, by the age of twenty, the elite performers (violinists) had each totaled ten thousand hours of practice.” — p. 38

“The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert—in anything,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin. — p. 40

“To become a chess grandmaster also seems to take about ten years. (Only the legendary Bobby Fisher got to that elite level in less than that amount of time: it took him nine years.) And what’s ten years? Well, it’s roughly how long it takes to put in ten thousand hours of hard practice. Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness.” — p. 41

This is not out of line with what we observe in Go, to reach professional level. If you spend an average of three hours per day "practicing" you will reach 10000 hours in ten years. Some people need more time, some spend more time per day, some people have more (or less) talent, so the time to reach mastery might be more or less than 10 years. Also important is what is meant by "practice". In go someone who mindlessly plays blitz games isn't really practicing, in my opinion. Someone who thinks about the moves played and reviews games, in other words plays seriously, is practicing.

The 10,000 hours idea is Gladwell's restatement of something that has a longer history, that it takes 5 years of study and practice to become expert at something. 40 hours per week, 50 weeks per year, for 5 years makes 10,000 hours.

Gladwell's reference to 10 years is playing to an innumerate readership. (He may believe that, as well.) For a top expert, 10 years involves more than 10,000 hours. OTOH, it probably involves less time than that competing against peers and betters.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

What people often forget about what was said in that book, and it is constantly taken out of context, is that they're not talking about the average person who picks up a violin, they're talking about the top level young violinists *after* they've put in the 10,000 hours. Same with the chess grandmasters, they are not typical people. They generally start young, they usually have some decent degree of talent and they are normally quite driven to succeed. I don't think anyone (from the academic side) is saying you could pluck a kid off the street, give them a violin and make them practice for 10,000 hours and you'd have a concert soloist at the end of it. They'd probably be pretty good at the violin, they'd also quite possibly detest it with a passion, but they're not necessarily going to reach elite level just because they put the magic number of hours in.

Though, to be fair, the experiment with the Polgar sisters in chess is very interesting in this regard and the father has been quoted as saying the weaker of the three sisters (still female GM / IM) was the weakest because she had the most innate talent and never developed the right work ethic because things came too easily to her. Though I may be remembering that incorrectly, I read about it quite a number of years ago.

Boidhre
I don't know, for me "talent" is still the excuse of the lazy ones as in "I can't reach xy because I got no talent!". Of course there are people who understand certain things faster than others and thus have an easier time progressing (although I think this has a lot to do with very early "education") but in general I believe everyone who is healthy and driven (although money plays most of the time a role, too) can achieve anything : )
Real talent is in my opinion the difference between e.g. Go Seigen and the other 9-dan professionals =D

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

Talent is definitely used as excuse by people, that doesn't mean it doesn't exist though!

We're not born equal. You and I do not have the same "ceilings" when it comes to most things I imagine. Be it physical things like weight lifting or mental things like the ability to memorise long lists of digits. It's simply not the case that if we both work hard at something we'll get there if we set very high goals (and the discussion is about being exceptional at something not merely very good). I mean, I cannot say that if I worked hard for ten years at go, say 30 hours a week, that I'd definitely be at least EGF 6d on the rating table at the end of it. I really, could not say that given any amount of hours or time to do it in. Life is fundamentally unfair, we can't achieve anything we want unless what we want is very pedestrian.

People will always find some excuse for laziness and mediocrity.
Its a little bit sad, and a little bit funny.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

Uh ....... Bobby Fisher was the youngest up to his time. A bit later and Gary Kasparov was also 14 when he made grandmaster. But Judit Polgar was just twelve! (and she made international grandmaster a month younger than Bobby Fisher did). Let's not write the ladies out of history.

So... does it prove the point (anybody can make grandmaster with sufficient effort?)
Or does it contradict it (Polgars were also very talented, maybe more so then Fisher and Kasparov?)

By the way...
How do we know Fisher was really that talented? He was an anti-social loner who, if not for chess, would probably turn out really bad at early age. Chess was all he had and he studied it more than anybody else in his time, and possibly by accident also discovered better learning methods. He was more driven, more dedicated, more absorbed, and more tenacious than anybody else at that time - because unlike most humans he did not have much else in life (or for whatever reasons.)

It would be interested to speculate how strong others would have been if they did what Fisher did... maybe much stronger, maybe not... who knows.

I think that 'talent tells' only when all other things are equal. With Fisher and his contemporaries - they were not equal. So its hard to tell... He sure had talent, but was it really that exceptional? Or did he just work harder. And then there is the added advantage of his legendary memory...

PS>
Personally, I usually think of Tal as one of the few who made it to the top largely by talent. Fisher made it largely by hard work and desperate determination. Which is not to say he did not have talent, or Tal did not work hard. But we would never know what would have happened if these two reversed their working methodologies. Interesting.

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- Bantari
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WARNING: This post might contain Opinions!!

That's right: the (ball-park) 10,000 hours are a necessary but not sufficient condition.

One irony here about the Dilbert strip is Scott Adams himself must have also put in
the 10,000 hours in Dilbert (and/or his earlier drawings), and/or his earlier job (as an engineer?).
One user comment on that Dilbert page already said it:No doubt other people also have noticed this irony about Scott Adams' own hours.

With a first strip just 24 years ago, Scott himself should just about be getting the hang of it. (Although it's 10,000 hours not 10,000 strips)

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Dave Sigaty
"Short-lived are both the praiser and the praised, and rememberer and the remembered..."
- Marcus Aurelius; Meditations, VIII 21

It could very well be true, but I always felt that the "10,000" hour rule was a bit odd.

That's because, personally, I can spend my time with great variance in efficiency. I can study something intensively making my brain feel like it's working hard for 30 minutes, and it can feel like I've learned more than when I spend an hour casually studying.

I wonder if this "10,000" hour rule means 10,000 hours of "efficient, making your brain hurt" study, or something else...

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be immersed

It's just a rule of thumb. The point is to indicate the degree of commitment you need to excel at something. 10,000 hours is scarier than 5 years.

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The Adkins Principle:
At some point, doesn't thinking have to go on?
— Winona Adkins

Visualize whirled peas.

Everything with love. Stay safe.

I assume it accounts for the variance in efficiency. At 1 hour a day 10,000 hours would take 27 years. 5 hours a day is 5 years.

And anyone who would dedicate that much time to Go probably wouldn't spend 5 hours a day durdling.

I didn't want to say that talent does not exist, I was merely stating the point that talent is more often than not used as an excuse. As I said, in my opinion real talent is the difference between Go Seigen and other 9-dan professionals. At this level talent plays a major role, below that there is no substitute for hard work and dedication - in my opinion ; )
Then I agree that we are not born equal, a world of twins would surely be a odd place to live. But I disagree that we could not reach the same things when we would be _raised_ the same and have the same passion for the same field of study. I don't have scientific data or anything, that is just my belief : ) (Though I like to take Puma and Adidas as an example, which were founded by brothers who had a disagreement in their first company or the brothers Sean "Day[9]" and Nick "Tasteless" Plott, who made it both in the e-Sports-scene escpecially in StarCraft.)
I also don't believe in "ceilings", for me the entire human history speaks against such a thing. The one thing you maybe can call a "ceiling" is your lifespan, quite hard to exceed that ; )
Last but not least, people are unfair, life is not. Life is the result of your choices and how you like to see things, your perception of things.

To quote David Foster Wallace:

Full essay at http://web.archive.org/web/200802130824 ... ement.html - highly recommended : )

And we can achieve anything we want, if we want =)

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My "guide" to become stronger in Go

I didn't expect to see a David Foster Wallace quote on here (my wife liked his books a lot).



Tell that to someone with treatment resistant schizophrenia. Seriously. If you are healthy, intelligent, educated and not in poverty then yeah maybe life isn't particularly unfair and down to your choices and perceptions, but that's kind of the point of the statement "life isn't fair."

I think you're both right to some extent. External circumstances give some people advantages over others. In this sense, "life isn't fair". But I also feel that people rarely live up to their potential, and can achieve much more than they think they can with effort. In that sense, "with enough hard work, you can do whatever you want to do".

Personally, I try to ignore the idea that "life isn't fair", because it's not beneficial. Yes, there may be external "handicaps" that I must face in life, but it is not productive to focus on them if I want to achieve something. I must focus on what is in my control - that which I can do. So I like to cling to the idea that I can do whatever I want to do, because it is not useful to think of the things I cannot control.

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be immersed

I didn't always work hard. I feel lucky that now I do so.

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Occupy Babel!

You have to work with what you have. It means you must know your own limitations rather than ignore them, and work around them.
I have my own challenges that I will not detail here, but I have achieved much more than some people thought I could, by finding roundabout ways to deal with my weaknesses. However your weaknesses will not disappear just because you decide so, even if you work very hard, and you need to accept this, or your life will be full with bitterness and frustration.

I think of Lee Sedol who said he would not be a game commentator as he suffers from aphasia, and decided on an alternate retirement plan. You can't say this is someone who couldn't work hard to achieve a goal, or that he has in any way lowered his self-expectations. However he choses his fights according to his strength in some areas and weakness in others. Everyone who suffers from a major problem like handicap learns this lesson early but I think it's valid for everyone.