The Truth About the 10,000-Hour Rule (And Why It Still Matters)

“Practice isn't the thing you do once you're good. It's the thing you do that makes you good.” - Malcolm Gladwell

You’ve probably heard of the ‘10,000 hour rule’—the idea that it takes 10,000 hours doing something to become an expert at it. 

But if you Google ‘the 10,000 hour rule’, you’ll probably find more articles attempting to debunk it than actually explaining it. 

Why is that?

In this email, we’ll explain a brief history of the 10,000 hour rule, why it’s fallen out of favour—and why we think it still matters.  

The “10,000-hour rule” first became popular after Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers, which suggested that mastery in any field requires roughly 10,000 hours of practice. Gladwell cited examples like The Beatles, and Bill Gates, who may have spent roughly that time on their craft. 

However, this rule was a simplification of research conducted by psychologist Anders Ericsson. 

In a 1993 study, Ericsson and colleagues investigated violinists at a German music academy. They found that the best performers had around 10,000 hours of practice by age 20, but this was simply an average, not a minimum requirement. Some violinists had fewer than 10,000 hours and still excelled, while others had practiced more without reaching the same level. The key finding was that deliberate practice—focused, effortful, and feedback-driven work designed to improve performance—was more important than the number of hours. 

Deliberate practice requires breaking down skills, isolating weaknesses, and working toward specific goals, rather than simply performing repeatedly. Confusing the two was Malcolm Gladwell’s mistake. 

But Ericsson’s research, too, has had its fair share of criticism. . .

• A 2014 meta-analysis by Zach Hambrick and colleagues found that deliberate practice explained only 26% of performance variance in games like chess and music and even less in other fields. Critics argued that factors like genetics, working memory, and even luck also influence performance. Others noted that Ericsson’s research focused on structured, measurable fields like music and chess, which don't generalize as well to creative or entrepreneurial domains.

• Studies have found heritable components in musical ability, spatial reasoning, and even the capacity to engage in practice itself. For example, some people seem biologically predisposed to better auditory discrimination or greater working memory—traits that give them an advantage from the start. 

• Practice requirements differ vastly between individuals. In some cases, individuals reach expert-level performance after far fewer than 10,000 hours, while others surpass this threshold without achieving true mastery. This variability challenges the notion of a predictable practice formula for success.

Bottom line?

While the 10,000 hour rule has influenced society, people aren’t as convinced as they used to be over its legitimacy. While deliberate practice is definitely positively correlated with expertise, it’s no longer as simple as ‘put in 10,000 hours and you’ll master it’. 

While we can see where this new opinion is coming from, it still seems a shame—there was something quite catchy and empowering about the 10,000 hour rule. 

So we wanted to dig a little deeper and figure out if there’s still a case to be made for why the 10,000 hour rule matters.

After a lot of reading, thinking and personal experience on the topic, our personal opinion is simple. . .

For every individual, there is a certain number of hours it might take them to become an expert in any field. The hard part is, none of us know that number in advance. It might be 4,000. It might be 15,000. It might be 600. 

But one thing we can be certain of is that the number will be greater than 0. 

The 10,000 hour rule is useful because it sidesteps the uncertainty of our individual situation and creates a magnetic field that drags us further and further away from 0 and closer and closer to mastery. 

In other words, holding up 10,000 hours as a goal is useful because it keeps us in constant pursuit of mastery—not because it perfectly maps the road to get there. And when it comes to expertise, it’s the process that matters more than the outcome. 

As James Clear (author of Atomic Habits) writes “One of the greatest pitfalls of the 10,000 Hour Rule is that it makes expertise seem like a finish line that can be crossed. It can’t. Expertise is not a race that can be won. It is simply a process that can be embraced. Experts are constantly asking themselves, “What am I missing? What new information is out there? What can I learn? How can I grow?” Expertise is a process, not an outcome.”

What’s the practical takeaway?

One of our goals at What Counts is to turn self-improvement into more of a science, and tracking progress toward 10,000 hours is one of the ways in which we do that. 

If there’s a field we want to become an expert in, we track the amount of time we spend on that activity each day and log it in a spreadsheet. The spreadsheet then keeps a running total of that time, divides it by 10,000 hours and gives the result to us as a %. For example, our cooking level is 1.53%.  

It’s a fun way to track our progress in areas we care about. 

And whether or not we’ll actually be experts by the time that counter hits 100% is less important than the fact that we’ll be worlds better than we were when we started. 

At the end of the day though, this meme sums this email up pretty well. . .

Until next week, 

Benji and Jacob

P.S. What about those of us who aren’t trying to achieve mastery? 

In the book Let My People Go Surfing, Patagonia founder Yvon Chouinard shares the following: 

“I’ve always thought of myself as an 80 percenter. I like to throw myself passionately into a sport or activity until I reach about an 80 percent proficiency level. To go beyond that requires an obsession and degree of specialization that doesn’t appeal to me. Once I reach that 80 percent level  I like to go off and do something totally different; that probably explains the  diversity of the Patagonia product line—and why our versatile, multifaceted clothes are the most successful.”  

While true mastery lies in that remaining 20%, going from 80-100 is often exponentially harder than going from 0-80. 

While 8,000 hours might not sound significantly different from 10,000, there’s another way to think about it…

The Pareto principle states that, for many events, roughly 80% of the outputs come from 20% of the inputs. In the context of this quote from Yvon, we could guess that 80% of the results (or proficiency) can be achieved with 20% of the effort. 

If we’re still holding to our 10,000 hour rule, that’s about 2,000 hours to get 80% of the way there. For many of us, that’s good enough. 

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