Tuesday, 4 October 2011

Don't be a jack of all trades...be a master of one

Apparently it takes 10,000 hours to get really really good at something. That's alot of practice. 

Daniel Levitin in This is Your Brain on Music talks about the theory of 10,000 hours:
… ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is the equivalent to roughly three hours per day, or twenty hours per week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.
Just check out Harold Owens III. A Yo-yo expert. 


Everyone has to specialise in something at some point. Just some people's specialism is way cooler than others.

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

At first I thought that Yo-yo expert meant that he is amazing at saying Yo or something, I mean, you never know.

But he is incredible, especially the over the shoulder action.