Here’s How Much Practice You Need to Become the Best in the World

Here’s How Much Practice You Need to Become the Best in the World

By Claire Cameron edited by Clara Moskowitz

What does it take to become the best at something? The answer may not lie in early childhood practice or in lifelong, laser-focused dedication. Instead the path to becoming exceptional at a skill might look a lot more like meandering.

That’s according to a new paper, published today in Science, that seeks to untangle what it takes to excel across different disciplines, from sports to chess to classical music. Somewhat counterintuitively, performers who showed the greatest promise in their discipline as children rarely went on to reach the pinnacle of their field as adults.

The findings blow up the “10,000-hour rule,” the idea that if someone spends 10,000 hours deliberately practicing a skill, they will master it, says Brooke Macnamara, an associate professor of psychology at Purdue University, who co-authored the new analysis. The rule, which was popularized in the book Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, is based on a 1993 study of top-performing violin students. These students had each accumulated an average of 10,000 hours of practice by age 20. Yet they were not world-class performers, Macnamara points out.

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“Compared with their national-class counterparts (those who are very good but not the best), world-class performers often started their discipline later,” she explains. They tend to engage in multiple disciplines early on and don’t shine in one thing at a particularly young age. “They accumulated less practice in their discipline and more practice in other disciplines and then rose to the top relatively late,” Macnamara says.

“This pattern doesn’t follow the idea of the deliberate practice theory or the 10,000-hour rule, which suggest that starting early and maximizing deliberate practice is the path to elite performance,” she adds.

The results came as a surprise to Zach Hambrick, a co-author of the research and a professor of psychology at Michigan State University. “I remember thinking, ‘This is crazy,’” he says. “I had never thought about the relative benefits of training in one discipline versus training in multiple disciplines. Expertise is, by definition, specific.”

Importantly, the findings don’t suggest that you don’t need to practice or put in effort to become a chess grandmaster or a Wimbledon winner. Instead they show that top adult performers tend to be “late bloomers,” Macnamara says.

In sports, for instance, world-class athletes peak later than national-class athletes. Those that peak early achieve a level that is the best for their age but that isn’t as high as what the other group will eventually achieve at a later age.

The findings are intriguing, says Edson Filho, an associate professor of sport, exercise and performance psychology at Boston University, who wasn’t involved in the study. Certain sports, such as gymnastics, see athletes hit peak performance far earlier in life than others, he points out, and the analysis doesn’t get into other factors, such as money and coaching, that can influence who becomes the cream of the crop.

The research emphasizes that people change. Children can get burned out or simply lose interest. To become an expert, you need to consistently perform at a high level under the most challenging of conditions, he says. “That’s a long journey.”

The findings matter for institutions and coaches who might be biased toward directing resources at the kids who show the most promise in a given field early on rather than those who have the most potential to reach a world-class level. The research holds a message, too, for people who want to pursue a skill or dream but who didn’t win their school competition or make it to the top of their youth league: do not despair, Macnamara says.

“For people who didn’t follow the prodigy route, know you are in good company!” she says. “Most world-class performers didn’t either.”

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