I think this 10,000 hour idea is a vast oversimplification.
For example, it's often difficult to differentiate rate of progress from final ability.
As someone who has been involved with elite athletics, there are people out there who are simply better at absorbing training, in terms of biomechanics (mostly injury resistance), recovery, and compensation (getting stronger). I've seen lots of folks, new to a sport, with little training, absolutely crush mush more seasoned/conditioned folks. There are many examples of this (see: Chrissie Wellington). For each of them you can contrive some story "well, she lived at altitude", but that's the point, these people exist. And to be clear, I take nothing from Chrissie's worth ethic, etc. She's simply better than a whole host of other elite athletes that have worked hard their whole lives and she went out and clowned them for several years.
The difficult question is, if an average person kept at it for 10,000 hours, would Chrissie plateau and that average person catch up? And here you can substitute math, chess, coding, whatever.
I don't know, but both my sporting and software engineering experience (anecdotally, N=1) says no. Different people are sometimes differently suited to tasks. I'd love to understand the causation.
I think this 10,000 hour idea is a vast oversimplification.
For example, it's often difficult to differentiate rate of progress from final ability.
As someone who has been involved with elite athletics, there are people out there who are simply better at absorbing training, in terms of biomechanics (mostly injury resistance), recovery, and compensation (getting stronger). I've seen lots of folks, new to a sport, with little training, absolutely crush mush more seasoned/conditioned folks. There are many examples of this (see: Chrissie Wellington). For each of them you can contrive some story "well, she lived at altitude", but that's the point, these people exist. And to be clear, I take nothing from Chrissie's worth ethic, etc. She's simply better than a whole host of other elite athletes that have worked hard their whole lives and she went out and clowned them for several years.
The difficult question is, if an average person kept at it for 10,000 hours, would Chrissie plateau and that average person catch up? And here you can substitute math, chess, coding, whatever.
I don't know, but both my sporting and software engineering experience (anecdotally, N=1) says no. Different people are sometimes differently suited to tasks. I'd love to understand the causation.