Malcolm Gladwell Got This One Wrong

I've read every book Malcolm Gladwell ever wrote.

And the most famous thing he ever said isn't true.

Back in the early 1990s, there was a psychologist named Anders Ericsson who went to a music school in Berlin, Germany, to study the violin students there. What he wanted to figure out was what separated the really great players from the ones who were just good. And most people who played the violin were simply the latter. They were just good.

What he did was pretty simple. All he did was ask every student to go back through their whole life and try to estimate how many hours they had spent practicing by themselves. Of course, that's not an exact science, but it gave him something to go on.

The school had already ranked the students. The top group was what everyone considered the group headed for careers as soloists, top of their class, excellent violinists. The middle group was probably going to be part of an orchestra somewhere, making a living playing an instrument that they love, but probably not enough to be famous or to be wealthy. And the bottom group was going to just play violin recreationally and maybe end up teaching violin. There's nothing wrong with that, by the way, but it isn't Carnegie Hall.

When Ericsson added up all those hours, what he found was that the top group had averaged about 10,000 hours of practice by the time they turned 20. That was such a startling finding that Malcolm Gladwell built one of the most famous chapters in one of his most famous books on that one idea. That was it. That one finding. The best violinists at one school in one city estimated that they had practiced more than the ones who weren't as good.

Ericsson published that study in 1993, the year I graduated high school, by the way, and hardly anybody outside of psychology circles paid attention to it, because it really wasn't that interesting. But someone did notice, and that someone was Malcolm Gladwell, an amazing writer and someone who has an eye for interesting perspectives. He put it in a book called Outliers. And this "10,000-hour rule," as he called it, became a phrase I've personally heard repeated at just about every leadership conference I've ever attended. According to Gladwell, 10,000 hours is what it takes to become great at anything.

Welcome to The Real Jason Duncan Podcast. Every week I write a newsletter called What's Real? where I expose the lies most people believe and reveal the truths they were never taught, and every Wednesday I bring it to you right here.

This week's post is called 'I've Read Every Malcolm Gladwell Book. He Got This One Wrong.'

And before I go any further, I need to tell you something.

What I'm about to say is going to sound like I'm dumping on Gladwell, and that's not entirely true. I do respect him a lot as a writer, and I love his writing. But he got this one wrong.

I've read every book Malcolm Gladwell has written. Well, I've listened to most of them, which I count as reading, and Outliers might be my favorite one of the bunch. So when I started looking into the actual research behind the 10,000-hour rule and found out that it isn't true, I was honestly kind of shocked. I had been repeating that thing for years.

Now, I'm not going to quit reading his books over this. Everybody makes mistakes, and I'm certainly hoping that when I get something wrong in my newsletter, and I will, you'll give me the same grace I'm giving him here. But the fact is, he wrote something that isn't true, and a whole lot of people, me included, built their idea of what it takes to get good at something on top of it.

So let me tell you what Ericsson actually found, because he spent the rest of his life trying to get people to understand it.

The first thing is that 10,000 was an average. It wasn't a line you crossed. Some of those top violinists had practiced way more than 10,000 hours, and some of them had practiced a lot less. In fact, Ericsson said later that Gladwell, and I'm quoting him here, "incorrectly claimed that all the violinists in that group had accumulated over ten thousand hours," when the truth is about half of them hadn't gotten there yet.

The second thing is that the number itself was kind of random. Gladwell could just as easily have used the same students' total at age 18, which was about 7,400 hours. But 7,400 doesn't sound like much of a rule, does it? He picked age 20, the average came out to a nice round number, and that's why you and I both remember it.

The third thing, and this is the one that really got me, is that those 20-year-olds weren't masters yet. They were very good students at a very good school, but they weren't done. Ericsson's own estimate was that 10,000 hours had gotten them roughly halfway to the top of their field.

And if you want to see how random the number really is, look at chess. Researchers who studied chess masters found that some of them reached master level in about 3,000 hours, and others needed more than 23,000. Same title, same board, same pieces, and a 20,000-hour difference between them.

But none of that is what bothered Ericsson the most. What bothered him was that people heard "10,000 hours" and decided the hours were the point. As if you could just log the time and greatness would show up like an Amazon package on your porch.

I call this the Odometer Lie, and here's what I mean by that.

You would never judge a driver by the miles on his car. I've known guys with 300,000 miles on a truck who were the worst drivers in the county, and everybody who rode with them knew it. But the 10,000-hour rule tells you to judge yourself, and everybody else, by how many hours are on the clock. And that's just as dumb.

I've learned this one the hard way in hiring. Somebody comes in with 20 years of customer service experience, and on paper that sounds great, until you find out they were a jerk for all 20 of those years. Nobody liked them, customers avoided them, and the only reason they kept the job that long is that the boss never saw it happen.

20 years of doing something doesn't mean 20 years of doing it right. Sound like anybody you've ever hired? Or, if we're being honest with each other, anybody you've ever been?

What Ericsson actually found was about a specific kind of hour, and he had a name for it. Deliberate practice. And deliberate practice looks nothing like doing your job. It's uncomfortable. It's aimed at the one thing you're bad at instead of the ten things you're already good at. It has feedback built into it, and almost every time, it has a teacher standing behind you saying, "No, do it again, and this time do it like this."

Doing more of what you already know how to do doesn't count. Ericsson said this over and over in interviews, and he eventually wrote a whole book called Peak that was mostly an attempt to correct what Gladwell had done with his research. A surgeon who does the same procedure the same way for 30 years has 30 years of experience, but he probably hasn't improved since about year 3.

Now, I want to be fair about the science here, because it's incumbent upon me to show you the whole picture. In 2014, a group of researchers pooled 88 other studies together and found that practice explained a smaller share of the difference between performers than Ericsson had claimed, and the two camps have been arguing about it ever since.

But notice what neither side is arguing about. Nobody in that fight thinks there's a magic number. They're arguing about how much the right kind of practice explains, and both sides agree the wrong kind explains almost nothing.

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is a golden cage.

The gold is that the rule feels fair. Anybody can put in hours, so anybody can get great, and every hour you log feels like it's getting you closer. It feels like discipline. It feels like paying your dues.

The bars are that the hours don't get you closer. Only a certain kind of hour does, and the rule gives you no way to tell the difference. So you can grind for 20 years and end up with one year of skill repeated 20 times, and the whole time you'll be proud of yourself for putting in the work.

So how do you get out? Let me give you a picture.

Imagine a guy who decides he's going to become a painter, and he spends 10,000 hours painting in his garage. Alone. He never shows anybody his work, and he never learns a single technique from anybody who actually knows one. What's going to happen is that he'll get better at whatever he's already doing, and he still won't be any good.

Now imagine that same guy spends one afternoon with a painter who really knows what he's doing. The teacher watches him for 10 minutes, tells him he's been holding the brush wrong the whole time, and shows him how to mix a color he's been getting wrong for 5 years. One afternoon, and everything he paints from then on is different.

That's the power of a teacher. That's the power of a coach, a mentor, a mastermind, anybody who has already been where you're trying to go and is willing to watch you do it and tell you the truth about what they see. Ericsson's research kept coming back to that person. The violinists who got great didn't just practice more. They had somebody designing the practice.

Solomon figured this out about 3,000 years before anybody thought to study a violinist. This is Proverb 27, verse 17, from the New King James.

"As iron sharpens iron, so a man sharpens the countenance of his friend."

I want you to hear that again and notice that there's no time mentioned. It doesn't say iron sharpens iron after 10,000 strokes. It says iron sharpens iron, period, and the reason that works is friction. Two pieces of iron rubbing against each other is what takes the dull edge off.

You can't get sharp by yourself. A blade sitting in a drawer for 20 years doesn't get any sharper no matter how long it sits there. Solomon's point is that sharpening takes another person, and it takes that person pushing back against you. Which is exactly what Ericsson found in Berlin, and exactly what the painter got in one afternoon. It's also exactly what the guy with 20 years of customer service never had, because nobody ever told him the truth.

So the next time somebody tells you it takes 10,000 hours to get great at something, I want you to ask them a better question. 10,000 hours of what? And who was watching?

Because you don't need 10,000 hours. You need somebody who knows what they're doing to tell you what you're doing wrong, and then you need to go do it differently tomorrow.

I just spent 15 minutes telling you that hours don't make you better, feedback does. So let me tell you about the one tool I use every week that gives me feedback I can't get any other way, because they also happen to sponsor this show.

Every follow-up I send after a podcast, a sales conversation, or a speaking inquiry goes out through a tool called Dubb. I record one short video, and Dubb turns it into a personalized video email, a text, or a landing page with a button on it. I've used it since 2018.

But the reason I bring it up today is what happens after I hit send. Dubb tells me who opened it, who watched the video, how far they got before they quit, and what they clicked. That's feedback. That's the difference between sending 100 emails and hoping, and sending 100 emails and knowing which 10 actually landed. You can't get better at something you can't see, and Dubb lets you see it.

I've known Ruben and Darius, the guys who built it, for years, and they've sponsored this show for a long time. If you want to try it, go to therealjasonduncan.com/dubb and use the promo code T-R-J-D-5-0 at checkout for 50% off your first two months. That's therealjasonduncan.com slash D-U-B-B, promo code TRJD50, and the link is in the show notes.

If you want the written version of this every Wednesday morning before the episode drops, it's free. Go to therealjasonduncan.com/articles and subscribe. That's therealjasonduncan.com/articles, and the link is in the show notes.

One more thing before I let you go. I'm booking keynotes for 2027. If you know somebody who puts on a conference or runs an industry group, send them to therealjasonduncan.com/speaking. That's therealjasonduncan.com, slash, S-P-E-A-K-I-N-G, and the link is in the show notes.

If you got something out of today, send it to somebody who's been telling you they just need to put in their 10,000 hours.

As always, I am your host, The Real Jason Duncan, and Jesus is King.