How Much Work is Required to Succeed in a Field?

The secret of being successful in sport, art, science or many other fields is practice or training. In the study published in the journal Psychological Review in 1993, K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues showed that the difference between individuals with superior and normal performance in a field is related to their training time. In the study, it was determined that the most successful of the 20-year-old violin musicians worked an average of 10,000 hours, those who were classified as good worked an average of 7800 hours and the least successful ones averaged 4600 hours. The opinion that journalist Malcolm Gladwell later called the 10,000-hour rule (that it would take 10,000 hours to become an expert in a field) was based on this work by Ericsson and his friends.

A new study conducted in 2016 shows that training causes 26% difference between the performances of people interested in a game like chess, 21% between the performances of musicians interested in a branch of music, and about 18% between the performances of athletes interested in a branch of sports.