To take advantage of the 50% discount that Storytel has launched for students: www.storytel.com/tr/tr/ogrenc... You can listen to the details of the 10000 hour rule as an audio book: story.tel/outliers (Sponsored) - How do successful people become successful? To what do those business people, entrepreneurs, athletes, artists, and writers owe this success? A high intelligence? or to be gifted from birth? Of course, these are important, but not as much as we think.
The average person has an IQ of around 100. Einstein's IQ was 150. The person I'm going to talk about now has such an IQ that is immeasurably high by some standards. this very intelligent person named Christopher Langan has not achieved any remarkable success in his life.
So natural intelligence alone is not enough. But what about talent? To understand this, I will play you some music.
Has anyone heard of this piano piece before? To be fair It can not be considered extraordinary. If the composer of this piece had composed similar compositions and left it there at the beginning of his career, we probably wouldn't even have heard him.
But he didn't leave it there. Mozart is the composer of this piece, According to some, he is the most important musician and the classical music composer of all time.
So what I am saying is talent alone is not enough. As we see in the case of Mozart, You need to have someone around you who will support, encourage, and if the need be, correct you. Even this is not enough by itself either. You need to, for a certain period of time, devote yourself, prepare and practice about the subject.
When we say a certain period of time, exactly how much time are we talking about? Scientists have an answer to this. There are many studies on this subject, even if I chose music, let there be no misunderstanding; this is not just about how successful the musicians or composers are nor how much effort they spend to be successful. But anyway let's continue with the same theme.
This research was done in a music academy. Violin students at the academy were divided into 3 groups by their own professors. The first group has stars. Students with the potential to become world-class solo violinists. The second group is just those who are judged to be simply good. In the third group, there are students who are not expected to play the violin professionally, but intend to become music teachers in the national education system.
So, students of a music Academy are categorized into three different levels of success by their proffessors, right? Are these students of different abilities? No. Because they have already passed a certain talent test to enter this school. So, are some of them more successful than others because they started music at different ages? Again No. Because all of them, just like Mozart, started music at the exact age of 5, the age given as an example in interviews etc. Well but what is the difference between them? This is exactly what the researchers were trying to find out. And here's what the experts found out different for the three groups.
All of the students practiced at roughly the same rate, two to three hours a week for the first few years. When they reached the age of 8, some of them continued their practice hours, whereas others started to increase them. As you can imagine those were the students in the top group. They practiced 6 hours a week at the age of 9, 8 hours a week at the age of 12, 16 hours a week at the age of 14, and more than 30 hours a week at the age of 20. Look, the school is the same school. Is there encouragement and support? Definitely. But the same teachers give this support to everyone. Those who make the difference are those who play their violins knowingly and willingly and not because they are forced to, with the intention of achieving better. So how much better? Research has shown that those in the group with the best in school had a total of 10000 hours of practice until the age of 20. Only the good ones had 8,000 hours of practice, and the music teachers of the future 4000 hours.
When Ericsson and his colleagues, who conducted the research, compared not only violinists but also other instrumentalists such as amateur pianists and professional pianists, and a similar model emerged each time. Pretty much the same time period. This research shows that if any student is talented enough to enter a good music school, the most important thing that sets them apart from the others and make them World wide virtuosos is how long they practice and spend time with their instruments.
Like I said, it's not just about music. In order to achieve expertise in whatever field, it is necessary to spend a certain amount of time and actively engage in that subject, and this certain period of time is 10,000 hours. This is a magic number that comes up again and again in many examples and studies.