Yeah, I think this passes the common sense test as well. It’d be quite suspicious if it took 10,000 hours to get to the top of the field of any discipline, regardless of the relative competitiveness or difficulty of different disciplines.
On the other hand, I think frontier’s point is good as well. If you don’t have any data, it’s reasonable to use the average as a rule of thumb. I think the real point of Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule is “It’s almost certainly going to take a ton of practice to become an expert at the thing, and you should expect and relish that.”
Yeah, I think this passes the common sense test as well. It’d be quite suspicious if it took 10,000 hours to get to the top of the field of any discipline, regardless of the relative competitiveness or difficulty of different disciplines.
On the other hand, I think frontier’s point is good as well. If you don’t have any data, it’s reasonable to use the average as a rule of thumb. I think the real point of Gladwell’s 10,000 hour rule is “It’s almost certainly going to take a ton of practice to become an expert at the thing, and you should expect and relish that.”