I didn’t say it was easy, I said it was easier. Being the world’s best mathematician/musician is much easier than being the world’s best mathematician. If you haven’t yet, check out the prerequisite.
I think it takes a lot less than ten thousand hours to reach competence at most skills, though this might be down to our definitions of competence? That’s eight hours a day for three or four years, and it usually makes me think of Gladwell’s 10,000 Rule from Outliers which is about achieving expertise.
I think riding a bike took me a weekend to learn so maybe ten to twenty hours, learning to play first person shooter videogames took me a weekend or two so about twenty to thirty hours, I picked up massage over a semester or two of class so about eighty hours of class time? I’m not saying I mastered those subjects that fast. I do think I learned enough to make use of them; you likely only need to practice riding a bike for a weekend or two before you can use it to get around town faster than walking.
If you have ten thousand hours of practice as a guitarist, your next fifty hours could go into being better at playing guitar. They could go into being better at audio recording, or setting up a great website for your band, or into being a better teacher for people who don’t know guitar yet. If you’re an amazing biology researcher with thousands of hours in bio, a week or two of intense study on how to write really good grant applications is probably more useful to you than an additional week or two of intense study in biology. My understanding is mathematicians who also know a little computer programming have options even in math that you don’t have if you’re a pure mathematician.
I was responding to the requirement to be literally ‘the best’. Ranked number 1 out of 8 billion plus human beings.
‘Expertise’ is a similar concept, the point is that they are clearly capable of reliably doing whatever the title implies, and are recognized as such by their peers in that field.
At a lower standard I think it’s quite reasonable to assume there are many mathematicians cum guitarists cum computer programmers cum biologists. Of course the vast majority of these only dabble in one area or another, like you said with a small time investment.
However to be literally better than every single one of them would require a lot more time, so I picked 10000 as a nice round number.
I didn’t say it was easy, I said it was easier. Being the world’s best mathematician/musician is much easier than being the world’s best mathematician. If you haven’t yet, check out the prerequisite.
I think it takes a lot less than ten thousand hours to reach competence at most skills, though this might be down to our definitions of competence? That’s eight hours a day for three or four years, and it usually makes me think of Gladwell’s 10,000 Rule from Outliers which is about achieving expertise.
I think riding a bike took me a weekend to learn so maybe ten to twenty hours, learning to play first person shooter videogames took me a weekend or two so about twenty to thirty hours, I picked up massage over a semester or two of class so about eighty hours of class time? I’m not saying I mastered those subjects that fast. I do think I learned enough to make use of them; you likely only need to practice riding a bike for a weekend or two before you can use it to get around town faster than walking.
If you have ten thousand hours of practice as a guitarist, your next fifty hours could go into being better at playing guitar. They could go into being better at audio recording, or setting up a great website for your band, or into being a better teacher for people who don’t know guitar yet. If you’re an amazing biology researcher with thousands of hours in bio, a week or two of intense study on how to write really good grant applications is probably more useful to you than an additional week or two of intense study in biology. My understanding is mathematicians who also know a little computer programming have options even in math that you don’t have if you’re a pure mathematician.
I was responding to the requirement to be literally ‘the best’. Ranked number 1 out of 8 billion plus human beings.
‘Expertise’ is a similar concept, the point is that they are clearly capable of reliably doing whatever the title implies, and are recognized as such by their peers in that field.
At a lower standard I think it’s quite reasonable to assume there are many mathematicians cum guitarists cum computer programmers cum biologists. Of course the vast majority of these only dabble in one area or another, like you said with a small time investment.
However to be literally better than every single one of them would require a lot more time, so I picked 10000 as a nice round number.