Debunking the "1,000 hours of practice" myth

Posted by JBfrom
Nov 13, 2011 at 12:44 AM

“Playing a musical instrument also involves physical dexterity and coordination that is absent from knowledge work (assuming you can already type extremely fast).”

Perhaps. Or perhaps it’s all about the myelin, baby: http://www.viperchill.com/productivity/

“it means consciously working at the edge of one?s abilities to increase the failure rate (and therefore the learning rate).”

One can do the same in knowledge work, by working at the edges of one’s knowledge base instead of repeating the known. Think boring vs. learning jobs. It doesn’t have to be a new skill, it can be a deeper application. The violinists are not learning a new instrument every practice session.

I disagree that an initial decision is required for focus. Tight integration of habit with workflow with software affordance can lead one insensibly into focused productivity.

It happens to me every morning. I wake up blearily, check email and RSS for a stimulation hit because I’m just completely lazy, find something interesting and start writing a response in a (highly-focused) Emacs scratch file (out of sheer laziness, so I can get it out of my head, because thinking requires effort), run out of new RSS entries, and then I’m off to the races because I’m already in my workflow environment, and the next step is as habitual as “left foot after right foot”.

I would say that the defining minimum is not so much FOCUS as ENERGY. Below a certain energy level the brain cannot actively engage stuff, and is forced to passively consume mindless entertainment.

Focus is much more involuntary than I think most people credit it. What most people consider to be “focusing” is to me just burning energy to compensate for poor passive barriers against emotional and informational distractions. This can work but is fatiguing. But if you have good passive barriers, you don’t need to burn energy to focus. If you’ve ever stared at a wall for hours in a stupor, that much is obvious.

So yeah, to return to my morning example, by the time I’ve exhausted the RSS and gotten my first cigarette and meditation going, I already have so much momentum that it would take a serious effort not to continue working in a focused productive way. As long as I’m not sick, this holds true.

Sure, there are super-challenging cognitive tasks I may not feel like tackling right away, but that’s more a function of energy level. Trying to take them on before energy levels are sufficiently high would induce a spike in cortisol, which would require deliberate “focus” to push through. There’s no need, since I can just wait till later in the day, when I’ll be bored with the easy stuff.

Which brings up a related point - it’s good not to micro-manage task sequencing, but just select areas of work. That way you can pick subtasks by available energy. Also, it’s good to have a workflow that allows pedantic plodding with predefined baby steps, or complex leaps of genius, so that you can tackle topics in either a low-energy or high-energy way.

Yep, that got me through half a morning cigarette. Thanks guys!