Musicians and great customer satisfaction

One of the stars of Outliers, the bestselling book from Malcolm Gladwell, staff writer for The New Yorker, is a psychologist named K. Anders Ericsson, who did an investigation of three different groups of violin students: the unquestioned stars, those who were good but not great, and those who had no hope of becoming professional musicians.

 

What separated the stars from everyone else? It wasn't raw talent, Ericsson concluded (every student had huge talent.) It was sheer persistence--those who practiced harder did better, and those who practiced insanely hard became wildly successful.

Gladwell dubs this phenomenon the "10,000-hour rule." Becoming great at anything--sports, science, business--requires ten years of practice and 1,000 hours of practice per year. "Ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness," he argues.

 

So let’s do some maths;

Greatness takes 10 years to achieve

Greatness = 10,000 hours over 10 years

Greatness = 1000 hours per year

Greatness (assuming 4 weeks holiday per year) = 20.8 hours per week.

 

So if we work 40 hours a week on average, can we achieve great customer satisfaction in 5 years?

 

Comments

[Stephen Hampshire]

Nice post Richard. Peter Norvig has a good article about quick fixes and how long it really takes to learn programming:
http://norvig.com/21-days.html

Citing the same research you're talking about he says "The key is deliberative practice: not just doing it again and again, but challenging yourself with a task that is just beyond your current ability, trying it, analyzing your performance while and after doing it, and correcting any mistakes. Then repeat. And repeat again."

I think that's the key - not mindlessly doing the same things over and over again, but deliberately stretching yourself every day.