(no subject)

[lethargic_man]

I have read, in more than one place, that you can't become expert in anything without putting in I think it was ten thousand hours of practice. (To the objection "what about child prodigies like Mozart or Stevie Wonder?", the response was given that they were only prodigious as children for their age: had Mozart died as a child, no one would remember him today.)

I find this rather depressing: it means that I will now almost certainly never become an expert at anything again (except, probably, at work): I don't have the willpower to climb that hill again in my spare time. Certainly not after seeing the dream I poured thousands upon thousands of hours into in my teens and twenties deliver next to zero results.

*sigh* Is it really all downhill from here?

Discuss. [20 marks]

Comments

[khiemtran.livejournal.com]

The other way of looking at it is that a field of expertise as it applies to humans is just the amount of stuff that one person one person can master in ten years/10K hours. Anything that's too big to master in that time just gets split down into subfields. Anything that's too small, just gets expanded as the experts within the field raise the bar higher and higher.

So, looking at it that way, you could still become an expert in less that 10K hours if you can find a new field that no-one else has gotten around to putting the hours into yet.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

the other way of looking at it is that a field of expertise as it applies to humans is just the amount of stuff that one person one person can master in ten years/10K hours

Hmm; if a PhD seems is a reasonable signifier of "expert in this field" (if sometimes for fairly small values of "field") does the work to get to that, being whatever fraction of one's undergraduate work is pointing in that direction plus the graduate study entailed, come out of the order of 10 Khours ? Back-of-a-metaphorical envelope calculation looks like that for me, though I would have guessed it was less than that.