Have you done your 10,000 hours? | #AltDevBlogADay

Have you done your 10,000 hours? « #AltDevBlogADay

I’m not a big fan of Malcolm Gladwell​’s books, but one of the things I read about after seeing a review of his book Outliers got me thinking about my own students.
His book Outliers is based on the research of Anders Ericsson in which he studies the commonalities of “experts” and how they came to be that way. The upshot of which is that it is all about “practice”. Notionally, the book suggests that you become an expert at something by fulfilling a regimen of practice for “10,000 hours”. You can read the research yourself to see how far Gladwell has stretched that notion. The thing is, 10,000 hours works out to rougly 3.5 years of full time 8 hours-a-day work!