Related is The Dan Plan in which a chap is trying to become a pro golfer by dedicating 10,000 hours to it (from zero experience) [1]. I seem to recall it was after Malcolm Gladwell claimed that it takes that long to achieve mastery in a discipline. Dan's almost at the 5 year mark now. I check back a couple of times a year to see how he's getting on.
Gladwell's 10,000-hour-rule is, at its core, anecdotal.
The 10,000-hour-rule seems like more of an observation that people who are really good at things are likely to have spent a lot of time doing them.
My anecdotal observation: The people I know who are masters of things, were very good at those things early on and that encouraged them to practice more and more.
I thought it was, at its core, research made by K. Anders Ericsson ("The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance"), but I have to confess that I have read neither author, so could you please expand on why it is anecdotal? Thank you!
I've been checking in a bit too and am somewhat discouraged. I'm not exactly sure how he is counting his rounds towards his hour goal, but it seems like he is playing more and more and practicing less and less. He also seems very equipment obsessed. It could just be that what he writes about has changed.
It would have been more accurate to say "It will be interesting to see how well a gross mischaracterisation of Gladwell's claim stands up to empirical testing".
He probably imagines Gladwell's claim to be, and I'm quoting from Outliers, "In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours." You'll note this unequivocally contradicts the claim you just made.
That Gladwell later wrote a much, much less popular article for the New Yorker in which he walked back that totally outlandish claim doesn't justify indignation at people remembering what he wrote.
In any discussion about mastery, people who have never read Outliers will attribute Gladwell with the idea of the 10,000 Hour Rule, take it out of context, and argue with it as if it were the main point of the book, or as if it was presented as a hard and fast rule.
This is a good read on the 10,000 hour myth. I can't remember where I originally heard that the idea as pushed by Gladwell has been debunked, probably the You are not so smart podcast. I've no personal insight to say whether this is a rule or a myth but the original researcher seems to disagree with the popsci understanding of it.
A research paper authored last year cited a study which found that only 30% of the variation in performance could be attributed to deliberate practice.
My understanding was that the claim was that the 10,000 hours rule was a necessary but not a sufficient condition for mastery. So any world class golfer will have played for at least ~10,000 hours, but not every golfer who has played for at least ~10,000 hours will be world class. The only way the hypothesis could be falsified is if Dan becomes a world class golfer in less than ~10,000 hours.
It wasn't his claim originally; he took a paper and summarized it in the 10,000 hour rule, even the original paper author has denied the claim stated as such.
There is a better summary of the studies in "Thinking, Fast and Slow"
From what I remember, the claim is that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice work best when:
1. You get immediate feedback on success and failure
2. The thing you are trying to master has a skill set that can be improved, and that improving that skill is sufficient.
That #2 is tricky -- a counter example is stock picking. We have no evidence that there is a skill that can be learned that will make you better at picking stocks, so 10,000 hours of deliberate practice, even with immediate feedback, won't help.
I think that Dan is following a reasonable deliberate practice plan with experts and that he does get fast feedback. What we don't know is if Golf is something that is primarily/mostly/all skill based. For example, what if there was a physical body type that made you better and Dan didn't have it -- then 10,000 hours might not help.
Also, the point of the 10,000 hours is to train your intuitive mind (System 1, the fast thinker) to be as correct as your deliberate mind would be (System 2, the slow thinker) if you had time and attention. This whole thing is much better for thinking-based activities, like say, programming. I don't remember if the studies looked at physical activities and "muscle-memory".
Caveat: this is all from memory -- read "Thinking, Fast and Slow" if you have interest in this.
I read Thinking Fast and Slow and also I also read a better summary of the initial study, by the author I think. The 10,000 hour was taking from a study from top music performers (so, no random population), also there was a lot of variance; for ex among chess players some achieved mastery in 5,000 hours, others put in more than 10,000 and didn't achieve it. So lots of deliberate practice is good, arbitrary 10k hours is BS.
Could you point to some articles? I've read a few Buffett articles and his suggestion seems to generally be - invest in an index fund and leave it alone.
Warren Buffet's own letter to stockholders is the best source for what he thinks. It is not stock picking (he parks some money in stocks, but that's not the bulk of what he does). He calls what he does "capital allocation" not "stock-picking"
His basic strategy:
1. Write insurance: that gives you tons of cash up front. Get good at setting the price right so you can make money on the float (using money in near term, paying it back in the future)
2. Now with all of this cash, invest in things (like utilities) that need big cash investment, but then pay-back forever (basic rent collecting). He likes things with big barriers to entry (moats)
He does not care if his company stock goes up or down, all he cares about is intrinsic value: the cash generated (now and in the future) and time value of money. His benchmark is the S&P 500 -- he wants to beat their intrinsic value.
[1] http://www.thedanplan.com