The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance

In a 1993 study of classical music students in Berlin, researchers found that the students’ expert ability was the result of 10,000 hours of accumulated practice. In the “now-famous paper—‘The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance’” (16), psychologist K. Anders Ericsson was the first to describe the ingredients of expertise in terms of 10,000 practice hours—or a “deliberate practice framework” (16), though he “never called it a ‘rule’” (16). Ericsson went on to suggest that all healthy people contain the genetic material to become experts, but that practice separates novices from experts.

While the mainstream media interpretation holds “that 10,000 hours is both necessary and sufficient to make anyone an expert in anything” (17), Epstein explains how training is not sufficient to make an expert but that it amplifies innate talent and is itself a product of genetics. Psychologists Guillermo Campitelli and Fernand Gobet carried the research further and found that 10,000 hours was an average and that actual experts reported a range of practice hours. Those with higher starting abilities, it seemed, needed fewer practice hours to achieve elite status.