What if 10,000 hours isn’t the answer?

So, what if practicing 10,000 hours, starting from youth, isn’t always the path to success? I have just started a book called Range and that appears to be its premise. We all know about Tiger Woods playing golf since as a toddler and growing up to become a legend. But I didn’t know about Roger Federer sampling various sports activities as a youth before settling down to focus on tennis.

This tidbit was stated in the preface of the book.

One of the most striking things about that preface was a chart showing elites practicing at a lower number of hours per week as compared to the near elites when between the ages of 0 to 15. Then starting around 15, the near elites’ hours of practice start to decline while the elites’ hours dramatically rose. The near elites were kind of burning out.

That is a fascinating premise.

I’m still reading the book, but I thought I would take each chapter and comment on main thing I got out of the chapter. Because I hate forgetting all of the good points in the book and this one got a lot.

This post is going to be short because the preface was a short teaser to what the author will be talking about throughout the book. But I do want to end with this idea: since the future is going to be changing rapidly and most manual, routine activities will be automated, we are going to need to be able to do things that computers currently can’t do. For starters, computers don’t have agency, they don’t just get up and make a decision to do something. Currently, they are just acting to codes. They can’t do anything without codes. The other thing is humans can blend different knowledge or domain whereas computers are restricted by what the codes tell them to do. If they are programmed to identify objects in images, then they cannot link the objects in pictures to – I don’t know – a story about a particular event. Humans can blend things to come up with something new.

At least that is my understanding and at least for now.