Prodigies such as Emma Raducanu spend thousands of hours honing their skills, but could anyone deliver a world-class performance with enough dedication?
At the end of every edition of his children’s TV show Record Breakers, Roy Castle used to sing: “If you want to be the best, if you want to beat the rest, dedication’s what you need.” But is it all you need? Tennis star Emma Raducanu seemingly came from nowhere at 18 to triumph at this year’s US Open, prompting much speculation as to what in her early life could have seeded such prodigious success. Or perhaps it could all be summed up in the old joke: “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” “Practice!”
One thing most people have heard about practice is that you need to do 10,000 hours of it to get really good at something. This claim was widely popularised by Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers (2008), which cited a study suggesting that the best violinists at a conservatoire were those who had done thousands of hours more solitary practice than their peers. But the author of that study, the psychologist K Anders Ericsson, said Gladwell had misrepresented it. “First, there is nothing special or magical about 10,000 hours,” Ericsson writes in his own book about his research, Peak (2016). “Gladwell could just as easily have mentioned the average amount of time the best violin students had practised by the time they were 18 – approximately 7,400 hours – but he chose to refer to the total practice time they had accumulated by the time they were 20, because it was a nice round number.” Moreover, he points out, the figure of 10,000 hours for the best 20-year-old violinists was “only an average”: half of the best players had not actually accumulated that much practice.