The Road To Excellence

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1. JustinSkycakAug 2024
   Definitely. Also, lesser known, but his earlier book The Road To Excellence: The Acquisition of Expert Performance in the Arts and Sciences, Sports, and Games.

   The Road to Excellence reads almost like a book club among researchers who read Bloom's Developing Talent in Young People and Ericsson's numerous papers on deliberate practice. Each chapter is from a different researcher or group, often with different views. (I was initially a bit put off by the lack of cohesiveness, but in hindsight, I like the resulting feel of authenticity: things get messy at the edge of human knowledge.)

   And for anyone who hasn't read Developing Talent in Young People yet, I would highly recommend. The main idea is that Bloom studied the training backgrounds of 120 world-class talented individuals across 6 talent domains: piano, sculpting, swimming, tennis, math, & neurology, and what he discovered was that talent development occurs through a similar general process, no matter what talent domain. In other words, there is a "formula" for developing talent -- though executing it is a lot harder than simply understanding it. (More info: https://www.justinmath.com/book-review-bloom-developing-tale...)

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2. riazrizviMay 2023
   I found the best resource for myself is Anders Ericsson's The Road To Excellence. The biggest problem I keep finding throughout my own career is I keep losing sight of where I need to focus to push my game forwards. Most of the online resources are aimed at the overcrowded beginner and mid-level end of software development, so after a certain point, you're writing your own syllabus to advance. Or you can just go broad, which I think is pointless. Ericsson highlights deliberate practice, the idea of finding your discomfort zone, where it most matters. I think there is a lot more to it than he writes in the book, but it's a good introduction on the topic.

   The thing about ageism is just a simple matter of interests. It's reasonable to think managers and teams are looking for the best talent, but it's more like the game show Survivor in that people are looking for talent only up to a point, people need to feel your talent isn't going to expose their weaknesses. So as you get better past a certain point, it really gets worse for you trying to break into new groups.

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3. riazrizviFeb 2020
   In the academic community a seminal work on performance is Anders Ericsson's The Road To Excellence. It is based on a premise that excellence in one field is pertinent to excellence in another.
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4. riazrizviMay 2016
   Gladwell's works Blink and Outliers both paraphrase important scientific works, in the simplified style the references are largely glossed over. In place of Blink, read Antonio Damasio's Descartes Error, the seminal book on emotional reasoning. Instead of Outliers read Anders Ericsson's The Road To Excellence. Both of these more formal books cite sources meticulously.
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5. el_dev_hellSep 2019
   I find the "10,000 hour rule" odd (after reading both Ericsson and Gladwell). It's often misinterpreted as "10,000 hours of X will make you an expert in X", but that's not how I interpret the claims by Ericsson or the simpler repackaging by Gladwell.

   I read the article you linked and was hoping it contained new research to clarify or refute the work done by Ericsson, but it didn't. The linked article regurgitates two of the key points in The Road To Excellence by Ericsson:

   * You need to be engaged in deliberate practice (e.g pushing yourself outside of your current area of expertise). Not mindless work. I'm not an expert driver from my 10,000+ hours of commuting. * 10,000 hours isn't a set figure. It's an average at best. The premise is claiming that people in the top-tier (2%-5%) spent a lot of time consistently practicing their area before reaching the top-tier.

   The "10,000 hour rule" hasn't been debunked. It just doesn't mean what some people assume it means when first hearing it refereed to as the "10,000 hour rule".

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6. utokuApr 2011
   The first study I know of is the 1996 book "The Road to Excellence" http://www.amazon.com/Road-Excellence-Acquisition-Performanc... . I got it after I read Peter Norvig's essay on "Teach Yourself Programming in 10 Years." http://norvig.com/21-days.html .

   So here are the numbers, in short, for mastery:

   It takes about 10k hours of practice.

   It takes about 10 years.

   That means about 3 hours of practice everyday. Everyday.

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