When will you reach 10,000 hours?
Updated
Work out the date you would reach 10,000 hours at your pace, and read what the research behind the 10,000-hour rule actually found.
How long is 10,000 hours?
10,000 hours is 416 days and 16 hours of nonstop time. Nobody practices around the clock, so the real answer depends on your pace.
To reach 10,000 hours in 10 years, you need about 2 hours 44 minutes a day, every day. To get there in 5 years, about 5 hours 29 minutes a day.
The calculator on this page uses the same arithmetic as the 10k ETA in the app: the hours you still need, divided by your time a day, counted forward from today. It assumes no breaks, so read the date as a best case.
| Pace | Per week | Time to 10,000 hours |
|---|---|---|
| 30 minutes a day | 3.5 h | 54.8 years (20,000 days) |
| 1 hour a day | 7 h | 27.4 years (10,000 days) |
| 2 hours a day | 14 h | 13.7 years (5,000 days) |
| 3 hours a day | 21 h | 9.1 years (3,333 days) |
| 4 hours a day | 28 h | 6.8 years (2,500 days) |
| 20 hours a week | 20 h | 9.6 years (3,500 days) |
| 40 hours a week | 40 h | 4.8 years (1,750 days) |
Where the 10,000-hour rule comes from
The number goes back to a 1993 study by the psychologists K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Krampe and Clemens Tesch-Römer.[1] They recruited three groups of ten violin students from the Music Academy of West Berlin: the best students, good students, and students training to become music teachers.[2] Each violinist estimated how many hours a week they had practiced alone in every year since they started, and the researchers added the years up.[2]
The totals lined up with the groups. By age 18 the best violinists had practiced about 7,400 hours on average, and by age 20 about 10,000.[3] The authors concluded that differences between performers, even elite ones, are closely related to how much deliberate practice they have done, and that many traits once thought to be innate talent come from intense practice over at least ten years.[1]
Deliberate practice was the key idea: effortful work designed to improve performance, not just time spent doing the activity.[1]
What Outliers simplified
Malcolm Gladwell’s 2008 book Outliers[4] turned the study into the “10,000-hour rule”[5] and presented ten thousand hours as the magic number for expertise.[6] The phrase stuck, but the study had found something narrower. Ericsson later set out what got lost:[3]
- An average, not a threshold. Half of the ten violinists in the best group had not reached 10,000 hours by age 20.[3]
- A round number. Ten thousand was simply where the best group’s average stood at 20. At 18 it was about 7,400. In Ericsson’s words, there is “nothing special or magical about ten thousand hours”.[3]
- Not just any practice. Gladwell didn’t separate the violinists’ deliberate practice from other kinds of practice,[3] and the term “deliberate practice” never appears in his book.[6]
- Performing isn’t practicing. Gladwell’s example of the Beatles counted their long club performances in Hamburg. Ericsson pointed to a Beatles biographer’s estimate of about 1,100 hours of playing, and noted that performing isn’t the same thing as practice.[3]
- No promise. Many readers took the rule as a promise that almost anyone can become an expert with enough hours. Nothing in the violin study implied that: it compared students who were already good enough to study at the academy.[3]
What later research found
In 2014, Brooke Macnamara, David Hambrick and Frederick Oswald pooled 88 studies that measured both accumulated practice and performance.[5] Overall, practice accounted for about 12% of the differences in performance between people, and the share depended on the field: about 26% in games, 21% in music, 18% in sports, 4% in education and under 1% in professions.[5,7]
They concluded that deliberate practice is important, but less important than had been claimed.[7]
Chess shows how far the hours can differ between people. Guillermo Campitelli and Fernand Gobet found that every player who reached master level had practiced at least about 3,000 hours, but some needed about 30,000 hours to get there, and some practiced more than 30,000 hours without reaching it.[8]
In 2019, Macnamara and Megha Maitra repeated the violin study with 39 violinists in three groups of 13, using a double-blind procedure.[2] By age 20, the best and the good violinists had both practiced alone for more than 10,000 hours on average, and by 18 the best had not practiced significantly more than the good.[2] Practice explained 26% of the differences in performance, against 48% in the original study.[2]
Ericsson’s reply
Ericsson argued that the critics had measured something else. In a 2019 paper with Kyle Harwell, he said many studies in the meta-analysis counted practice that doesn’t fit the original definition: training designed by a qualified teacher for one student, with a clear goal, full concentration and immediate feedback, so the student can make repeated, gradually better attempts.[6] Reanalyzing only the studies that met those criteria, they estimated that practice explained about 29% of the differences in performance, or 61% after correcting for measurement error.[6]
Ericsson didn’t defend a fixed number either. He and Harwell wrote that there was no evidence for a magical number, and that for winning international piano competitions about 25,000 hours would be a more accurate figure.[6]
Researchers still disagree about how much practice explains. Neither side says practice doesn’t matter: the argument is about how much it explains, and which practice counts.[6,7]
So, is the 10,000-hour rule true?
Not as a rule. Counting your hours is a fair way to check that you’re putting in the time; it just isn’t a guarantee. A fair reading of the research:
- There is no magic number. 10,000 hours was the average of one group of violinists at age 20,[3] and the hours needed differ by field and by person.[6,8]
- Practice matters, but it isn’t everything. Across fields it explained from about a quarter of the differences in games to almost none in professions,[7] and researchers disagree about the exact share.[6]
- The kind of practice counts. The research is about deliberate practice, not time spent on an activity.[1,6]
- High levels still take thousands of hours. Every chess master in Campitelli and Gobet’s study had practiced at least about 3,000 hours,[8] and the best violinists averaged about 10,000 hours by age 20 in the original study[3] and more than 10,000 in the replication.[2]
What deliberate practice looks like day to day
Ericsson’s definition comes from music students working with teachers,[6] but it translates into habits for any skill:
- Pick one specific goal per session. A passage at a set tempo, one verb tense, one chess opening, hands in a figure drawing: small enough to improve today.
- Work just past what you can already do. Deliberate practice is effortful by design.[1] If it feels easy, you’re rehearsing.
- Get feedback right away. A teacher, a recording, a chess engine, an answer key: anything that shows what went wrong after each attempt.[6]
- Repeat with one correction at a time, so each attempt gets a little closer to the goal.[6]
- Give it your full concentration. Full concentration is part of the definition.[6] When your focus fades, take a break instead of logging tired minutes.
- Find a teacher if you can. In the original definition, a qualified teacher designs the practice.[6]
- Track hours and results. Hours show whether you’re showing up. Recordings, scores and test results show whether the hours are working.
Track your hours with 10k
10k is a practice-time tracker built around the 10,000-hour idea. Press Start when you practice: every session adds to your hours and moves your 10k ETA, the date you’d reach 10,000 hours at your current pace. Goals, streaks, a practice heatmap, and friends and clubs come with it. Free during launch.
Questions and answers
How many hours a day is 10,000 hours in 10 years?
About 2 hours 44 minutes a day, every day of the year. In 5 years, about 5 hours 29 minutes a day.
Who came up with the 10,000-hour rule?
Malcolm Gladwell named it in his 2008 book Outliers,[5] based on Ericsson, Krampe and Tesch-Römer’s 1993 study of violinists.[1]
Does 10,000 hours make you an expert?
Not by itself. The hours people need differ by field and by person, and what counts is deliberate practice, not time alone.[6,8]
Do I need an account to use the calculator?
No. The calculator is free and works without signing in. Tracking your real hours in 10k is free during launch.
Sources
- Ericsson, K. A., Krampe, R. T., & Tesch-Römer, C. (1993). The role of deliberate practice in the acquisition of expert performance. Psychological Review, 100(3), 363–406.
- Macnamara, B. N., & Maitra, M. (2019). The role of deliberate practice in expert performance: revisiting Ericsson, Krampe & Tesch-Römer (1993). Royal Society Open Science, 6(8), 190327.
- Ericsson, A., & Pool, R. (2016, April 10). Malcolm Gladwell got us wrong: Our research was key to the 10,000-hour rule, but here’s what got oversimplified. Salon, adapted from Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise.
- Gladwell, M. (2008). Outliers: The Story of Success. Little, Brown and Company.
- Association for Psychological Science (2014). Becoming an expert takes more than practice. Press release on Macnamara, Hambrick & Oswald (2014).
- Ericsson, K. A., & Harwell, K. W. (2019). Deliberate practice and proposed limits on the effects of practice on the acquisition of expert performance: Why the original definition matters and recommendations for future research. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 2396.
- Macnamara, B. N., Hambrick, D. Z., & Oswald, F. L. (2014). Deliberate practice and performance in music, games, sports, education, and professions: A meta-analysis. Psychological Science, 25(8), 1608–1618.
- Campitelli, G., & Gobet, F. (2011). Deliberate practice: Necessary but not sufficient. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 20(5), 280–285. Hours as quoted in the Association for Psychological Science release “Mastering chess: Deliberate practice is necessary but not sufficient, psychologists find” (26 October 2011).