It’s a well-known belief that it takes at least 10,000 hours of practice to become an expert at a skill. However, a Michigan State University psychology professor is tapping the brakes on that axiom.

“Practice is indeed important to reach an elite level of performance, but this paper makes an overwhelming case that it isn’t enough,” Zach Hambrick said.

Hambrick suggests that natural talent and other factors are major influences.

“The evidence is quite clear that some people do reach an elite level of performance without copious practice, while other people fail to do so despite copious practice,” he wrote in the journal Intelligence. Ah, this may explain why I’m still struggling with piano lessons.

In looking at 14 studies of chess players and musicians, Hambrick found that practice only contributed to about one-third of the differences in skills among them.

Hambrick says that intelligence, innate ability, the age at which someone starts learning an activity, and working memory capacity could all contribute to the other two-thirds differences in skills.

Don’t worry. There’s some good news.

“If people are given an accurate assessment of their abilities and the likelihood of achieving certain goals given those abilities, they may gravitate toward domains in which they have a realistic chance of becoming an expert through deliberate practice,” he said.

In other words, build on your strengths and not your weaknesses.

–By Jason Hensel

(Source material: Michigan state University. Image via Flickr: Leo/Creative Commons.)