10.000 Hours Myth Debunked

I pub­lished this notion already on the Ger­man part of my blog, but then would want to repeat it here for the Eng­lish read­ers.

After see­ing again and again on the Face­book, at con­ven­tions and in clubs the desire and attempts of magi­cians to mas­ter some­thing and “be the best” of them all, I start­ed to rethink the “10.000 hours of prac­tice” myth. Prac­tice the Cen­ter Deal for 10.0000 hours and you will be the best in the world, and so on …

I found out that recent research has proven that this myth is not so true as we thought it to be (which is good for us magi­cians). The “10.000 hour rule” can even be con­tra pro­duc­tive, if wrong­ly under­stood. Read this arti­cle about the myth.

Josh Kauf­man explains it very well in his TedX talk, and this is of much more use for us “nor­mal” prac­ti­tion­ers of mag­ic. Let’s take our stan­dards down to a real­is­tic lev­el, prac­tice the stuff that is with­in our reach and which is use­ful to us. I know from my own expe­ri­ence what the sched­ule of only 30 min­utes of con­scious and focussed prac­tice a day, 5 days a week can do for you in just one month. Amaz­ing!

Maybe it would be of help not to try to get down use­less and unreach­able stuff that will bring us only he recog­ni­tion from the col­leagues (and I know many magi­cians that prac­tice cer­tain things only for the recog­ni­tion), but to focus on what is impor­tant in per­form­ing for the pub­lic. And for that, in mag­ic at least, we sure­ly don’t need 10.000 hours or ten years of dai­ly hard work. But some brains, con­cen­trat­ed and con­scious effort and the abil­i­ty to dis­tin­guish.

Div­ing into these top­ics, explor­ing and under­stand­ing them seems to be of greater val­ue on the long run in our devel­op­ments as magi­cians, than con­stant­ly feed­ing our brains with new tricks, sleights, gos­sips and shows, as exhib­it­ed usu­al­ly on our mag­ic con­ven­tions and get-toge­hters.

I think there would be a lot more enjoy­able mag­ic out there to be watched and the indi­vid­u­als would be more suc­cess­ful, hap­py and rec­og­nized …