The 10,000-Hour Rule Myth and the Rest Revolution
Good work ethic requires equally good unhustle ethic
One of my favorite writers, Malcolm Gladwell, popularized a theory called the "10,000 hours rule" in his book Outliers, suggesting that we need 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery in a field. While Gladwell cited research on deliberate practice by Anders Ericsson, the rule has been misunderstood and turned into a catchy oversimplification of Ericsson's work. Frustrated with Gladwell's interpretation, Ericsson wrote an open letter titled "The Danger of Delegating Education to Journalists."
The Original Research: What Ericsson Actually Found
The Berlin Academy Study (1993)
Anders Ericsson's landmark study from 1993 at the Berlin Academy of Music divided violinists into three groups:
"Great": World-class orchestral potential
"Good": Symphony orchestra potential
"Average": Future music teachers
The Real Numbers:
Great group: 10,000 hours by age 20 (but only 7,400 hours by age 18)
Good group: 8,000 hours by age 20
Average group: 4,000 hours by age 20
The practice escalation pattern:
Age 9: 6 hours/week
Age 12: 8 hours/week
Age 14: 16 hours/week
Age 20: 30+ hours/week
What Gladwell Got Wrong
10,000 was an average, not a requirement - half of the best violinists hadn't reached 10,000 hours
The number is "totally arbitrary" according to Ericsson - catchy but not scientifically meaningful
Individual variation is enormous - one chess player reached master level in 3,000 hours, another needed 23,000 hours
At 20, they were very good but not yet experts - they were still developing
In response to Erickson's research, Princeton psychologist Brooke Macnamara published a study titled "Deliberate Practice and Performance in Music, Games, Sports, Education and Professions: A Meta-Analysis" in 2014. After compiling data from eighty-eight studies involving over eleven thousand participants total, Macnamara and her colleagues found that only about 21% of the variation in music performance can be explained by deliberate practice.
"There is no doubt that deliberate practice is important, from both a statistical and a theoretical perspective. It is just less important than has been argued" (Princeton University).
They found that deliberate practice explained 26% of the variance in performance for games, 21% for music, 18% for sports, 4% for education, and less than 1% for professions and concluded that deliberate practice is essential, but not as important as it has been argued. One must also take into consideration IQ, working memory, and the age of the person.
But there's more to the dilemma.
Alex Soojung-Kim Pang 's Revolutionary Insight
In his book Rest: Why You Get More Done When You Work Less, Alex Soojung-Kim Pang reveals Gladwell's crucial omission:
Gladwell said: 10,000 hours of practice = expertise
Pang discovered it should be:
10,000 hours of deliberate practice
12,500 hours of deliberate rest
30,000 hours of sleep
Looking at it this way, deliberate practice contributes only 25% to the success formula.
Pang's Core Insight
"Work and rest are actually partners. They are like different parts of a wave. You can't have the high without the low. The better you are at resting, the better you will be at working." - Alex Soojung-Kim Pang
What Elite Performers Actually Do During Practice
The True Pattern from the Berlin Study
Elite violinists practiced only 4 hours per day on average, but this practice was:
Alone and deliberate (not social or casual)
Very effortful and focused on error correction
Structured in 60-90 minute sessions
Not inherently enjoyable - it was work, not fun
The Session Structure
Elite performers (destined for soloist careers):
3.5 hours total daily practice
Split into three 60-90 minute sessions
Frequent naps between sessions (3 napping hours per week)
Average performers:
Only 1.4 hours of daily practice
No rest between sessions
Single longer sessions rather than multiple focused ones
What Elite Performers Do When They're "Done" with Practice
The Strategic Rest Architecture
1. Strategic Napping
Elite violinists napped 3 hours per week between practice sessions
Sleep requirement: Elite performers need MORE sleep than average, not less
Stanford swimmers who slept 10 hours nightly showed significant improvement in sprint time, reaction time, and technique
2. The Hypnagogic Advantage
Elite creators like Salvador Dalí and Thomas Edison used "slumber with a key" - micro-naps lasting less than a second:
Hold an object that drops when dozing begins
Access hypnagogia - the creative state between wake and sleep, where the mind accesses a more playful state and can come up with new solutions to problems
83% of people in this state solved creative problems, vs. 31% who stayed awake
The Subconscious Work Phenomenon
Alex Pang's Key Discovery:
"Our minds do a really good job working on problems even when our formal attention is somewhere else... That is our subconscious minds continuing to work on problems even when we are focused on other things."
The Process:
During rest, the creative subconscious continues working on challenges.
Like trying to remember an actor's name - it "pops up" when you stop trying.
Deliberate rest provides space for this subconscious problem-solving
The 4-Hour Workday Pattern
Greatest minds all adopt a 4-hour workday for deep, creative work.
The remaining time is spent in "inward focus" activities that boost creativity.
The brain is only 5-10% less active when resting - it's still working, just differently.
The REM Sleep Creativity Connection
The Science of Sleep and Creativity
Research on Remote Associates Test (RAT):
Participants who got REM sleep improved by almost 40% in creative problem-solving
Quiet rest and non-REM sleep groups showed no improvement.
REM sleep facilitates "formation of associative networks from previously unassociated information"
The Mechanism: REM sleep enhances integration of unassociated information for creative problem solving through neurotransmitter system changes.
Deliberate Rest vs. Passive Rest
Unlike passive rest (Netflix, scrolling), deliberate rest as defined by Pang:
Recharges while being physically or mentally active
Consolidates memories and searches for solutions
Fosters connections between seemingly unrelated ideas
Enhances the time spent working by making it more efficient
Examples of Deliberate Rest:
Walking in nature (activates the default mode network)
Engaging hobbies that require skill but aren't work-related
Meditative physical exercise
Art, music, or crafts that engage different brain areas
The Revolutionary Implications
Why This Changes Everything
Traditional productivity culture says: More hours = better results
Elite performer research proves:
4 hours of deliberate practice + strategic rest = peak performance
Quality of rest determines quality of work
Subconscious processing during rest often produces breakthrough insights
Sleep and micro-rest are where creativity actually happens
The Bottom Line
The 10,000-hour rule isn't just incomplete - it's misleading. Elite performers don't just practice more; they rest more strategically. Their "downtime" isn't downtime at all - it's when their subconscious minds are doing their most important work.
In the words of Alex Pang: "Rest is not the absence of work. It's the augmentation of work." The best performers understand this partnership between focused effort and strategic recovery - and it's why they consistently outperform people who just "work harder."
To be really good at what you do, it takes more than work ethic.
It takes smart unhustle ethic.
See you next week,
Milena
P.S. Get on the advanced reader team of my book Unhustle and be the first to learn a new way of living, working, and leading fit for the times we live in that leads to Work-Life Liberation.