I fully agree with you: the title is a sound byte and somewhat imprecise. Creating good titles has been an ongoing struggle for me. As an engineer, I want to be precise; as a writer, I want more readers. What I've learned over time is that something like "The 100-hour rule" performs way better than something like "the speed of knowledge acquisition decelerates rapidly."
Hopefully the post's gist is clear: it takes a long time to become a true expert/master, but much less time to surpass everyone who has zero knowledge about a field.
Hi there, thanks for the response. I actually don't mind the title--I've certainly been guilty of trying to increase my audience with a catchy title. I think the main reason I posted my comment was that even after reading your whole post, I still came away with "the 100-hour rule" sticking in my head pretty prominently. I think if I had written the article and chosen that title I would have tried to make people come away with a much stronger feeling about the fallacy of thinking about it in terms of "n hours" and more in terms of just deliberate focused effort.
If it's only about surpassing people with zero knowledge in the field, I'd say it's probably closer to 10 hours with a good teacher. But that's if they're consecutive.
I don't think they always need to be consecutive. I've seen situations where, say you practice deliberately for one hour. You see some noticeable progress, but for maybe the last half of the time your progress slows or levels off. Then, you can go away for awhile (maybe a day or a week) and when you come back you seem to be much better.
Not all activities work like this, but some do. Good teachers, however, pretty much always help. :)
I fully agree with you: the title is a sound byte and somewhat imprecise. Creating good titles has been an ongoing struggle for me. As an engineer, I want to be precise; as a writer, I want more readers. What I've learned over time is that something like "The 100-hour rule" performs way better than something like "the speed of knowledge acquisition decelerates rapidly."
Hopefully the post's gist is clear: it takes a long time to become a true expert/master, but much less time to surpass everyone who has zero knowledge about a field.