Daniel Levitin Quotes

One of the bigger misconceptions of learning is that many skills take a lifetime to get world-class at, or 10,000 hours to become world-class at.

I have put in more than 10,000 hours perfecting my craft. And I am good at it.

The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert - in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again…no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours.

It takes ten thousand hours to truly master anything. Time spent leads to experience; experience leads to proficiency; and the more proficient you are the more valuable you'll be.

The thing that you do obsessively between the ages of 13 and 18 is the thing that you stand the best chance of being world class at.

What's really the driver of talent is not raw ability. It's not even just experience. It's what's called 'deliberate practice,' which is to say, if you do something a lot, you get really good at it.

I'm one of the guys that thinks you have to spend a lot of time at whatever your craft is in order to sustain it, and in order to get better at it.

Mastery is not a function of genius or talent. It is a function of time and intense focus applied to a particular field of knowledge.

Practice is the path of mastery.

The 10,000-hours rule says that if you look at any kind of cognitively complex field, from playing chess to being a neurosurgeon, we see this incredibly consistent pattern that you cannot be good at that unless you practice for 10,000 hours, which is roughly ten years, if you think about four hours a day.

Every single person in the world could be a genius at something, if they practiced it daily for at least ten years (as confirmed by the research of Anders Ericsson and others).

To become an expert achiever in any human activity, it takes practice... practice... practice.

I shall become a master in this art only after a great deal of practice.

We're just getting better at our trade, man. We know what we're doing, and the reason why is that we've spent 30 years doing it. There's nothing that can replace that.

Really, acting is like anything else. The more time you put in, the more you learn and the more you can give back to the industry.

In cognitively demanding fields, there are no naturals. Nobody walks into an operating room straight out of a surgical rotation and does world-class neurosurgery.

Whatever it is, if you draw, you paint, you're a carpenter, you play football, the more you do it, you're a journalist, the more stories you write, the more people you interview and navigate your way through these different personalities to get your story, the better you're going to get at it. Acting's no different.

Knowledge is not skill. Knowledge plus ten thousand times is skill.

I feel I've done the 10,000 hours you have to do to get good at something.

I always say that practice gets you to the top most of the time.

You've got to put in a lot of practice if you want to be good in something. You've got to do it the right way.

With anything you do and you dedicate yourself to and you dedicate thousands and thousands of hours, eventually you're gonna get a little bit better at it unless there's some innate impairment preventing that.

Whatever it is you do, study it, learn the ins and outs of it, and really work on building your craft.

If you're any good at all at what you do, you get better the more you do it.