Daniel Levitin Quotes

In order to be a world-class expert in anything, be it audiology, drama, music, art, gymnastics, whatever, one needs to have a minimum of 10,000 hours of practice. Unfortunately, it doesn't mean that if you put in 10,000 hours that you will become an expert, but there aren't any cases where someone has achieved world-class mastery without it! So the time spent at the activity is indeed the most important and influential factor.

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

True intuitive expertise is learned from prolonged experience with good feedback on mistakes.

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.

Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... 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.

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.

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.

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

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

A skill is something that you aren't inherently talented at and that isn't an effortless action, the way your thinking talents might be, but is something you can become excellent at nonetheless.

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

Practice is the path of mastery.

Anything we need to know, we can learn it from a book. Reading, careful study, a little practice, and we’re throwing knives expertly, overhauling engines, speaking Esperanto like natives.

To become really good at anything, you have to practice and repeat, practice and repeat, until the technique becomes intuitive.

To become proficient in any field you must practise. There is simply no achievement without practice and the more practice, provided it is done intelligently, the greater will the proficiency be and the sooner will it be attained.

The sum of all technical knowledge cannot make a master contract player.

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

Spontaneity comes after skill, not before.

An expert is anyone who can already do what we want to do.

Experience helps you do better in your work.

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

You never really get to be good at anything.

If you do something enough with purpose long enough, you're eventually going to get really good at it.

A lot of times I'll show someone a technique I got really good with, but I didn't put all the hours in. I didn't do the research and development. I didn't take it to the next level.