From Lab to Life: How to be Greatest of All Time

What does it take to be the best at something (a G.O.A.T.)?  In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell used a study of top-performing violin students to promulgate the 10,000-hour rule: To be a GOAT, you need to practice for 10,000 hours. At 6 hours a day, including weekends, that takes 4.5 years of essentially doing little else but practicing violin, tennis, or chess or whatever.

Now comes a new study, published on December 18 in the leading science journal Science, co-authored by Brooke Macnamara, Purdue U. associate professor of psychology, who studied world-class performers.  Her findings: Often they started their discipline later.  They engaged in multiple disciplines, not just one.  They accumulated less practice in their discipline and more practice in other disciplines and then rose to the top relatively late.

World-class athletes peak later than national-class athletes, they find.  Those that peak early achieve a level best for their age but not as high as what the world-class group achieves at a later age.

What is going on here?   First, burn out.  Well before reaching 10,000 hours, you get tired of it.  Imagine practicing piano for 6 hours a day, every day, for nearly five years.  You bail out, well before the fifth year, at least many do.  Maturity counts a lot, and the experience of training hard transfers from one skill to another.  Motivation, hunger, desire, these are key and can evaporate through boredom.

For raising children, it may be best to have them play several sports, or several instruments, or simply, to try a lot of different things, rather than demand or insist on excellence in any one thing.  The skill of becoming really, really  good at something is a vital one, and you get better at it, the more skills you try.   Besides, cultivating multiple skills is fun – if you get tired of X,  you can move to Y or Z – and we know that an atmosphere of fun and joy cultivates creativity.

• Güllich, A., Barth, M., Hambrick, D. Z., & Macnamara, B. N. (2025). Recent discoveries on the acquisition of the highest levels of human performance. Science, 390(6779), eadt7790.