The 10,000 Myths
10,000 steps a day for health. 10,000 hours of practice to master a skill. Kind of daunting, right? 10,000 steps is roughly 4 to 5 miles, depending on your stride length. 10,000 hours would be 2.74 hours per day, every day, for 10 years.
Read on for some good news. I'll be discussing where these stats came from, how they became memes, and whether either one is an overestimate. (Hint: They both seem to be.)
Let's start with the 10,000 steps rule, which is so ubiquitous that even devices like Fitbit are preset to use 10,000 steps as a default goal.
The origin of this particular advice was a marketing ploy. The 1964 Tokyo Olympic games sparked interest in fitness among Japanese people, and so, in 1965, the Yamasa Clock and Instrument Company began to sell a pedometer called Manpo-kei, which means “10 000 steps meter." Why 10,000? Because the Japanese character for 10,000 looks like a walking person. (Or perhaps a striding person. Here it is: 万).
The history of how a product name morphed into a fitness goal remains fuzzy, but we know at least that the 10,000 step statistic isn't evidence-based. In fact, peer-reviewed studies suggest that fewer steps have health benefits. I don't see a magic number in this literature, but interesting effects do crop up in the range of 7,500 to 8,500 steps per day. For example, among elderly women, taking more steps each day is associated with lower mortality rates, with benefits reaching a plateau at around 7,500 steps per day (see here). And, among younger people, 8,500 steps a day (or possibly less) seems necessary for normal fat metabolism, while reducing step counts to roughly 2,500-5,000 steps per day for only 2 days is enough to temporarily lower the body's ability to metabolize fat (see here).
Bottom line: Exercise. Move around. Don't sit for 8 hours a day unless you're also exercising 60-75 minutes per day (see here.) And, if you count steps, don't feel pressured to reach 10,000.
If the 10,000 steps rule is a myth, how about the idea that 10,000 hours of practice leads to mastery of a skill? I'll let you judge, but I would call this pretty mythy.
Malcolm Gladwell popularized this idea in his 2008 best-seller Outliers, which contains persuasive argumentation interspersed with comments like "ten thousand hours is the magic number of greatness". In brief, Gladwell’s claim was that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice (plus adequate social and material support) leads to substantial expertise in whatever you're practicing.
Apart from speculation, Gladwell's evidence for this “magic” number was a 1993 article published by Anders Ericsson and colleagues in the prestigious Psychological Review. The main goal of the article was to refute the traditional idea that exceptional performance stems from innate talent. Ericsson and colleagues argued that in some domains, expert-level performance can be achieved simply through sustained, intensive effort. Specifically, about 10 years, or 10,000 hours, of deliberate practice. However, Ericsson and colleagues added many qualifications that Gladwell ignored. For instance, they pointed to the necessity of good instruction, continued environmental support, the ability to avoid injury, and the motivation necessary to engage in regular, deliberate practice day after day for many years. In short, not everyone who practices deliberately for 10 years will master a skill, and it takes a special kind of person to be able to practice that way in the first place.
In a recent podcast, Ericsson was asked about Gladwell's treatment of his work. Ericsson faulted Gladwell for not mentioning some of the qualifications outlined above, and, prompted by the interviewer, he noted a parallel between Gladwell's approach and that of Fitbit, criticizing Gladwell for simply counting hours. 10,000 hours of practice won't translate into expert performance unless many conditions are met. Ericsson's emphasis in the podcast was on the role of instruction. Crudely speaking, you need good teachers to make those long hours of practice pay off.
So, if Gladwell didn't get it right, is Ericsson's view the last word on the connection between practice and expertise? Well, no.
First, one could question whether 10,000 hours (or 10 years, as Ericsson tended to frame it) is the right amount of practice needed for most kinds of skills. Ericsson and colleagues focused specifically on music. Perhaps you need more (or fewer) hours to achieve expertise in other domains. (Ericsson et al.'s review of studies on expertise in a handful of other domains was mostly speculative with respect to hours.)
Second, Ericsson and colleagues focused on just two types of expert – members of symphony orchestras, and advanced students in a prestigious music academy. It's not clear how many hours of practice are needed to attain expertise that’s greater (or less than) what these individuals possess. (Ericsson and colleagues' review of the literature jumps back and forth between very different levels of expertise.)
Third, Ericsson and colleagues' samples were quite small – 30 violinists in their first study, 24 pianists in their second one. That’s it. That's a pretty weak foundation for a global theory of expert performance.
Finally, and arguably most concerning, a 2019 study by Brooke Macnamara and Megha Maitra failed to replicate Ericsson and colleagues' work. Macnamara and Maitra found that although practice is important, it contributes much less to differences among skilled violinists than Ericsson and colleagues purported to show. Why the difference in findings? In brief, improved methodology, including a more suitable approach to statistical analyses. (If you have training in stats, check out Macnamara and Maitra's critique of Ericsson et al's analyses. You'll find that Ericsson et al.'s use of ANOVAs were strongly facilitative of Type I error.)
Bottom line: If you want to improve at a learned skill, practice. Practice a lot. Deliberately, with support from a good instructor. But don't assume that 10,000 hours of practice automatically leads to any particular level of expertise. On the other hand, don't assume that expertise is impossible with less than 10,000 hours of practice. Throughout the literature are are signs that less than 10,000 hours is sufficient, assuming other conditions are met.
In sum, the claim that there's something special about 10,000 hours of practice, like the claim that there's something special about 10,000 steps, turns out to be a myth. Steps and practice are both beneficial, but there's no evidence that 10,000 of either is a particularly important number.
Part of the appeal of the 10,000 steps/hours rules – perhaps even part of the reason they became memes – may be that 10,000 is a round number, and round numbers are more likable than others (see here and here). (Why are round numbers more likable? Perhaps because they're easier to process. Or they hint that the thing being counted is more valuable (see here).) On the other hand, studies show that people tend to think of round numbers as estimates, while assuming that non-round numbers are more accurate and therefore more believable (see here). In other words, claims about 10,000 steps or hours might’ve been even more widely accepted if the number had been, say, 9,836 or 11,231.
(In any case, a myth is a myth. I’ve played guitar for at least 8,000 hours. The day I reach 10,000, I still won’t be jamming with Eric Clapton. Not unless he’s feeling really, really kind…)
Thanks for reading!