The Skill Slot Theory
Once I was complaining to a co-worker that, because my computer day job was taking up so much time (especially with São Paulo’s slow commuting), it interfered with the Literature studies for my second degree. He said, but I have this friend who’s also studying in your university and, even with all the work here, he’s getting passing grades without any trouble.
I was flabbergasted and didn’t know what to say until I reset my worldview to his. For my co-worker (and for most people in IT) a university is kind of an obstacle course to get tickets to better jobs. Therefore, the only point of studying is to get good grades. I tried to explain, as better as I could, that I don’t join a university to get a title, and absolutely not because I want a job. I start a course because I want to know stuff. Really know stuff. If I don’t have time to read all the bibliography and to comprehend all the topics, I’ll be unsatisfied.
But what does it takes to know stuff?
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No such thing as «learning»
Educator John Holt hates the word «education». As an alternative, he uses «helping people do things better». Another word he hates is «learning». He substitutes «doing». There’s no dividing line between learning flute and playing flute. You don’t say, ok, I’ve learned to play the flute, now I’ll start playing it. From the first time you bring a flute to the lips and try to blow (and fail), you are playing flute. You just do it progressively better.
Holt’s argument is philosophically sound, but unsatisfying. For practical as well as ideological reasons, we want to separate the apprentices from the masters. We want diplomas, black belts, certificates, tea-names, language proficiency tests. For every field there is a fuzzy but established line between learning and doing (and quixotic attempts to unfuzzify it).
One possible criteria for the dividing line is at what point do you perform well enough to get paid. Another is the Boiling Teapot Metaphor. This is a description for the learning process that keeps popping up; I first heard it from my karate teacher. He said, learning karate is like boiling water in a teapot — at first you need a lot of fire to bring the water to 100°C, then you need less fire to keep it at the boiling temperature, but at all times if you stop the fire you’ll have to start again. Most (all?) skills work like this, and then a natural candidate to the dividing line is the boiling point — the point at which you need less practice to avoid cooldown.
Let’s use these ill-defined dividing lines, for the sake of argument if nothing else. I am a flute player if I can read sheets and play mostly anything and perhaps compose my own music. I am a painter if I can represent arbitrary scenes and objects on canvas, and use it to express “art”, whatever my definition of that is. I am a tea-person (chajin) if I can, with some preparation, perform any of the hundred or so formal tea procedures. Far from perfect definitions, but they’ll have to do.
With that in mind, we can ask again: what does it take to know stuff?
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Ten years of solitude
Peter Norvig, famous computer guy, wrote an article about how long it takes to become a skilled programmer; his answer is «about ten years of concentrated effort» (the post you’re reading right now is kind of an inferior version of his article, so by all means go see the source). Norvig’s point is not just some arbitrary guru-talk for computer science undergrads. He cites several cognitive studies on learning, and the same figure of ten years pops again and again, for fields as different as soccer, painting, chess, or topology. As Norvig puts it,
There appear to be no real shortcuts: even Mozart, who was a musical prodigy at age 4, took 13 more years before he began to produce world-class music. In another genre, the Beatles seemed to burst onto the scene with a string of #1 hits and an appearance on the Ed Sullivan show in 1964. But they had been playing small clubs in Liverpool and Hamburg since 1957, and while they had mass appeal early on, their first great critical success, Sgt. Peppers, was released in 1967.
Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell, looks closely at what the ten years mean, by comparing the top, middle, and bottom groups of a Berlin Academy of Music class:
Everyone, from all three groups, started playing at roughly the same time — around the age of five. In those first few years, everyone practised roughly the same amount – about two or three hours a week. But around the age of eight real differences started to emerge. The students who would end up as the best in their class began to practise more than everyone else: six hours a week by age nine, eight by age 12, 16 a week by age 14, and up and up, until by the age of 20 they were practising well over 30 hours a week. By the age of 20, the elite performers had all totalled 10,000 hours of practice over the course of their lives. The merely good students had totalled, by contrast, 8,000 hours, and the future music teachers just over 4,000 hours.
So ten years of concentrated effort means about 10,000 hours of active struggle to improve oneself.
I’ll suggest some exercises to drive this point home. Think of a friend who you believe is a “genius” or “talented” at something — drawing, programming, music, skating, whatever. Go and ask him since when he’s practicing that skill. Then, with his help, try to estimate how many hours he has trained so far. Alternatively, think of a “genius” figure you admire — Da Vinci, Picasso, Michael Jordan, Pelé, Mohammed Ali, anyone — and go research how they lived their pre-fame lives and how much they trained. What UFC champion won the title by training two times a week, two hours per class? What famous physicist read only enough books to get passing grades? If you believe in born geniuses, you’re in for a surprise.
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Of course, people are different and you probably won’t become Mozart by training as much as Mozart. It’s statistically improbable you’ll become an Olympic athlete, even if you train as much as an Olympic athlete. The legends of each area have all kinds of factors other than personal effort helping them, including not only genetics but cultural environment, economics, and plain old luck. There are five points I’m trying to make with all this talk about cognitive research and the value of training—
- Norvig’s «no shortcuts». To repeat, even friggin Mozart had to work his ass off before composing anything of value. You will have, too.
- No whining. You might not be an Olympian, but you’re not allowed to use «I don’t have any talent» or «I can’t do this» or «I don’t have slow-twitch muscles» as excuses until you put up 10k hours of deliberative practice.
- No biologic fatalism. Even if you won’t become a world-famous name, after 10k hours you’ll almost certainly be skilled in that field, enough to satisfy any of those fuzzy definitions of «skilled».
- Enjoy the ride. It will take a long time to get there. If you’re anxious to be a famous artist or an accomplished teacher, you’ll be impatient for ten years. There’s no choice but to learn to enjoy learning. Don’t expect to be an earth-shattering comic-book author or to come up with wicked guitar solos like your rock heroes after six months of casual dabbling.
- Jack-of-all-trades is master of none. Do you want to learn music, drawing, writing, languages, physics, woodworking, parkour, typography, cooking? (I do). But how much do you want to learn? For each of these skills, do you want it badly enough to spend 10 years of hard work?
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The Skill Slot Theory
When I had to choose a personal domain, I wanted something long-lasting. I asked myself, what attribute or slogan do I associate with so strongly that, even if my personality and interests change drastically in the coming years, I will still relate to it? I chose «namakajiri» — dilettante — because I don’t think I’ll ever be free from the desire of learning things from widely different areas. But the 10k hours figure, coupled with the span of the human life, put a hard limit on how many skills you can master. Let’s assume you live up to 75 with your mental and physical health intact, and that you have enough knowledge and independence to choose your path at fifteen. That gives us 60 years to learn things. Assuming you apply yourself, hard, during all this time, it means you can learn at most six skills.
Human beings have six skill slots.
Even worse, the value of the slots is not the same. The first skill you learn, you get to use for 50–70 years, most of them with full health. The sixth one, for at best a couple decades as an elder.
This insight highlight what exactly was the tragedy of me choosing programming when I was a teenager. At the time, I believed I could learn anything if I worked hard enough — which is true. Problem is, it takes too long. I wanted to make videogames, but it turns out the things I liked about videogames had nothing to do with programming (and the game creators I liked were not programmers). So I wasted my precious first skill slot with a skill I don’t even care about. It’s nice to have this skill, but it’s not nice to lose a decade on it. If I had considered that at fifteen, I’m sure I’d have spent this time learning something I value more.
The only consolation is that this tragedy is probably the most widespread one, ever. Last week I said to a friend, «I feel like I threw away the last ten years», and he said «welcome to 99% of humankind». It’s always hard to anticipate consequences, and it’s especially hard when adolescent invulnerability feeling blinds you to the limitations of reality (if you want to see this effect for yourself, try asking a sample of last-year students from any course what do they think about their area). I’ll be sure to expose my children to these ideas as early as possible.
This Skill Slot Theory is not a real theory, of course (I feel like I’m stating the obvious, but it’s easy to be misunderstood in the webs). I’m using the word in a cute, tongue-in-cheek Internet sense. There are all kinds of problems with the reasoning, like, to what extent you can try interweave training and exercise more than one skill in ten years (a good idea, according to cognitive science), what skills give experience bonus to others (e.g. programming and math), and where to put those darn certification lines (I might not become a master woodworker by fiddling with wood once a month, but what about being skilled enough for home repair or building a few simple cabinets)? Nonetheless, as a general abstraction of mastering skills I think it’s a good approximation for ambitious people — 10k hours in ten years to become real-good at anything, and a depressingly limit on the number of skills in a life-span. I do think the five stupid self-help slogans coined above are valid. And remember,
The road winds uphill: all law, all nature must be overcome.
—Aleister Crowley, The Book Of Lies
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