50 HOURS TO COMPETENCE

Do you know that you are only 50 hours away from being competent? Isn’t that amazing? And given that there are 168 hours in a week, potentially at least— you could become competent in this next week.

This was one of the discoveries that Ericsson and colleagues found in their longitudinal study on expertise. In their 2006 book, The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance, they discovered the relationship between the amount of hours of practice to becoming an expert in a given field. As you might suspect, they found that there is indeed a correlation between the number of hours a person devotes to learning and practice and one’s level of expertise. One thing that distinguishes novices from experts, and then from masters, is the amount of time devoted to practicing one’s skills.