Beyond the 10,000-hour-rule: Experts disagree about the value of practice
一万小时理论的背后：专家并不认同练习的价值
IN RECENT YEARS, it’s become a matter of conventional wisdom that if you want to get good at something, you have to practice. A lot. There’s always been some intuitive truth to this idea, but it gained greater influence after the 2008 publication of Malcolm Gladwell’s bestseller “Outliers,” which presented research suggesting that the best people in a field got there because they practiced longer and harder than everyone else.
近年来，“如果你想要变得擅长某事，你就必须大量练习”俨然已成共识。支持这种观点的直觉性事实有很多，但是在2008年马尔科姆·格拉德维尔的畅销书《异类》出版之后，这种观点变得更有影响力了。书中说，研究表明，领域内最优秀的人才之所以优秀，是因为他们比其他人练习得更多更努力。
Among researchers, however, the importance of practice for achievement remains an open and hotly debated question. In particular, a group of researchers argues in a recently published book chapter and a forthcoming paper in Perspectives on Psychological Sciences that the importance of practice has been wildly overstated.
然而在研究人员中，练习对于成功的价值依然是被公开热烈争论的问题。尤其是一组研究者在他们最近出版的著作的一章中，和即将在《心理科学展望》发表的一篇论文中表示：练习的重要性被过分高估了。
“It’s just not scientifically defensible at this point to say that training history does or could explain all the variation [in talent],” says Brooke Macnamara, a psychologist at Case Western Reserve University.
“训练经历能够或者可能能够解释（才能上的）所有差异这种观点从科学角度看是站不住脚的，”凯斯西储大学心理学家Macnamara表示。
Macnamara is coauthor of the book chapter, published earlier this year in “The Psychology of Learning and Motivation,” and the forthcoming study. This work follows 2014 research in which she and her coauthors performed a meta-analysis on thousands of studies on skill acquisition in order to estimate exactly how much practice matters in different pursuits. They found that how much a person practices explains about 26 percent of the variation in how good people are at games like chess, 21 percent of the variation in performance playing musical instruments, and 18 percent of the variation in performance in sports.
Macnamara是今年早些时候出版的《学习与动机的心理学》一书的专章和上述即将发表的研究的合著者。这项研究紧随2014年的一项研究，在前一项研究中，她与合作者对数千份针对技能习得的研究进行了荟萃分析，以期精确估计练习在不同的消遣活动中占了多少比重。他们发现练习量能够解释博弈游戏（比如象棋）的能力差异的26%，乐器演奏的21%，以及体育运动的18%。
“Our conclusion is that, of course, deliberate practice is an important factor, but it’s not the only factor or even the largest factor,” says coauthor David Hambrick, a psychologist at Michigan State University.
“我们的结论是：刻意练习是一项重要的因素，但是这并不是唯一的因素，甚至连最大的因素都算不上，”合著者之一，密歇根州立大学心理学家David Hambrick表示。
Hambrick and Macnamara’s work is a rejoinder to research by Anders Ericsson, a psychologist at Florida State University and the person most famously identified with the view that the right kind of practice makes all the difference. Ericsson’s research played a starring role in “Outliers,” the book that gave birth to the now famous “10,000-hour rule,” which says that elite performance hinges on practicing the correct way for that amount of time.
Hambrick和Macnamara的研究是对弗罗里达州立大学心理学家Anders Ericsson的反驳，后者以“恰当类型的训练决定一切”这一观点之化身而出名。Ericsson的研究在提出了著名的“10000小时理论”的《异类》中扮演主要角色。该理论认为优异的表现取决于用正确的方式练习足够长时间。
Ericsson says Gladwell misstated his research and that he never specifies any amount of practice time as a magic threshold. He takes issue with the 10,000-hour rule in his new book, “PEAK: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise,” due out in April.
Ericsson表示Gladwell 错误解读了他的研究，他从未把任何特定数量的练习时间划定为神奇界限。他在四月即将出炉的新书《巅峰：专业技能新科学的奥秘》中对10000小时理论提出了异议。
More generally, he argues that Hambrick and Macnamara’s research underrepresents the value of practice because it counts training activities that fall short of the kind of focused, deliberate practice that underpins his research. As he sees it, to really make a difference, practice has to be undertaken with the specific goal of improving an aspect of performance and under the supervision of a coach or mentor who can provide skilled feedback.
更一般而言，他认为Hambrick和Macnamara的研究低估了练习的价值，因为这项研究所统计的练习行为缺少专注的、刻意的练习，而这正是支撑他的研究的关键。他认为，如果想要有所成效，练习必须有明确的提升某方面表现的目标，并且在教练或者导师等能提供专业反馈的人的监督下进行。
“Critics have tried to put us into this mindless repetition idea here, and that completely misunderstands [my] view,” he says. “We find that the expert is engaging in this search for finding the best ways of performing and then constantly seeking feedback about where they’re performing suboptimally.”
“批评者们试图把我们的想法解释为愚蠢的重复，这完全误解了我的观点，”他表示，“我们发现，专家会致力于寻找最佳执行方式并就何处表现未达最优持续谋求反馈。
Ericsson grants that practice is not necessarily everything. He argues that some physical characteristics and personality traits do influence the development of talent — it helps to be tall to play basketball, and people with the right disposition may be better able to able to sustain hours of deliberate practice. Still, Ericsson continues to view practice as far and away the factor that explains differences in ultimate talent.
Ericsson认同练习不意味着所有。他认为某些身体特性和性格特征确实会影响才能的发展——长得高对打篮球有帮助，有良好性格的人可能更能承受数小时的刻意练习。Ericsson仍然把练习看作解释才能之最终差异的最重要因素。
“Lacking evidence about what some people actually lack in order to achieve at this very high level, wouldn’t you as a scientist have to say we don’t know?” Ericsson says. “And if we don’t know, let’s not go around saying it’s obvious that some people are able to and others are not.”
“为了达到相当高的水准，人们真正缺乏的是什么，这个问题一直缺少证据，难道作为一名科学家不应该必须说我们不知道吗？”Ericsson表示“如果不知道的话，我们就不要四处散播说什么很明显有人行而其他人不行这类说法。”
Others in the field are less convinced.
这一领域内的其他专家对此不是很信服。
“I wouldn’t expect that if my kids got 10,000 hours of piano playing, they’d become professional piano players,” says Jonathan Wai, a visiting researcher at Case Western Reserve University and research scientist at the Duke University Talent Identification Program. “It doesn’t take away from the idea that practice is important, but it does take away from the idea that anyone can be anything.”
“我并不期待我的孩子在练习弹奏钢琴10000小时之后成为专业的钢琴演奏家，”凯斯西储大学访问学者，杜克大学才能鉴别项目研究科学家Jonathan Wai表示。“这并不会贬低练习的重要性，但是这会削弱任何人能做成任何事这类观点。“
If practice isn’t everything, the next step is to nail down what else matters, and that’s where a number of researchers have turned in recent years.
如果练习并不意味着全部，那么下一步就是明确是何种其他因素产生影响，这正是一批研究人员近年来所转向的方面。
The answer, Hambrick and Macnamara suggest, is likely to be nuanced. They argue it’s time to get beyond the idea that talent is either “born” (genetic) or “made” (all about practice). Instead they propose what they call a “multifactorial” model. It features arrows going all over the place in an effort to capture how factors like basic ability, personality, and deliberate practice affect each other and the overall development of talent.
Hambrick和Macnamara给出的答案相当微妙。他们认为是时候跳过才能究竟是天生（遗传）或者造就（只关乎练习）这种观点了。取而代之的是他们称之为“多因子”的模型。该模型的特征是全方位探索，试图捕捉到诸如基础能力、个性、刻意练习等因素如何互相影响以及对才能整体发展的影响。
If this revised picture of talent acquisition is complicated, it implies at least one simple message: While practice may make perfect, perfect is probably off the table already for most people in most tasks.
如果这幅改进版的才能习得图景有一天能完成，那么至少能表明一个简单的信息：虽然练习能造就完美，但是对于绝大多数人来说，在绝大多数任务中，“完美”这个概念没有讨论的必要。
翻译：黑色枪骑兵（@忠勇仁义诚实可靠小郎君）
校对：babyface_claire（@许你疯不许你傻）
编辑：辉格@whigzhou