I have not followed this thread closely, but I have seen the videos before and am aware of the research. This guy cannot now "play an instrument" after 20 hours. He has STARTED to learn to play an instrument. He has reached a stage after 20 hours of focused practice where he can give a performance of a song called the "4 chord song" which means you only have to play 4 chords over and over again. So he has begun to learn to play 4 chords. He is a long way from having mastered the instrument, and is a long way from being classed as a "good" player. It would probably take many more hundreds of hours for him to reach that stage. The point of the 20 hours thing is that you can make a really good start to learning a new skill in that time. For a badminton application, remember that badminton is a huge collection of skills. We should pick a particular skill e.g. backhand overhead clear, and declare that after 20 hours of dedicated, focused practice, just on that skill, you will have developed it quite well - recognisable as a backhand clear. This does not mean that doing this practice will improve your forehand clear, but it may help you with other shots e.g. a backhand drop shot. However, practising dedicated for 20 hours on a backhand clear will not give you a good backhand drop shot - you still need to practice those in order to get them right, but there is overlap in the technique which definitely helps. So I think the take home message I got from these videos is: If there is something you really really really want to learn how to do, you need to dedicate focused time and energy to doing it correctly. You can learn to do a brand new skill reasonably in a relatively short time. In order to master a skill (meaning to be ranked in the best in the world at a certain skill) you need to practice for many many hours. You need to perform deliberate practice. For those who don't know, deliberate practice is when you practice with every ounce of your concentration, working on your imperfections to improve them. It is extremely hard work (mentally) to focus in this way for long periods of time. Simply turning up and performing all the drills is not enough - it needs to be focused effort. Whatever you practice needs to be practised correctly, and some methods of practice are better than others. A good coach can help the process by ensuring what you practice is correct, and how you practice is optimal. I believe that to master your field of study, you need to put in thousands of hours of practice. The field of study will contain many different skills, each of which needs to be learnt.
As Matt pointed out, there's a huge huge difference between able to do something vs being proficient at it. Certainly nobody would want a neurosurgeon with only 20 hrs experience of brain surgery to operate on you, vs another neurosurgeon with 9980 more hrs...
Wait! Of topic. But where/how would he gain the 9980 hours of practice time? Does it count if he doesn't use a real human's brain to practice?
in the first 20 hours, one might learn a lot in a very little time. but at the 10,000th hours, one learns very very little even with a lot of efforts and time.
I did not follow the hints given at those lectures, but intuitivelly used most of them, while learning Chinese. My experience was that at first I did not feel like learning a lot. But after building up some basic stuff that seemed useless at first, my learning curved got steeper. This was well later then after 20 hours. After many years of that learning, I can see that a curve could not describe my learning process, actually, as there were many plateaus, stairs-like.
I do not believe in these curves. Looking at [MENTION=56594]pcll99[/MENTION] chart, consider that plateau at the top. It's the same as the slow beginning. I believe that as long as the stimulus is there, you will grow. It becomes harder to find that stimulus as time goes on, because you find a comfort zone; eventually your opponents become more predictable, and you know what shots you can comfortably play. When you find new stimulus, you can then have that steep acceleration again.
i found all these charts from Google search... i googled "learning curve" and "s curve learning" and clicked on images and found all these images... Charlie's example would be this...
If you are talented at a particular thing, your steep acceleration will begin early. If you are average, your steep acceleration will begin later. If you are no good at that particular thing, you will give up before your steep acceleration arrives.
