The 10,000 Hour Rule

Practice isn't the thing that you do once you're good is to think that you do that makes you good. This is a line out of the book Outliers: The Story of Success by Malcolm Gladwell. It's a book that I highly recommend and one of the most famous things in this book is the 10,000 hour rule in which Gladwell describes the story of The Beatles.

Between 1960 and 1964 in Hamburg, Germany The Beatles played a tremendous amount of music at local bars in front of a very small audience and they accumulated 10,000 hours of practice during that time. Gladwell recognizes that period of time as the most important element in the success that The Beatles had in future years. So the 10,000 hour rule doesn't only apply to The Beatles, it applies especially to sports and when we're talking about tennis, it makes a lot of sense.

Junior Tennis

Let's just take a junior who trains four hours per day. It would take the junior 7.4 years to accumulate 10,000 hours of practice, in other words, seven and a half years to get 10,000 hours. It makes sense that for example a nine-year-old that practices four hours per day, by the time the seven and a half years are over, the player will be around 16 years old and it's highly likely that the player could be a high-level tennis player.

Now something that Gladwell talks about in his book is the fact that the ten thousand hours of practice have to be the correct practice. And when we apply this to tennis, it has to be the correct practice. If you practice the wrong strokes for ten thousand hours, you're only gonna get better at hitting the wrong stroke. You are going to have to practice the correct way.

Tennis is such a complex game that it's not all about the amount of hours you put into the game, there's a lot of other factors that will come into play in whether a specific player can make it on the professional tour. But generally, I do think the statement is correct that if you put in ten thousand hours of the correct practice, you have a very good chance to become a high-level tennis player.

Story

How does this information benefit you as a recreational player? Well, I'm gonna tell you a story which is going to make a lot of sense to you because you're probably thinking ten thousand hours is a lot of time.

Pretend that a student asked me whether I've read the book by Malcolm Gladwell and if I've heard about the rule of ten thousand hours, and I said yes of course I read the book. This student who's a 4.0 level recreational player who's been playing seriously for the last two years, who's addicted to tennis and enjoys the game a tremendous amount, hdid the math and calculated how long it would take him to accumulate 10,000 hours of play with his current practice schedule which is four hours per week?

Which by the way, that's a lot of hours for the recreational level. And he did the math and it would take him 52 years to accumulate 10,000 hours of practice by playing four hours per week. I can tell you that this student was completely depressed about how long it would take him to accumulate 10,000 hours.

Realistic Goals

You cannot have the goal of playing 10,000 hours of tennis, that is an unrealistic goal. If you play four hours a week, it's going to take you 52 years. So just that in itself will make you want to quit and not do it at all.

And that's what happened to this student, he was completely disappointed and felt like not practicing at all. The way you have to approach goal setting in tennis is not to think about 10,000 hours. Think about the next hour and focus on what you're going to do in that next hour, what things you are going to improve in your game, then once that hour is over, you go on to the next hour.

Going Pro

If someone asked me this, I wouldn’t say yes or no. I’d tell them to go step by step and to get the reps in, to practice as much as possible. The reason why I don't say yes or no is because both of those answers are bad. If I say yes, this is going to be unethical in a certain context.

Let's say somebody of an older age asks me if they can turn pro and I say yes, and maybe proceed to take money from them for advice, this would be highly unethical. I don't want to mislead anyone and give them false hope. Nevertheless, I also don't say no. I don't want to crush anybody's dreams.

I would be very vague in my answers, I’d just tell everyone to work as hard as possible, get as many reps in as possible, and have gradual step-by-step goal setting. But here's the epiphany I had recently, and this is something that's so simple and relates to the topic of this video, which is the 10,000 hour rule.

The number one question everybody has to ask themselves is if they like this thing, do they like hitting this yellow fuzzy ball? If the answer is yes, then the 10,000 hours are going to come naturally. If you love the game of tennis, if you love hitting the ball, you are going to want to be out here every day and the 10,000 hours is going to be no problem whatsoever.

I've been playing tennis for twoish years, I probably have 1,500 hours plus and I try to go out on the tennis court and hit balls on a daily basis. Why? Do I have any aspirations? Sure. But more importantly, I love hitting the ball, this is by far the biggest passion in my life.

Final Thoughts

If you are the same way, if you love tennis, then the 10,000 hours are going to come natural to you. However, if you don't like tennis and if you are maybe picking up tennis for other reasons because you like the idea of being a professional player and being on TV, it is only a matter of time until you quit.

As soon as you realize that this goal is too unrealistic, too far away, you're going to end up quitting. And this is something that you will see at your local clubs. There is a crazy amount of junior players that end up quitting tennis because they play tennis for the wrong reasons. So from now on, if somebody asks me is it too late for them to turn pro, I'm going to ask them a simple question: Do you like hitting the tennis ball?