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10,000 Hours Can’t Help Dunning-Kruger Pass the Marshmallow Test

Three studies that suffer from the “Vizzini Effect.”

If there was a bingo card made for personal development/productivity writers, it would definitely have three squares for the studies mentioned in the title.

• The “10,000 Hour Rule”, based on research by Anders Erickson and popularized in Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, is often simplified into the idea that expertise in any field requires a minimum of ten thousand hours of practice.
• The “Dunning-Kruger” effect was inadvertently paraphrased most succinctly by then-Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld as he explained in a press conference that “…there are things that we don’t know we don’t know.” The idea is that the less someone knows about a subject or skill the more confident they are in their aptitude and mastery of it, and vice versa.
• The famous Marshmallow Test, performed in 1964 by Prof. Mischel and his colleagues at Stanford, seemed to indicate that the longer a child was willing to delay gratification — by not eating a marshmallow — the more successful they would be in later life.

I’ve linked each of these to their relevant Wikipedia entries — I don’t want to go into depth on what they are, here. You can do your own research — as I…