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William Spear We’ve all heard that it takes 10,000 hours to master something. This was popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his book Outliers: The Story of Success. His idea was this: it takes 10,000 hours of practice to become a world-class expert in any skillful field. He uses examples such as the Beatles and Bill Gates: both are world-renowned experts in their respective fields, and both practiced more than 10,000 hours. Therefore, 10,000 hours must make an expert in the field of choice.
Raymond LeClair Permission requested. Ah, Dunning-Kruger, you are so cruel. You know, that psychological quirk of humans in which confidence starts high with lack of expertise, only to fall quickly, like on a stomach-wrenching roller-coaster, as knowledge is gained. Such was our recent project exploring surveillance using genomic sequencing. While we knew we were far from experts in the field of genomic sequencing, we had high confidence that we would learn enough to accomplish something useful.