Questioning conventional wisdom has benefits. Here’s why.
From the time we are young, we are taught to chase. Chase the ball. Chase improvement. Chase greatness. And, eventually, chase our tails.
We are told that practice makes perfect, that grit conquers all, and that success awaits somewhere, just over the horizon of 10,000 hours. It’s a story we carry into sports and life—a secular gospel that transforms labor into virtue. Work hard. Grind. Push through. No pain, no gain. It all sounds noble, except for one problem: none holds up to scrutiny.
The gospel of practice is so deeply embedded in our culture that few of us ask, Why?
Why do we believe that relentless repetition will make us better?
Why do we cling to the myth that suffering breeds strength, even when the evidence says otherwise?
If the research landed on our desks, would we recognize it? More importantly, would we have the courage to challenge it?
In the late 2000s, Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers popularized the idea that mastery required 10,000 hours of deliberate practice—a concept loosely based on the work of psychologist K. Anders Ericsson. The premise was simple: if you practiced long enough and with enough focus, you could achieve expertise. It was a seductive message that promised the ordinary person a path to greatness. The practice became democratized—a commodity that anyone could invest in.
However, the research never said that practice alone led to expertise. Ericsson’s work was far more nuanced. His studies found a correlation between deliberate practice and performance, but the correlation is not causation. More damningly, the notion of “deliberate practice” was never clearly defined, making it nearly impossible to falsify—a fundamental flaw in any scientific theory.
In 2020, Hambrick et al. published Is the Deliberate Practice View Defensible?” Their review found deliberate practice explained “only 1% of performance variance” among elite athletes. Let that sink in: 1%. The other 99%? Factors like genetics, environment, and sheer randomness. And yet, the myth persists.
What if the answer was never more practice but less? In 2023, Peter Gray et al. published Decline in Independent Activity as a Cause of Decline in Children’s Mental Wellbeing. Their research revealed that as free play has declined, “youth anxiety and depression have skyrocketed.” Children, robbed of the opportunity to roam, risk, and play on their terms, have grown up without the psychological tools needed for resilience.
Yet, in youth sports, we’ve taken the opposite approach. We’ve replaced free play with regimented practice and called it “development.” But development toward what? The pursuit of mastery at the cost of joy? The transformation of childhood into a full-time job?
By 2022, the global market for youth sports had become a $37.5 billion industry built on the gospel of grind. Parents now treat their children’s athletic lives like financial investments, with tournaments, private coaching, and year-round travel substituting for the very thing sports once offered: play.
The trouble is, sports are a reflection of life itself. And the practice gospel has bled far beyond the field. Today, the same unfalsifiable pseudoscience that drives youth sports underpins corporate leadership programs, educational reforms, and self-help manifestos. We glorify “hustle culture” without examining whether the hustle works. We reward busyness over effectiveness and persistence over wisdom.
But what if we’re wrong? What if sports—and life—were never meant to be about chasing mastery through toil? What if the point was play all along? The random, spontaneous, creative moments that build adaptability, resilience, and ingenuity? What if the kids playing pickup basketball, creating rules, and solving their disputes are learning far more about life than the kid on their fourth travel soccer team by age 12?
Here’s the reality: no one knows the future. There is no receipt for success, no secret formula to guarantee outcomes. Any advice on mastering your life or predictions about your future should not only be questioned but scorned. Why? Because the rigid grind and formulaic approaches we’ve come to accept don’t just ignore the complexity of the human experience—they make us less human.
To live is to embrace uncertainty and find meaning in life’s absurdity and difficulty.
The truth we avoid is that perfection, mastery, and success are not the ultimate goals. Instead, the unstructured play, the failures, and the random occurrences shape us. In these moments, we discover adaptability, creativity, and even joy.
So, let’s stop chasing success and start embracing life for what it is—an unpredictable, sometimes painful, often absurd journey. Perhaps we will find the most significant victory: living authentically, with grace and humor, in the face of the unknown.
