A few years ago, author Malcolm Gladwell posited a fairly straightforward idea that fast became a core tenet of the modern self-improvement industrial complex, this belief that if anyone spends a whole lotta time doing something - ten thousand hours to be precise - they'll become really, really good at it.

Gladwell's idea, since coined the 'ten thousand hour rule', is based on research by K. Anders Ericsson who developed a hypothesis that said a person becomes a elite at something, a true expert, through years and years of deliberate practice. Gladwell took this concept and ran with it in his book The Outliers, where he pointed to people like Bill Gates and The Beatles as examples of those who have developed elite skill through logging the necessary ten thousand hours at their respective crafts over the course of many years.

Hacking Gladwell's Law

Increasingly however, instead of doing it the old fashioned way, people are gaining expertise, or at the very least producing elite expert-like results, in much shorter time period with the help of advanced technologies. Whether it's perfecting your shot with sensor-powered basketballs, learning how to code online with e-learning services or using an app-driven cooking device that gives you chef-like results, today's technology is increasingly offering products that can help someone become very good at something in a much shorter time period.

Wilson's Connected Football brings Moneyball analytics to the playground

Wilson's Connected Football brings Moneyball analytics to the playground

One major part of this trend is the democratization of online learning. Whether it's the availability of coding courses online that provide access to technology education that previously required a college course in computer science or the proliferation of how-to videos on YouTube, the Internet provides access to world quality expertise in ways that were never possible before.

But it goes beyond online education. In fact, one could argue that it's the application of newer technologies to provide real, physical world guidance that is the driving force behind completely new expertise-building experiences unlike we've ever seen before.

Take sports. With the arrival of connected footballs, kids - whether it's in their backyard or within a formalized sports program - will know pretty quickly how tight their spirals are and how quickly they are improving both against their own past performance and against that of others. In short, technology is bringing Moneyball level analytics to the backyard, not to mention gamifying the experience so kids don't need an entire team to get better, but can simulate the experience of a basketball or football game with a little brother or sister.

And how about becoming a master brewer? Before, brewing great beer usually involved thousands of hours and hundreds of late nights before you got to the point where that grain concoction of your's was good enough win an award, let alone sell at the local pub. But now, companies like Picobrew and Brewie are applying IoT technology to the process of beer brewing to not only assure consistent results, but also to enable the aspiring brewer to brew beer recipes from master brewers from almost the get-go.

Forget Augmented Reality: Here Comes The Era of Augmented Expertise

In some ways, much of this isn’t any different than what’s been happening in the world for as long as mankind’s existed: The arrival of ever more advanced toolsets, which brings about expert results and gives people repeatable elite skills in ways that had previously been out of reach. The most obvious fields here are athletics and the military, where the application of new technology results in measurable improvements in shorter periods of time for people.

But unlike before, the fusion of computing technology with the physical world has created an acceleration of understanding in what seems like every conceivable arena imaginable. We’ll call this trend augmented expertise, where the arrival of low-cost sensors, GPS-like guidance systems for nearly everything and real-time analytics are combining to accelerate learning in practically every discipline. Whether it’s future musicians using connected pianos or would-be chefs achieving restaurant like results with a new sous vide cooker, the time it takes to achieve high quality — or even expert — results across a range of disciplines is shrinking.

All this said, it must be said that God-given talent still matters. If the last few decades in the world of sports has shown us anything, it’s that amazing results happen when you combine born talent with advanced technology and training techniques. We are in an era where world records hardly stand for a year or two, let alone for a decade. Still, with the arrival of new technology and the era of ‘augmented expertise’, we are entering a new age where technology will help us amateurs go from zero to sixty much faster, and maybe even make a really good steak while we’re at it.

Michael Wolf is a technology analyst for NextMarket Insights and creator of the Smart Kitchen Summit, the first event looking at the future of the connected kitchen. You can find him on Twitter here.