The 10,000 hours

File under Meet Yourself


[Note: This is a re-post from a May 2011 post]
Last post I talked about the concept that opportunity and time are more important to success than any desire for greatness may be. I’ll build on that here by talking about how they are also more important than any inherent skill or talent is.


A renowned psychologist by the name of K. Anders Ericsson has spent his life studying “experts”. His life thesis, proven through many of his and others’ studies, is that an expert is created through deliberate practice and work for a very long time. How long? 10,000 hours. And this practice is infinitely more important of a factor than any talent, IQ, or God-given gift.

New York Times columnist Malcolm Gladwell talks of this phenomenon in his book Outliers. He argues that certain “great” individuals such as the Beatles and Bill Gates achieved their vaunted success, not through inherent intelligence or skill, but rather through having the opportunities to practice and master their crafts. The Beatles had opportunities to practice for 10,000 hours by playing together all night for several years at bars in Germany before hitting it big back home. Bill Gates had opportunities to do computer programming for 10,000 hours as a teenager by being granted access to university computer labs where he spent nights writing code.

10,000 hours. Imagine deliberately practicing at a skill 8 hours a weekday for 5 years. I’m not talking about the approach we typically have at work. I’m talking about focused, deliberate concentration for that long and that consistently. That is a daunting threshold to hit for anyone trying to master a skill or achieve a success. It’s like the Sisyphus myth I talked about previously. Unless we hit that threshold, everything else is just average. Which begs the question, is it worth the effort if we don’t have that opportunity?

Song of the Day
I was at a wedding last weekend of a friend of my wife’s. The bride, who incidentally is not quite the strong believer in the ‘Perfect’ antidote theory, made the joking comment that this blog was for lazy potheads. Ironically we had a brief conversation where she brought up the 10,000 hour threshold. So in honor of Nell and Derry’s wedding, lazy potheads, and hearing this song three times in one day yesterday, the song of the day is Pink Floyd’s “Wish You Were Here”.