Where’s Your 10,000 Hours?
by Ajani Husbands
Let’s say you’re an artist. I need you to paint 1,000 paintings for me in one year. That’s about three paintings a day with thirty free days scattered in between. Can you do it? Is it possible? Your answer to this might determine whether painting for you is a hobby of something you happen to be good at, or if you have the drive to be a definitive reference point in the art world.
Right now I’m in the middle of reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers and the question persists: what does it take to be an outlier? Passion and drive? Perhaps it is one’s circumstances and upbringing? Pure luck? No matter the case, one thing has already one thing has been made clear: Outliers aren’t just talented. They WANT to be outliers.
For those that haven’t read the book, Gladwell describes outliers as individuals who excel in society. Not just excel, they become landmark individuals who change the way we live and view life. The outliers he describes are Bill Gates, the Beatles, the world’s top law firm, Steve Jobs, and so forth.
We’ve all met extremely talented and motivated individuals. Most of you reading this are probably pure firestorms of energy and drive. But what sets an outlier a part? I would say it’s the actual desire to be an outlier, to be someone who isn’t just talented but who defines the world around them.
Let’s look at Gladwell’s famed 10,000 hour rule. All outliers have at least 10,000 hours of practice under their belts. It’s what prepares them for their eventual lifestyles. The Beatles had grueling hours in Hamburg, Bill Gates spent countless hours programming as a teen, and so forth.
Where are your 10,000 hours? Or rather, Where does your expertise lie? While you are thinking of an answer, note that there is a difference between expertise and hobbies. I regularly watch cartoons. But that doesn’t make me an expert. I go to work for 10 hours a day, but after a dozen years I won’t be an expert. I’ll just be the guy who’s worked there for 10 years. Hobbies are passive. Expertise Is active. Bill Gates didn’t just mindlessly program for 10,000 hours. He poured all his intellect into it for each long hour.
The difference between hobby and expertise is in the response. Let’s look out our painter dilemma from earlier. If you consider 1,000 paintings/year an impossible task, then painting is a hobby. But if you immediately start cancelling weekend plans and rearrange your work schedule, you might have the hunger for expertise.
What I take away from Gladwell’s book is that we should all be conscious of how we spend our time. Every day we have a choice. When you wake up in the morning, you have a choice of whether you will turn on the tv and watch news, catch up on sports, or instead, get to work on turning your hobby into your expertise.
