Learning Your Craft – One Step at a Time

Today I want to share with you an article by Michael Neill, The Genius Catalyst, that fits right in with learning and mastering a new craft:

In Malcolm Gladwell’s fascinating new book Outliers, he quotes research by Dr. Daniel Levitin into the amount of practice it takes to achieve world-class expert status in whatever field you happen to be involved in.

In Levitin’s own words:

… ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is the equivalent to roughly three hours per day, or twenty hours per week, of practice over ten years. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people don’t seem to get anywhere when they practice, and why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.

In researching this further online, I came across this fantastic blog entry by David Seah:

What to Do? Just Do!
Starting first with that 10,000 hours of practice: I’d had a similar thought about leveling-up abilities based on a magnitude-of-10 hour scale:

• at 1 hour … you know some basics
• at 10 hours … you have a pretty good grasp of the basics
• at 100 hours … you are fairly expert
  
• at 1000 hours … you are an experienced expert
• at 10000 hours … you are a master

I originally got this idea when reading about pilots, who seem to always mention how many hours of flight time they’ve logged. Hours of experience are a good metric, and I’ve noticed that this pattern seems to recur (up to 100 hours, anyway) for me. It’s not always exactly this many hours, but as an order-of-magnitude analysis it holds true.

While 10,000 hours over 10 years is a daunting proposition, consider this:

• 1000 hours is pretty doable. That’s a little less than a year of full-time work.
• 100 hours is even more achievable… you could do that over a few months on the side, or just slam through it in a very intense couple of weeks.
• Even spending 10 hours practicing something is going to make you significantly better at it. If you spent 10 hours practicing one song, or learning how to juggle, or learning how to bowl strikes… you’re going to learn something.
• One hour? That’s worthwhile too. You could spend an hour writing your signature over and over again to make it cooler. I’ve done that at least a couple of times in my life.

While breaking down the 10,000 hours to mastery in this way can certainly make it seem less daunting, another distinction I have found useful in this arena comes from motivator Anthony Robbins, who recounts his experience of booking himself out as a speaker 3 times a day to anyone who would listen. As Robbins says in the book Awaken the Giant Within.

While others in my organization had 48 speaking engagements a year, I would have a similar number within two weeks. Within a month, I’d have two years of experience. And within a year, I’d have a decade’s worth of growth. My associates talked about how “lucky” I was to have been born with such an “innate” talent. I tried to tell them what I’m telling you now: mastery takes as long as you want it to take.

When someone tells me “I can’t draw well”, or “I’m no good at sports”, or “I’m not a natural writer”, I invariably ask them “how many hours have you spent practicing?” It is very rare indeed that the answer is anywhere near 100 hours, let alone 10,000. The implication is that their apparent lack of skill is usually less a function of a lack of anything on the inside than it is a reflection of a lack of time and effort spent on the outside.

For me, the point of all this is not to give up on something you’d love to do because you’re apparently not very good at it. Almost any worthy goal will succumb to an investment of time – and time is the one commodity that we all have in equal abundance!

Copyright © 2008 Michael Neill. All Rights Reserved