I haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell new book Outliers yet, and have no immediate plans to because it’s one of those books that will be selling for 1 cent on Amazon Marketplace in six months. But I’ve read several reviews (all mediocre) and an excerpt called “Is there such a thing as pure genius?” Here is an intriguing excerpt of the excerpt:
This idea – that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice – surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.
“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals,” writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, “this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years… 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.”
On average, I spend about an hour a day on this website. Some days I will skip altogether or dash off something in 20 minutes (like this post), but on good days I spend 60-100 minutes writing and re-writing a post. I’ve been doing it for more than 5 years. So a generous estimate is that I’ve spent about 2000 hours of website-focused writing. (Unpaid, I might add. Now you know why I had to marry rich.)
At this rate, if I stay on track and resist the temptation of slapdash, plagiarism, musing upon extensive excerpts, and other forms of posting that require no cognitive skills (like this one), I’ll be an expert at creative web writing in another 20 years. Stay tuned, because I think I’ve made some great progress in only 2000 hours.
