I haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers yet, and I have no immediate plans to. It’s one of those titles that’ll be going for one cent on Amazon Marketplace in six months. But I’ve read several reviews (all middling) and a decent excerpt called “Is There Such a Thing as Pure Genius?”
Here’s the pull-quote that stuck with me:
“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.”
Neurologist Daniel Levitin elaborates:
“In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals… 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.”
So. That got me thinking.
On average, I spend about an hour a day on this website. Some days I skip it altogether or dash off a post in 20 minutes (like this one). On better days, I spend 60–100 minutes writing, editing, polishing, deleting, sighing, and rewriting. I’ve been doing this for over five years now.
Let’s be generous and say I’ve clocked about 2,000 hours of focused web-writing. (Unpaid, I might add.)
At this rate, assuming I stay consistent—and resist the lure of lazy filler, long block quotes, plagiarism, or whatever this is—I’ll reach expert status in another 20 years.
Stay tuned. I think I’m making decent progress for only 2,000 hours in.
