A Journey Of 10,000 Hours Begins With A Single Step

Good news! It only takes about 3^1/2 years to be an “overnight success.”

In his book, “Outliers,” Malcolm Gladwell writes about the"10,000-Hour Rule", claiming that the key to mastery in any field is a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours. That’s 416 days, working 24 hours every day. Multiply that by three if you work an eight hour day and that’s 1,249 days or about 3^1/2 years of consistent devotion. Shorten that time frame, of course, if you’re willing to practice for longer hours.

Gladwell supports this contention through several examples, including the 10,000 hours the Beatles played together before becoming famous and the 10,000 hours Bill Gates spent programming computers before creating Microsoft.

What distinguishes an “overnight success” from the rest of us is the 10,000 hours the “overnight success” spent practicing.

This is similar to the quip attributed to Mark Twain (but not actually authenticated) that “it takes a lot of practice to speak extemporaneously.” Thomas Edison made a comparable remark when he famously said, “genius is 1% inspiration and 99% perspiration.”

Or we may read about the film actor who did 100 repetitions of a one-minute scene in order to create one take to be printed. When we watch the movie, we marvel at how effortlessly the actor performs and might even think, “I could never do that.”

Could it be that the difference between the “I could never do that” and those who do it is the 10,000 hours of practice it took to “just do it?”

In fact, the athletes we see performing in Nike’s famous commercials (or at the Olympics) have spent at least 10,000 hours to achieve their level of performance.

If you are skilled at anything, you probably spent about 10,000 hours to attain your current proficiency. You may not achieve fame (Gladwell writes in his book about the importance of being lucky), but if expertise and professionalism are what you’re after, you will certainly achieve those.

Necessity may be the mother of invention, but it’s repetition that is the mother of mastery.

To paraphrase a famous saying, a journey of 10,000 hours begins with a single step.

You may never complete the journey. After all, there are no guarantees. But, in truth, it’s not the destination we’re after, but who we get to experience ourselves as being in the pursuit of that destination. We get to be courageous and fearless and free of the constraints of our past. And, I suggest, that’s what we’re after anyway as we take that first of 10,000 steps.

What do you dream of achieving? What will be your single step today?