In Outliers Malcolm Gladwell asserts that one of the keys to success is practice, practice, and more practice. He sets the metric at 10,000 hours, that after 10,000 hours of continuous practice you will see yourself become a master.

We’ve all got some area of our lives that we’d like to master, what’s yours?

The 10,000 Hour Rule

10,000 hours is an arbitrary number to lend a certain amount of solidity to the concept of practice, practice, practice. Then, after you’ve practiced, practice some more.

Bill Gates has been programming computers since he was 13 years old. Years of programming practice gave him a leg up when the opportunity to form Microsoft came along.

Robert Oppenheimer devoted himself to science, becoming one of the most respected physicists in the world during World War II. This ultimately gave him the opportunity to be placed in charge of the Manhattan Project.

The Beatles played 1,200 shows in the span of a few short years. When they returned to England they had unique sound the world had never seen before.

Did these people practice their craft for 10,000 hours?

Did they punch a clock to make sure they didn’t stop short at 9,999?

Hell no. 10,000 hours is an idea.

Find something you like to do, practice like a maniac, and eventually you’ll become the master.

Identify YOUR 10,000 Hour Task

There are a LOT of things I like to do. I like being an engineer, to me it’s more of a calling than a job (most of the time, anyway). I like to write. I’m rediscovering a passion for drawing.

Right there are 3 things that I could be spending 10,000 hours trying to master. So which one do I go after?

In short, all of them.

See, I can be pretty squirrelly. I pick up one hobby and drop another like a lot of people change underwear. Using that method odds are pretty good that I would never master any of the things I like to do.

That’s where my life plan comes in. I’ve talked about life planning briefly before. It’s effectively a road map from where I am in life right now to where I want to be.

If you haven’t taken the time to write out a life plan I suggest you start over at the Art of Manliness and follow their guide. It’s totally worth it.

I now have a clear idea of where I want to be and a list of action steps to get there. That prioritized list is absolutely KEY in identifying the things that I want to spend my 10,000 hours to master.

So, What’s Your 10,000 Task?

Do you want to be a better writer?

Do you want to be a world famous painter?

Do you want to learn COBOL? (Seriously, does ANYBODY want to learn COBOL?)

Pick something you enjoy and practice. It’s about that simple.

I like to draw, so I keep a pencil and a sketchbook on me at all times. I spend roughly three hours a day drawing, one feature at a time. I might draw an eye for 10 minutes. Then an hour later I’ll spend 20 minutees drawing a mouth. These aren’t huge chunks of time but they add up.

The same with writing. Lately I’ve been devoting roughly 3 more hours a day to writing in little chunks. I usually write these post in an hour-ish sitting. Then I work on my fiction and various other things as I find the time. It’s shitty from a routine/habit building standpoint, but it’s practice all the same.

Pick something, spend five minutes a day practicing, and watch yourself grow into a master.

There Are No Overnight Successes

99% of the “overnight success” stories out there have hours upon hours of work behind them that we never see.

Gladwell uses a couple of examples to demonstrate this idea, but I have my own favorite example:

Twitter.

I remember watching TV one day years ago and a commercial came on. I don’t remember the company, but they were fairly large. The commercial ended with “Follow us on Twitter.”

My response was “What the hell is Twitter?”

And in the next couple of weeks the social media platform absolutely exploded. From nothing to one of, if not THE, largest social networks in the world. Did it happen that fast?

Absolutely not. There were thousands of hours of coding behind the site that had to be compeleted before it went live. If some programmer somewhere hadn’t put in that time ahead of launch day there would be no Twitter, it would be horribly broken or just plain wouldn’t be there.

Success is a gradual thing, made up of accumulated hours of work.

Showing MY Work

I’ve been reading a lot into Austin Kleon lately, and especially his book Show Your Work. Kleon sort of launches off of the Gladwell 10,000 hour theory, but adds to it saying that success is not only the accumulation of hours, but piles and piles of lousy art.

I’ve got a drawer full of half finished, really bad short stories.

I’ve got sketchbooks FULL of shitty drawings.

All of those `failures’ are behind every work of genius I create from here on out (assuming I DO create a work of genius…). Without the BAD, there could be no GOOD.

So, to that end I’ve decided to share my bad. Today marks the official launch of a new page on the site: my art gallery.

This is going to be the place I dump any and all artwork that is scannable. If you click over there right now you’ll find a couple of Flickr galleries full of drawings I did on lined notebook paper in high school.

Most of them are absolute garbage. I even added comments to all of them discussing what I like and what I don’t like about each one. And, since my drawings have always been about the story behind the drawing, to me, anyway, I share some of that, as well.

Am I worried about getting criticism for posting shitty artwork on the intertubez for everyone to see?

Yup.

And I’m willing to take the criticism, because I realize that there HAS to be a pile of lousy art in order for me to get better.

So, click over the the gallery and take a look. Right now all the artwork there is from high school. Recently I’ve been working in sketchbooks that don’t lend themselves well to scanning. As soon as I get that figured out I’ll be putting more recent work up there as well.

It’s the only way to get better folks, work through the bad.

Thanks for reading.