10,000 Hours of Practice
In “Outliers” by Malcolm Gladwell, Malcolm suggests that all expertise is preceeded by 10,000 hours of practice.
This idea began with a study of elite musicians in Berlin’s Academy of Music. When they asked the question, “What distinguishes the musicians who were destined to go on to be the world’s finest artists, from the ones who would be merely very good?”, they found something very interesting.
The very best musicians had practiced 10,000 hours*.
All of the students were exceptional. Just making it into this music school meant that they were already among the very elite players.
But the very best had practiced more. The merely very good averaged 8000 hours of practice and good musicians had practiced only 4000.
Malcolm goes on to show this trend in everyone from the computer geniuses of our time (men like Bill Joy and Bill Gates), to leading athletes to the Beatles. It’s all over. Great people put in hours and hours of practice.
This is very important to those of us starting a business.
Often we hear of the “instant success” story. We marvel at the grandma from Cedar Rapids who, within a year of starting her business, was earning 6 figures.
What we don’t hear is that she was practicing for years.
All of us need to practice our skills.
And like children learning any skill, all of us need to allow ourselves to not be very good. We become accustomed to skillfulness as adults. Being clumsy is uncomfortable. But clumsy is what we must do to become great.
What do you need to practice?
What are your scales that you must repeat over and over to get right?
For today, write down one thing to practice for your business and do it. Do it poorly or well, but commit yourself to practicing fully.
And by the end of the day, you only have 9999 more hours to go.
*By the way, 10,000 hours comes to 20 hours/week for 10 years. LOTS of practice.
