10.000 hours
I guess everyone has heard of the 10,000-hour rule – the supposed amount of deliberate practice needed to reach “mastery,” whatever that means. While having a set number of hours to measure competency is obviously quite ridiculous, I recently found some use in keeping this concept in the back of my mind when thinking about my own practice. I never realized that 10,000 hours is actually a lot. Practicing anything deliberately for 2 hours a day, most days, intuitively sounds like a lot. Most people would probably consider this kind of schedule obsessive, or at least very disciplined. But:
Quick Math:
Imagine you practice a skill for 2 hours a day, 5 days a week—that’s 10 hours a week, with no time off for sickness, injury, holidays, or events. That’s 520 hours a year. It would take you more than 19 years to reach this (arbitrary) number of hours!
However arbitrary this number is, you can bet that some of the practitioners, artists, or athletes you look up to have put in these kinds of hours. Most probably, it took them more than 2 hours a day to get there. It’s also likely that the majority of these hours were put in before adulthood.
As I said, I think there’s a lot more to skill acquisition (and "mastery") than just the number of hours you put in, but I do think there’s some value in considering it. Here are a few ways I use this idea when thinking about my own training:
Don’t compare myself to the top practitioners in any field I pursue. Not only am I nowhere near putting in those kinds of hours, but there’s a good chance I never will. Take handbalancing, for example—I only really started practicing at 28. It’s unlikely I’ll be able to keep up a 10-hour-per-week average for the next 20 years, especially as adulthood comes with more responsibilities, and a decrease in recovery capacity and neuroplasticity.
If I want to reach some level of competency, I should try to get as many hours in as possible. Skipping a few hours here and there might not add up to much in the short term, but over the course of 20+ years of practice, it probably does.
Given how few practice hours I have left, I should probably make them count. Maybe it’s time to lay off the podcasts during sessions, stop checking Instagram in rest breaks, and actually pay attention to what I’m doing.
