When Malcolm Gladwell wrote in Outliers that becoming a master takes 10,000 hours of practice, he was probably trying to give us some hope – that success is more about your work ethic and persistence than being born lucky.
But most of us see that number, with all those zeros, and think to ourselves, “shit…that’s a long time.”
And it is a long time. If you practiced your thing three hours per day, seven days a week without fail it’d still take you 9 years before you’d be a master by this standard.
The hope of telling people it just takes “hard work and time” is that we’ll shed our fixed mindset – you know, that voice in our head that tells us we’re just plain bad at writing, we can’t design worth a damn and we couldn’t sell a bucket of water to a man on fire because we’re just not wired that way.
That kind of thinking freezes us.
If this was Malcolm’s goal in citing the 10,000 rule, it’s a noble one: to get people to quit watching the hugely successful people way beyond our skill level and focus on the work instead.
But the truth is, growth doesn’t take 10,000 hours.
Growth happens quicker than we think
Three social psychologists – Carol Dweck, Kali Trzesniewski and Lisa Blackwell – ran an experiment on junior high school students in 2007.
Many of the kids were poor students, and almost all of them showed the traits of a fixed mindset. They described themselves as “stupid” or said, “I suck in math.” In their minds, these traits were etched in marble.
So Dweck, Trzesniewski and Blackwell split the 7th graders up into two groups. One group was taught that we can grow – that our brains are trainable, and with hard work we’ll get better at the skills we want. The other group was taught generic study skills.
You can probably see where this is going.
The kids who were taught the growth mindset did phenomenally better than the other kids. Their grades improved significantly, while the kids who received generic study skills training saw their grades slip.
Within a year there were vast differences between the two groups.
“Mastery” is relative in business
The 10,000 hour rule holds water when we’re talking about mastery at the level of Tiger Woods, Beethoven or Bruce Lee. This level of skill is borderline absurd – these people come along once in a thousand years. And it takes 10,000 hours to get where they did.
But what about business? Do you need to be a master with 10,000 hours of practice under your belt to offer your services and provide real value to customers?
Whatever your niche is there are no doubt those people at the top of the game – the people whose blog posts you never miss. If you’re writing online, Brian Clark is up there. If you’re a search marketer, people like Aaron Wall are at the top. Web software developers no doubt look up to the folks at 37signals.
If you focus on the top, and how far you are from it, it’s easy to fall into the thinking that you’ll never crack the upper crust.
And you know – that might be the truth. The A-list, by definition, doesn’t have room for all of us.
If your goal is to earn a living, though, who says you need to be, as Seth says, “the best in the world?”
Think of the list of martial artists who have made a life-long living of teaching their art to the rest of us. Hundreds of thousands of them.
And none of them would last more than a few seconds against Bruce Lee. He’d sidekick their guts all over the nearest wall.
Dave Navarro put it just right in his excellent (and free) workbook, “7 Steps to Playing a Bigger Game“:
You may not see yourself as a 10…maybe you’re a 5, but let me tell you this: to people who are a 0, 1 or 2, your 5 might as well be a 10. You have value they need.
The trick is to be honest with yourself about the value you can offer first, and then, offer it with confidence.
And ask for something of equal value in return. (Like money.)
Show up and do the work
Forget 10,000 hours. Focus on this one. This next hour. It’s a chance to grow.
When your goal is so distant it’s a speck somewhere over the horizon, there is no motivation. There is only distance. It’s so far, in fact, that it seems impossible to get there. So quitting seems reasonable.
The thing is, you’ve probably already covered some ground. Maybe a great deal of it. You’ve been growing.
And those people way back there, for whom the distance is even greater? They’re the 0s, 1s and 2s to your solid 7.
You can help them.
And helping people, it turns out, is a fine way to earn a living.
Very true, very true. It’s all to easy to get caught in the mindset of “man, I’ll never be that good”, or “there’s no way I could do that”. I mean it’s just easier at the end of the day to say no or to give up.
I think that’s where the true A-listers come from. They refuse to say no, they refuse to take the easy way out. If they can’t do it the first time, then maybe the 30th time will work, or the 300th time, but they’ll get it at some point.
I’ve found myself many times in this situation. Sadly I’ve taken the easy way out on more then one occasion, but lately have been trying to take the “harder”, less traveled path. It’s not easy and I get frustrated from time to time, but it feels that much better when you make a breakthrough, even just a little one.
It’s easy to fall into the thinking that you’re somewhat “stuck” with what you’ve got.
I think the absolute most important thing is to know you’re going to fail along the way and understand it’s just part of growing – in fact, without those failures, we’re not pushing hard enough. The route safe from failure is sitting still.
It’s a combination of things, of course – we’re all born with some innate talent. But it’s far more important what we do with our time, how we dedicate ourselves to growth.
Carol Dweck (one of the researchers mentioned above) has a great book called Mindset that you should really consider reading. It was the inspiration for this post and has really opened my own thinking. There’s a difference between thinking, “yeah, I know, we can all grow” and then seeing the immediate effects this thinking has on people who are otherwise stuck.
I really like this article, particularly the part about the psychological study. I think what you’re talking about here is about something called the self-fulfilling prophecy, where positive things happen if you think positive things are going to happen and negative things happen if you think negative thoughts.
For example, if a student was doing bad at school and he thinks “I’m doing bad”, and thinks “people expect me to be bad” then he will do poorly. Whereas if a student thinks “I’m doing bad” and a teacher tells him he’s actually doing well, he thinks “I’m doing well” and does even better. I’m dumbing this down A LOT. So don’t listen to that word-for-word but it’s essentially what it is.
Thanks Luke.
I think it’s something like the self-fulfilling prophecy, but it’s important to understand the psychological roots here. There’s been a lot of stuff thrown around about how to “visualize” success and how that will somehow metaphysically attract it. The Law of Attraction, the Secret, etc…they all get on about the power of the universe and insinuate there’s some magical thing happening.
The truth is that there are some basic psychological reasons a growth mindset helps us improve, and they have more to do with our own heads than some mystical force of nature.
Haha, I don’t have much more to say to that! So I’ll just celebrate.
\o/
Great point, Mike. Thanks to the internet and social media, we’re constantly surrounded by the best of the best in whatever our chosen vocation is. It’s easy to get discouraged, but you can either choose to see yourself as not measuring up or choose to learn from the experts and move forward.
Thanks Pete. It’s definitely something I’ve struggled with in the past – when your point of comparison is the people at the very top of the game its easy to lose sight of your own progress. Much better to move than to watch.
Really good inspirational post Mike. And you are so on a roll. For cryin’ out loud I go away for just a few days, and I come back to, like, a boatload of new unstuck posts. You crammin’ in the caffeine lately?
Thanks – trying to build a habit of posting more regularly.