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Ten thousand hours
Dec. 1st, 2012 11:25 amSo there's this idea, backed up by fairly solid studies, that a very large part of what most people think is 'talent' or 'genius' or whatever your preferred term for innate skill is, is actually just the result of a very long time spent practicing those skills. Around ten thousand hours or so, to be more specific - that's the amount of time most people need to spend practicing a skill in order to master it.
The other day the obvious-in-hindsight realisation struck me that I spent most of my childhood mastering skills that are completely useless to me in the grand scheme of things, and very little time mastering skills that are useful to my current work. As a result, I often feel incompetent because the skills I'm using aren't the ones that I'm especially practiced at.
Things I am almost certain I've spent at least 10,000 hours doing:
Audience participation: What areas have you spent your 10k hours on? Are they directly related to what you're doing now?
The other day the obvious-in-hindsight realisation struck me that I spent most of my childhood mastering skills that are completely useless to me in the grand scheme of things, and very little time mastering skills that are useful to my current work. As a result, I often feel incompetent because the skills I'm using aren't the ones that I'm especially practiced at.
Things I am almost certain I've spent at least 10,000 hours doing:
- Dancing, most of which was ballet: I eventually failed at this because of hard physical constraints (eg. my hips are extremely stiff/inflexible) and because I hated performing on stage, but I did pick up a couple of superpowers along the way, like my near-eidetic memory for sequences of steps* and my ability to ignore the cold in the depths of winter as long as I'm within a 3 minute window of doing ballet (before or after)
- Reading, especially fantasy fiction: Very large vocabulary, fast reading speed
- Sitting and paying attention to teachers: yup, I am pro at this.
- Programming - I would put my mastery level somewhere in the level of hundreds of hours, at most 1k. I appear superpowered to most of my grad colleagues, but I'm achingly aware of just how many gaps I still have and how long it sometimes takes me to do what I feel ought to be very trivial tasks
- Video games/boardgames: Probably around the 2k hour mark, maybe higher (My childhood was basically evenly split between dancing, videogames, and school). Gave me the ability to quickly orient myself in new internally-consistent systems, to make decent chocies in those systems without a complete explicit understanding of what constitutes a good choice, and to locate loopholes/synergies/imbalances in said systems. Also, encyclopedic knowledge of the standard fantasy depictions of medieval weapons, warfare, life and philosophy, some of which bears a decent resemblance to the real thing. But again, I'm achingly aware of how bad I am at all these things relative to the real experts
- Being on the Interwebs: 'nuff said
- Working on stuff in a consistent and/or timely manner regardless of motivation levels
- Talking to people, both in the sense of small talk/hanging out and of being able to persuade/argue coherently in real time
- Fashion/personal appearance: Although I'm led to believe that there's a ton of low-hanging fruit here that would require less than 20 hours to learn
- Academic/nonfiction writing: I'm a lot better at this than a random person off the street, but not relative to my peers
- Critical thinking, with emphasis on the critical: For some reason as a kid it virtually never occurred to me that I could/should question the way things were; I treated everything as hard constraints that needed to be routed around if I didn't like them rather than challenged directly. I still have some of that mentality, where I take things as given that I have the power to change or should be least be more critical of
Audience participation: What areas have you spent your 10k hours on? Are they directly related to what you're doing now?
