Forget about 10,000 hours, Do This Instead

One argument for choosing a niche is the concept that it takes 10,000 hours to become and expert at something.

If you work at something full time, 40 hours a week, then if you work 50 weeks a year (because we all need a vacation) you can be an expert in 250 weeks, about 5 years.

Malcolm Gladwell popularized Anders Ericsson’s 1993 study that showed it took about 10k hours of practice to master complex tasks.  However in this article Ericsson says that a detail from the original research that is not talked about as much is the variable of having a good teacher.

Practice without a guide may take longer than ten thousand hours, and a great guide can get you there faster. Having someone tell you what to focus on can shortcut your improvement.

Another factor of course is what are you learning. The complexity of the task matters. I can become an expert candle maker in less time than I can become a master herbalist. It will take me less time to master playing the flute than the organ.

Josh Kaufmann, in his The First 20 Hours book (or watch hisTed talk) goes a step further than a few shortcuts.

He proposed that you can get good enough at many things through 20 hours of focused practice. Not an expert, but decently proficient.

I’ll tell you this for free, I can practice the drums for 20 hours and I will be nowhere near good enough to play in a band.  But, the interesting thing is that if Kaufmann’s theory is correct, learning is on almost a reverse exponential curve, where the steep slope comes first and then there is incremental improvement after that.

And, when you are passionate about learning and experiencing life, we don’t really need to be experts after all. We just want to be good enough. These are just hobbies, pastimes, and pursuits, not something we want a PhD in.

This is why I am passionate about creating learning paths and exploring diverse topics with Dilettante Living. Sometimes it’s fun to dig deep, but often it’s better to have just enough information to safely start a new project or pursuit. We learn a lot just by doing.

Progress comes from practicing the thing, not reading about it.

And, when you want to dive deeper, then go back and put in a few more hours of learning.