What does it take to master something?
In the book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell studied what it takes to become masterful – at anything. What is surprising is how little talent and luck have to do with whether someone becomes a world class expert – regardless of the field they are in.
You may not be interested in becoming known as an expert in something, but there are things you would like to be able to do extremely well. There are areas you would like to master. My guess is that “personal growth” falls into this category somewhere. Not that anyone can really become a master at personal growth (I don’t even know what they might mean), but you can become an expert on yourself…and on who you are becoming. In fact, part of the reason you have been drawn to this site, or become a member, is that you want to find ways to gain knowledge, experience, and insights that are meaningful.
While natural talent or affinity affects whether you end up being drawn to a particular field – such as, if you have a natural talent for playing the piano or speaking in public, you may have been drawn to fields that require those skills without thinking about it – but talent or affinity will not determine whether you are a “success” at either. And though opportunity and luck play a role in who you get exposed to as you make your way toward mastery, even people with the same talent and same opportunity don’t achieve the same level of mastery. Talent and luck are not enough.
The key distinction, according to Gladwell, is that world-class experts have already put in 10,000 hours of practice BEFORE they “burst on the scene”. Yes, you read that right. Ten-thousand hours. Gladwell provides many examples in his book, but here are just two we think you will be familiar with.
When The Beatles “burst on the American scene”, they had already banked more than 10,000 hours of performance time. Performance time, not just practice time. They credit those hours – which sometimes came in the form of 8-hour performances – as perhaps the most important factor in their success. When you play that long, you have to learn to improvise and to entertain at a level far different than if you play a couple of one-hour sets a couple of nights a week. Being on the spot and having to do your best, for an enormous amount of time, is what forces you to get better.
So, you may love personal growth and attend all the personal development seminars you can…but that doesn’t mean you’ve actually mastered how to apply what you have learned. In fact, that’s probably the biggest source of frustration or let down people feel when they leave a personal development seminar. They get home, only to discover they’ve learned about something, but not truly how to use it and master its usefulness in their life. They got in some good, condensed “practice time”, but it takes hours of practice and application to actually master the new information.
Another example is Bill Gates, founder of Microsoft and clearly at the world-class expert level of computers and programming. He was lucky that he attended a high school that invested in computer access – but so was every other student who attended that school. He was fortunate that the university he went to kept their computer center open 24-hours a day – but every other student also had that same access. What set Bill Gates apart is that he USED that opportunity and access for hours and hours of computer experience. In one 7-month period he logged 1575 hours working on programming – that comes out to 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. There’s no doubt Bill Gates was blessed with a great mind and some great opportunities. But the real difference is that he put in tens of thousands of hours “practicing” before he “made it.”
When you think about your own journey with personal development, there’s no doubt that you’ve put in a lot of hours, right? But if you had to assess them more closely, how many of those hours were just learning about something – and how many were hours where you were applying the learning, actually practicing it?
Something to think about….
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