Writing Wednesdays
The 10,000 Hour Rule
By Steven Pressfield | Published: November 9, 2011
I’m not sure whether Malcolm Gladwell was the first to identify this principle or was simply responsible for popularizing it. But his name is definitely associated with it.
The rule says that in order for an individual to master any complex skill, be it brain surgery or playing the cello, she must put in 10,000 hours of focused practice. Since a thousand hours seems to be more or less the maximum we humans can handle in one year, ten thousand hours equals ten years.
Of course there are exceptions. Tatum O’Neal won an Oscar at age nine. But, from my own observation, I’d say that ten-year figure is about right.
But what exactly are we learning when we’re beating our brains out all those years? What was Charles Bukowski learning while he was boozing and wenching and sorting mail at the P.O.? What was Henry Miller accomplishing in Brooklyn and Paris? Or Miyamoto Musashi dueling all those samurai swordsmen?
Skill, certainly. Patience, professionalism, many other things. But it was something much more subtle—and far more difficult. I almost hesitate to write about this, in that it borders on the mysterious and the sacred. I must silently (or not so silently) beseech the Muse’s permission.
What these masters were learning was to speak in their own voice. They were learning to act as themselves. In my opinion, this is the hardest thing in the world.
I understand why Zen masters give their students koans, i.e. unsolvable, logic-defying riddles. They are trying to crack open the young aspirants’ minds by making them hurl themselves over and over into a brick wall of futility until they finally and inevitably give up … and inexplicably succeed.
To speak in one’s own voice means to let go of all the other voices in our heads. Whose voices? The voices of what is expected of us. Yes, that means the voices of our parents, teachers, mentors. But it means something more elusive too. It means our own expectations of what we should be doing or ought to be thinking—what is “normal” or “right” or “the way it ought to be.”
“If you meet the Buddha on the road,” says the master, “kill him.”
In terms of the aspiring writer, we sit down and try to write the way we think writers write. If we’re painting, we paint like painters paint—or dance like dancers dance. What this means of course is that we’re writing like somebody else writes and painting like somebody else paints and dancing like somebody else dances.
The agony of an artistic apprenticeship comes from our inability to bust out of this self-imposed prison. People tell us to “break the rules” or “think outside the box.” But how the hell do you do that when you’re trying to? You can’t. It’s a koan. It’s impossible.
How does the actor get past his own excruciating self-consciousness? How does the entrepreneur come up with an idea that’s really new? The answer is they both beat their heads against the wall over and over and over until finally, from pure exhaustion, they can’t “try” any more and they just “do.” The writer says fuck it and writes a sentence in a way he would never imagine himself writing a sentence, and to his amazement that sentence is the first real sentence he’s ever written.
The price of achieving that breakthrough is time. Time and effort. Ten thousand hours if you’re lucky, more if you’re not. The gods are watching for those ten thousand hours, like instructors at Navy SEALs training. They can tell when we’re faking and they can tell when we’re for real. They can pick out those of us who really want it from those who are only pretending.
The worst part is there’s no guarantee. Put in your 10,000 hours in medical school and they hand you a scroll of parchment and call you a doctor. But try to make a movie, or write a symphony or paint a picture.
In the end those ten thousand hours must be their own reward—which is the way it ought to be, don’t you think?
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Yet more serendipity! Thank you, Mr. Pressfield for this. It’s something I’ve been trying to deal with for a while, just lately crescendoing into greater importance.
Several years ago, I tracked down (what I believe is) the original article for this 10,000 hour concept. It’s “The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance” by K. Anders Ericsson, Ralf Th. Krampe, and Clemens Tesch-Romer, and was published in 1993 in the Psychological Review. [Vol. 100. No. 3, 363-406, if you're as anal as I am.]
One thing that is often lost in the “telephone” version of both this study and of Gladwell’s book is the rest of the concept. It isn’t just putting in 10,000 hours of routine work, it’s putting in 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. In other words, those hours have to be spent actively working at getting better.
“Time and effort,” to quote Mr. Pressfield.
For me, the hardest part is sorting through all the accretions of “others” in my head. Is any given attitude or belief truly me, or is it one of those notions that slipped in sideways in my childhood and took root in my brain as a child’s interpretation that now influences the adult?
I love studying about the new brain research and how we become who and what we are, almost – but not quite – more than I love researching (at the moment) corrupt 18th century politicians. (And, yes, I’m pretty darn sure that last is not anything I absorbed, sideways or not, from anywhere else.)
The zen koan reference reminds me of the Growth Mindset (as delineated by Dr. Carol Dweck), whereas a Fixed Mindset would quit the trials long before we might “inexplicably succeed” (again, to quote Mr. Pressfield).
It’s the idea that the trials and the explorations themselves are what propel us forward that’s hard to implement for many of us, but so vital that we do.
Any suggestions as to how to sort through the morass to discover our own “true”?
Brandon,
My take is that while there have always been the wannabes, the ones who want the caché of being an artist (or anything perceived as ’special’) without doing the actual work, there are others who for reasons complex and often hidden have more difficulty moving forward, yet their aspirations are true.
It is to those last that I see this article being particularly helpful. (Myself among them.)
So, again, my thanks to Mr. Pressfield.
In Do the Work, you mention that if you’re a professional writer, you write because you have to. I am, by my rough estimate 3,000 to 4,000 hours into my apprenticeship. But I’m not exactly counting to 10,000. I’m just writing because I can’t think of anything else I’d rather do with my time on this earth.
I wrote myself a note the other night:
“Success is not somewhere you go.
It’s something you do.”
Every day you kill the dragon of Resistance, you succeeded. If you kill it for 10,000 hours, you succeeded, whether it resulted in a work of art visible to others, or simply the one you created by killing that beast over and over and over again.
The value is in the craft, not the thing crafted.
I am not a writer (well, actually, I am paid to write, but it’s technical IT stuff, and is a nice little earner and certainly not a passion!). However, I am currently studying kinesiology. I have found that it seems to take years for people to really ‘get’ kinesiology. There are very, very few kinesiologists whose work I have been really impressed by, but those who have impressed me have blown me away. I had a sense the other day that it was going to take me about 27 years to get really good at it and I just did a quick calculation to see that that was a little over an hour a day for the next 27 years. While I appreciate what Brandon says about how you will never succeed if you aren’t “haunted” I think that it’s easy to lack discipline and focus in a study and then find, too late, that you’ve run out of time. This has been a really helpful article for me to read as it’s made me appreciate that, unless I make sure I am doing an hour a day, I am unlikely to live to the age when I master this skill!
You have to do the work, but there is no guarantees of the outcome. You have to do the work therefore, for the sheer joy of doing the work.
Emanuel Lasker, in his Manual of Chess, claimed that 120 hours of guided instruction sufficed to “educate one ignorant of ches to the level of one who, conceded any odds, would surely come out the winner.” If there is a law of diminishing return – more effort for each step higher – then perhaps the “formula” for competency is 100 hours (to keep the numbers even), for journeyman 1000 hours and mastery 10,000. (Is “craftsman” a better term than “journeyman”? Meaning one who produces an acceptable product.)
I teach English 101 (throw out those stereotypes and put down those weapons). The first half of the semester the students bang their heads against the wall and get angry with me because I won’t let them follow formula. (Have you ever tasted that stuff? YUck.) In one place I teach students must take an “exit exam” – an in-class essay graded by a panel. They’re given a prompt. (Ex.: Should student loans be forgiven?) I told them if their first sentence is the prompt as an assertion (Student loans should/should not be forgiven) they’ve already lost their voice. Orwell talked about this in “Politics and the English Language.”
The voice empowers. It’s worth 10,000 hours – or more – to find it.
I loved Outliers, but part of me felt a little hopeless, too. His point didn’t seem to be, “Hey, if you want to do this, you have to put in 10,000 hours of work!” It was that these successful people were all in very unique situations that enabled them to log that many hours. Most of us are not in similar situations. All this to say, as others have said, focusing on the number 10,000 is not where it’s at. Putting in the work is where it’s at. The voice will come.
Man, oh, man…everyone wants to fit complex, hard won wisdom in a nice little catchphrase. “10,000 hours” equals whatever it took that professional to go pro. if a pilot has 5000 hours of flight time, he has expended 5 times that much, planning, studying, thinking and rethinking those missions…Hard won wisdom cannot be understood by those who have not gone down the path. Semper Fi!
I like the concept of the 10,000 hour rule, but I don’t like the idea of putting in the work.
But as an aspiring writer it makes sense. What’s the old saying “to become a success overnight all you need is 10 years of hard work”, or something like that.
I first heard author Po Bronson (author of What Should I do with my life), talk about the concept, he held somewhere between 17 – 20 different jobs before he became a writer (none related to writing).
I don’t believe achieving mastery is easy, and I know I’m going to have to put in the work.
Read the book The Talent Code by Daniel Coyle, it goes more into depth about the 10,000 hour rule.
My field is futures trading, Steve, and it took every bit of ten thousand hours to get to the point where I was doing the right thing. My mentor would say, “You have to see it.” There has been no short cut for me to get to where I can see it. A great trader was asked how he came to choose trading. He answered, “I don’t think you choose trading. Trading chooses you.” Must be the same for writing. Thanks for a great post.