A Path of 10,000 Hours

If you've read Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, or perhaps his blog, or if you've heard about studies he's researched from another source, you may have come across 'The 10,000-Hour Rule.' As soon as I was introduced to the concept, I was immediately fascinated by the idea.


In summary, Gladwell suggests that a growing number of studies point more to preparation than innate talent when it comes to developing mastery of a skill or aptitude. Though there is apparently a degree of talent required in the first place, once this baseline requisite is reached, the only thing that can be reliably seen to differentiate the merely good from the best is practice. And, the amount of practice has been pegged at around the 10,000 hour mark.


In fact, in one study from the 1990's—conducted by K. Anders Ericsson—Gladwell points to the finding that the existence of prodigies, or 'natural' talents, those who are thought to travel without difficulty through the ranks of their contemporaries to achieve greatness, was unfounded. Ericsson discovered no such individuals who could rise to the top with little effort and, what's more, neither did they find any individuals with that basic level of talent who, despite toiling away in practice of their craft, weren't able to rise into that upper level. The common denominator between all of the really successful people—the unknown 'x- factor' of talent notwithstanding—was work. Very hard and very sustained work.


Now, all of this doesn't mean that I would necessarily be able to become, say, a nuclear physicist if I wanted to. This study, and the others he investigated, Gladwell notes, was conducted with people who all had some initial level of ability. I, for one, very much doubt that a career in nuclear physics is within my grasp, no matter how much I enjoy the humor of CBS's The Big Bang Theory. I have an affinity for geeks, but I'm not apparently gifted to that level of geekdom.


But, aspiring writers, take heart: if you, like me, have heard on many occasions that you're either born a writer or not, the 10,000-hour rule does give some weight to your counter-arguments. I think that, if a person gravitates to writing and has a degree of talent for it to begin with, then there's no reason to think that you can't become a very good, or even great, writer.


This is where it gets difficult. You've probably also heard that you MUST make time to write regularly and purposefully to develop the craft. And, not just any writing will do the trick. I've probably spent almost half of the 10,000 hours writing essays and other functional pieces (or at least it seemed I spent that much time writing them throughout high school and university), but that doesn't cleanly translate into creative writing. It doesn't hurt, I'm sure, other than creating a few—okay, a lot—of bad habits, but I believe, if you want to write creatively, either in fiction or non-fiction, that's what you must practice.


How long, in common language, is 10,000 hours? Well, if you wrote for five hours a day, five days a week, you'd clock your 10,000 hours in 400 days. And, if you convert that into weeks, since you're not writing every day, it would amount to eighty weeks. Take off a few weeks here and there for holidays, illness, and what have you, and you're looking at approximately two full years of full-time writing.


From this perspective, it doesn't appear to me so much that you need to be born to write, but you need to be born with the desire to write, because that's an incredible investment of time; especially since most of us have real, paying jobs that frustratingly want to interfere with our creative writing habits. Or, at least they do if you want to eat and have a place to sleep, not to mention to write.


But, as they say, a journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step. And, I suppose then, that a writing foundation of 10,000 hours begins with a single minute. How many have you spent practicing your craft this week?