Ten Thousand Hours

I will start my article today with a personal anecdote (antidote? ....no anecdote sounds right). Over the past weekend, we bumped into a marathoner (It is probably the coolest thing that has happened to me in a bit, so I shall mention it often and in inappropriate places). We had gone to try out new experiences and this kindly gentleman decided to accompany us in our new experience. In the midst of this aimless running in the wilderness, we got to talking about the art of running a marathon, seeing as that was what I plan to do next weekend and seeing that he has done this professionally for a couple of decades....who better to ask advice from? This is what he told me (not in so many words):

For someone to become a professional runner, you have to practice running every single day for at least two hours, for a year. Just running. This improves your posture, lung capacity and it just gets your body used to running. Then after that, you have to work on your strength and resistance for another year. (So on top of the two hours you are running, you have to do weights, uphill and downhill resistance, sit ups, pull ups and planking and all sorts of ridiculous things….every.single.day). This lets your muscles adapt to the strain and pain of running thus preventing injuries. Now you’ve moved from 2 hours to 4 hours. If we calculate that, we are talking in just 2 years, you have done 2,190 hours of practice….Then you can start competitive running. But don’t forget, that just gets you to the bottom of the ranking.

I am reading a book called ‘Bounce’ (Thanks person who gave me this book. :). It says that genius is achieved after 10,000 hours of purposeful practice, which roughly translates to 10 years of continuous practice. Whether you are child prodigy, a master painter, a math genius, a top athlete, whatever it is…..10,000 hours. To be at the top of your game….10,000 hours. To condition yourself to be the best.....10,000 hours. (Let that sink in for abit....a few more minutes then?) Mathematically speaking, if you work 8 hours a day on the same thing for 20 days a month, you should attain genius status in 62.5 months or roughly a little over 5 years. Doesn't sound too hard does it? Now I know what you are wondering. Why haven't you become Louis Hamilton after driving for 20 years, Richard Branson sitting behind your desk doing accounts recievables for 15 years or even Tiger Woods going to the golf course every morning at 6? Why are you not a genius yet?

If you read the sentence it said “10,000 hours of purposeful practice”. That means quantity and quality practice. What were you doing when you were working? Probably, thinking about your date last night, fighting with your colleague about paper clips or if you are like me, your brain was half asleep and the part that was awake was doing grocery shopping. Basically, you are autopiloting all the way to the monthly salary. Your hands work while everything else just goes on holiday. The challenge is gone, the mystery is gone and the boredom has set in and engulfed you completely and totally.

The genius however trains for a purpose. To get better and then become the best. They improve their skills by trying out a harder strategy and then they do it for hours and then move to the next hard strategy. They are already good at what they do. They however constantly challenge themselves to be better. Top NBA stars are trained by having 2 instead of 1 blocker playing against them during practice, top golfers practices out of sand pits and obstacles as opposed to the green, top seed tennis players, make hit after hit at a candle stick on the other end of the court to practice directional control, musicians hit the same note over and over again until it is the only note they can hit, race car drivers train in the wet conditions over and over to master control. I even heard pick pockets train skill and running every morning before going to work. They do the same thing over and over and over again until they own it, and then go on to the next level. It works the same way in business. That’s how new models and new techniques are created. So that when the easier task which is playing against an opponent, it is a natural fluid movement, almost like they were born with it. The ordinary folk like you and me call it instinct. These people are not just working harder than everyone else, they are working smarter than everyone else. Accounts receivable is not their end goal.

To put it in perspective…Mozart had put in over 3,500 hours of practice before his first performance at 5 years of age (child prodigy?), Tiger Woods began training at the age of 2…he became a junior champion at 13. Serena and Venus began playing tennis at 4 and 3 years practicing for 8 hours at a time, the math genius Sarah Flannery’s father would write math problems on a kitchen blackboard for her to solve when she was barely a toddler. Picasso drew faces and body postures over and over and over, sometimes up to 200 times before he made a master piece. It not only makes movements fluid, it allows you to see where the mistakes you make.

From the website http://www.businessinsider.com/executives-share-the-best-advice-they-ever-got-2012-3?op=1 "22 Executives Share The Best Advice They Ever Received" The best minds in the business give more or less the same conclusion....don't dwell indefinitely to your past, move forward, be better and learn. The concept remains, genius grows.

So there you are at your office, discussing people who have done great things and how lucky they are and yet, you have not put a single hour of yourself into anything meaningful. You want to be a great businessman and yet you don’t try to learn anything new. The 20 top CEOs in the world are up before 5 am every morning. Not to mention Chris Kirubi, Titus Naikuni, Bob Collymore and our very own president. You want to become a rapper, and you party all night and wake up in the afternoon, waiting to be an overnight success. Jay Z started banging on his mother's dishes as a teenager and joined rap battles in the late 1980s. It is now 2014...more than 25 years since he began...he is not the overnight success you believe he is. If you are going to dream big, you have to put some meaningful working hours towards it, you have to get feedback and repeat until you are at the very least good at it.

Even if you are not aiming to be the best, you at least want to be good at what you do. So it may not be 10,000 hours but you can do a few hours a week of purposeful self-improvement. Read, practice, run, sing, be better. My question after all this is, what are you doing with your 10,000 hours? Are you just day dreaming about the long weekend or are you aiming for something bigger?

"Nothing worthwhile ever happens quickly and easily. You achieve only as you are determined to achieve...and as you keep at it until you have achieved" Robert H. Lauer