10,000 HOURS
Friday, November 14th, 2008
In his latest book, “Outliers”, Malcolm Gladwell mentions the 10,000-hours rule. This rule states that for someone to become very good at a task, he needs to spend 10,000 hours doing it. From brain surgeon to rocket scientist to programmer, the very good professionals are the ones who have clocked in the really serious hours.
Talent, is just a predisposition. An opportunity. The common factor in success stories is simple hard toil and effort. Even child prodigies score earlier because they started practising and rehearsing when they were very young.
Using Bill Gates as an example, Gladwell reminds that the world’s richest man started his programming activities when he was still a teenager. At 13, Gates started spending hours a day at a mainframe terminal. This was back in 1969 when even top universities did not have computer access. By the time he dropped out of Harvard, Gates had more programming experience than most programmers would have in a lifetime.
10,000 hours, even at 8 hours a day, take 1,250 days. Divided by 20 working days a month, that works out to 62.5 months that a professional would need to be honing his specific trade at. So, I would be wary of anyone who claims to be an expert in anything after a year or even a few. 10 years would seem more humanly reasonable. (Interesting to note that the Catholic Church has similar requirements for most of their priestly orders.)
At Convertium, we actually have colleagues who have clocked in more than 10,000 hours of experience in their areas of online expertise (don’t call us uncles!). But since the Internet is still a relatively young field, it is the collective expertise that our 30 colleagues generate on a monthly and yearly basis that truely allows us to serve our clients more effectively.
It helps that everyone at Convertium is passionate about the Internet. And we do nothing but Internet work 8 hours (ok, always more) a day, 5 days a week, 50 weeks a year (less leave days and slacking time). At the individual level, we all strive to become the 10,000-hours expert. As a company, we generate that 10,000 hours every 2 months. That is why we are stronger and better together.
The next time you meet an Internet expert (or any other for that matter), think 10,000 hours.