The summer following my freshman year in high school was important to me. After spending my freshman year in the marching band lugging around a heavy bass drum that was strapped to my chest, I decided that I needed to carry something smaller, like a snare drum. The problem was that they don’t give snare drum positions away on a drum line. You had to audition for it. With only 4 or 5 snare drum available and 10 to 15 guys wanting one, it wasn’t easy. To ensure that I would get one of the coveted snare drums, I spend my summer practicing. I spent hours upon hours practicing drum rudiments. At audition time, I got the part and happily carried the snare drum for the next two years. But, the practicing never stopped because your snare was always up for grabs.
Professional endeavors require practice as well. Being an “expert” at something is nothing more than doing that “something” more times than anyone you know. In Malcolm Gladwell’s book “Outliers”, Gladwell quotes neurologist Daniel Levitin:
The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert — in anything. In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals, and what have you, this number comes up again and again…no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.
So 10,000 hours of “doing” will make you an expert at anything. Because many of us are knowledge workers, it is difficult to determine what it is we actually “do” – other than send emails and no one wants to be an expert at that. But once we figure it out it’s important that we continue to practice in order to become experts.
I leave you two things to ponder. The first is a quote from Benjamin Franklin who came along well before neurologist and fancy research: “Speak Little, Do Much”. Second, what much do you think the guys in this video practice?
