The Sleep Deprived Machine That Is ABTBA

As I reviewed the first few chapters of Mastery in preparation for my book report my mind wandered. That is usually not a good thing for me. It is even worse when my sleep deprived mind wanders. Luckily my wandering ended on a good path. I was pondering mastery and the endless plateaus that we must face to truly master something. Why pondering I remembered a very intriguing article about the 10,000 hour "rule". A study was published by Andre Ericsson about young violinists and how at a certain age the students achieving mastery of the instrument had generally accumulated 10,000 hours of practice. This idea was further extrapolated on in a popular book called Outliers by Malcom Gladwell. While Ericsson has rebutted the now famous 10,000 hour mark he still believes that this level of focused practice will indeed give someone true mastery of a subject. So I thought about how many up's and then plateaus it would take someone over 10,000 hours. My guess, a lot!

Now in my wanderings I researched the original article which brought me to the 10,000 hour mastery subject. It was a bout a man named Dan Mclaughlin, who quit his job as commercial photographer and set off to see if by 10,000 hours he could become a pro golfer. This became his life. He amassed more than 6,000 hours of practice before medically he could no longer continue. He ended with a 2.1 handicap which according to an article only 6.6 percent of golfers achieve in a lifetime. So we may never know if he could play professional golf after 10,000 hours but we do know that he was getting pretty close.

My own personal experience of being on the plateau led me to think about what is the longest I have ever had focused practice on one subject. My initial thought was basketball. I love to play basketball and played all four years in high school. Over those years I estimated my hours to be around 500-700 hours of practice! That's nowhere close to 10,000. That does not factor in my many years of youth basketball leagues but even then I may barely scratch the 1,000 hour mark. I think this gives a great perspective into how long mastery actually takes.

What are the Rules?

Finding our passion may be easy. Putting restrictions or rules on that passion is difficult. We are told to find our passion. We are encouraged to pursue our passion. We are told to dedicate ourselves to it. What happens when we go to far. The difference between passion and vice can become obscured if we don't establish boundaries. I'm not discouraging people to find their passion and follow it, but we have all seen that going overboard with our passions can have negative effects on our lives.

A simple video game can provide a person with entertainment and release from stress in their lives. That same video game can begin to demand vast amounts of your time and cause you to neglect other responsibilities in your life. Many parents combat this with making rules about video games. They may set a time restriction, or monitor the type of games being played and may even cut out video games all together as consequence for failing to perform other responsibilities.

As adults in business we can an analogy out of video games. We are the kids, the video games are our business and unfortunately we are also the parents responsible for setting the rules. Allowing a child to set their own rules can sometimes benefit them but other times they may abuse the system. We are the same, we benefit from controlling how much time we spend on our business and what our responsibilities are, but we can abuse the system. In this abuse we may be sacrificing meaningful family time, neglecting other responsibilities or allowing debt to get out of control.

So how do we set our own rules? We can write them down. We can discuss them with family. We can constantly reassess if they are working. Businesses are unique, people are unique; so find your balance and set your rules.

ABTBA Is Coming Along

In life we are faced with many decisions. I've learned this week that those decisions can very widely. When confronted with two decisions, one of them bad and one of them good; it is easy for us to discern what option to take. That is not real life though. Our life is often a myriad of good decisions. A lot of the things we are presented with have varying benefits to our lives. Many times we settle for a quick burst of entertainment or joy. This was not a bad decision by us, it provided us with something. It entertained us, although for a short period. There may have been another option, an option that sacrificed our instant gratification but in turn provided a longer more sustained feeling of joy or happiness. All things have inherent value and a lot of them are positive. We just go through life collecting these things and often adding positive value to our lives.

A common example many people may face like the one suggested above is that of school vs work. do we begin a career right out of high school and start earning money immediately even though our earning could be limited? Or do we go to college, get a degree, delay our earnings but most likely have a higher potential of earning money. both options are positives in our lives but have unique values based on the individual.

Contemplating Life

Hey everyone,

This week has been a interesting from an introspective point of view. The lessons had me focusing on who I wanted to become and what my life goals were up to this point. That has always been some scary stuff to me. A couple years ago I decided to buckle down and focus on finishing school once again. I was unsatisfied on how far I could advance in my work place and wanted something more. I decided that finishing school was the best thing to do to broaden my horizons. Well that left me with another problem just a couple of years later.

You see my next major problem stemmed from the fact that my long term goal was just to finish school. It was not about what I would do with the degree or how long it would take me to finish, just finishing. My wife frequently asked what I wanted to do afterwards and I would shrug and say, "I will see when we get there". Well this week has be a reckoning of sorts. My long term future at my current job is on the rocks and making a switch to a new career path became a must to ease my conscious. This left me with the question, what do I do now?

I could go into business for myself and begin creating a business plan or I could invest more in my future and choose new school goals that would pay off later. After a lot of thinking and praying and discussing the end result may be pursuing a secondary degree. One front runner is the possibility of applying to law schools. I've always been excited by the career opportunity of becoming a lawyer and the critical thinking to succeed in that field is one of my strong suits. The biggest hold back is the additional school. School has always been one of my biggest struggles. Not because I find it terribly difficult but because I find it difficult to motivate myself in certain areas of schoolwork. I just wanted to let you all know that big life changes may be coming over the next few months if I iron out my future course. I guess that's a lesson I still have to learn.