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.