10,000 Hours

March 21, 2008

A couple weeks ago I was listening to the Diane Riehms Show on NPR and a guy was talking about his new book about modern craftsmanship. In an earlier time craftsmanship was all about carpenters and masons and bricklayers, and it still is today, but he went on to suggest it applied to many things today including science and cooking, etc.

Since I worked as a cytogenetics technologist for years, I can attest to this. It takes time and practice and repetition to get good at a number of things, including pipetting, analyzing chromosomes or harvesting cells. It's also something that physicians, who often spend a couple weeks in a lab, think, "This is easy, anybody can do it," and move on, taking their attitudes with them. When, in fact, the technologists doing that work have a skill that's been honed by hours of practice and most of the time the physicians were so slow and awkward you'd fire their ass within a week if they didn't get it together. Yes, on the surface it's easy; down in the day-to-day trenches, not so much. The distance between "familiarity" and "mastery" is very far indeed.

Anyway, he made a comment that the number bandied about required to master most crafts--say, playing the cello, for instance--was 10,000 hours.

I immediately thought of the oft-repeated suggestion that in order to become a competent novelist you needed to write 1,000,000 words, which probably does come into that 10,000 hour figure somewhere, maybe.

And the truth is, I know this. I was a music teacher. I know that sometimes, in order to learn a complicated piece of music (and even non-complicated piece of music), you need to repeat it dozens of times. Yes, it's boring. Yes, it's repetitious. Get over it. There aren't any short cuts unless you're a freakin' genius.

I had this hammered home recently. I'm a 1st degree brown belt in Sanchin-Ryu karate. The next belt level is black. I "know" all the basics (10), combined basics advanced--CBAs (10), and pretty much know all ten forms. I know the moves. I know what they're about. But...

Last weekend I went to a 3-hour workshop conducted by Chief Grand Master Dearman, who developed the style, and one of the things we as brown belts were working on was what you might call Kumite 101. Kumite essentially means fighting, but he was introducing us to what he feels are the best way to enter into this very complicated thing. So we teamed up with 2 or 3 other people. One person was in the middle and the 2 or 3 people stood around you, holding one hand about head level and the other hand down around waist level--those were our targets. Then they began to slowly revolve around the person in the middle. The middle person's job was to do our 10 CBAs fluidly and hit our targets. This is, frankly, amazingly difficult. Not only to actually do it, but to stay calm during it, and to REMEMBER THE 10 CBAs!

And the CBAs aren't really, generally, that complicated. 3 or 4 moves for each. For instance, the first one is a cross-body punch followed by a backfist. In other words, what we were asked to do was about 40 moves in a row, fluidly without falling apart, in order, while people moved around us, and by this time, we probably have known these moves for 3 or 4 or 5 years.

What this drove home for me was it was time to start drilling myself on everything I know--to increase the repetitions. To take time during the week to do each basic or CBA or form 10 times or 20 times or 50 times each. That it was time to get away from "familiarity" and move toward "mastery."

So where am I going with this?

If you want to be a professional writer--fiction or nonfiction or poetry or whatever--you're going to have to put in the time. You're going to have to write a lot--a million words, maybe. A lot of it will be crap. A lot of it will never see the light of day. You'll need to move through "familiarity" to "mastery" and in between those two there's a fair amount of boredom and frustration.

I once heard somebody suggest that no writing was ultimately wasted, that it was all part of those million words (or 10,000 hours) and I think that--and "ultimately" may be the key word here--this is true.

So, how many hours do you have in?

And have a good holiday, if this is one you celebrate.

Cheers,

Mark Terry