Any observed statistical regularity will tend to collapse once pressure is placed upon it for control purposes.
Goodhart's Law
We fear complexity and uncertainty so much that we're willing to pour most our energy and money into reducing them. Many of us approach our path to mastery this way. We wish it were as simple as just clocking in a certain number of hours and be guaranteed some outcome at the end.
The damnest thing about ten thousand hours is that it's not wrong. It's not false that the best X or best Y people dedicated insane amount of hours. But this doesn't mean that we will become the best Z by putting in those hours ourselves. Why?
Masters like Jordan weren't practicing thousands of jump shots because they liked jumping and shooting a ball Masters like West weren't mixing a song in multiple dozen settings including different cars with varying speakers because he got off to sitting in different acoustic settings listening to the same songs on repeat. Masters like Jobs weren't yelling at his team members amidst a looming deadline because he enjoys stretching his vocal cords and being an ass.
What stretches all masters to unusual inputs are their intentions. What is Jordan intending to achieve with those jump shots? What was West trying to achieve by listening to the same song in all these different settings?
Celia Butcher recently coined the idea that the shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts.
Ironically, the ten thousand hours path for many of us is a shortcut. Not a shortcut in time, but a shortcut in honest reflection. Reflections on what kind of life we want to live. We're too quick to think we want to be like so and so and try to sign up for the ten thousand hours they took.
We fear complexity and uncertainty so much that we're willing to pour most our energy and money into reducing them. Many of us approach our path to mastery this way. We wish it were as simple as just clocking in a certain number of hours and be guaranteed some outcome at the end.
The damnest thing about ten thousand hours is that it's not wrong. It's not false that the best X or best Y people dedicated insane amount of hours. But this doesn't mean that we will become the best Z by putting in those hours ourselves. Why?
Masters like Jordan weren't practicing thousands of jump shots because they liked jumping and shooting a ball Masters like West weren't mixing a song in multiple dozen settings including different cars with varying speakers because he got off to sitting in different acoustic settings listening to the same songs on repeat. Masters like Jobs weren't yelling at his team members amidst a looming deadline because he enjoys stretching his vocal cords and being an ass.
What stretches all masters to unusual inputs are their intentions. What is Jordan intending to achieve with those jump shots? What was West trying to achieve by listening to the same song in all these different settings?
Celia Butcher recently coined the idea that the shortcut is to stop looking for shortcuts.
Ironically, the ten thousand hours path for many of us is a shortcut. Not a shortcut in time, but a shortcut in honest reflection. Reflections on what kind of life we want to live. We're too quick to think we want to be like so and so and try to sign up for the ten thousand hours they took.
Seth Godin calls this the dip - the point in a marathon where you're nowhere near the start or nowhere near the end. The people who enjoy running, they're the ones who end up finishing. For everyone else, who can't fathom the end and have exhausted the excitement of beginning, they can quit - it's not for them and that's okay.
I can honestly say that I haven't hit the dip on anything yet. Maybe Godin has a word for this? I always skip out after the honeymoon phase. I might be hitting the dip in the next 18 or so months with software though. So let's see how I feel about all this when that time comes around lol. I hope you and I will still be exchanging ideas by then. I know I still owe you my five year plan. It's very very hard to do. I simply wrote this right now because I know that putting it out there makes it easier to actually start.
But to use another Godin idea... I just stopped writing to go actually look at what the dip entails. Because I interpreted your description of it as something that would happen after at least 1000 hours (nowhere near the start and nowhere near the finish)
reading this now.
https://seths.blog/2005/06/the_four_curves/
will write again later
I went and read wikipedia's entry for The Dip and it seems to be about small failures and allowing them to guide you to quitting early.
I really like this idea of timeboxing your failures. Because I think otherwise people take this long slog approach and then they get scared to try anything new because of sunk cost fallacy