The problem with 10,000 hours

as reply to Improvements are only temporary until they become part of who you are

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.


This reminds me of our talk on the means vs. the ends. The intention, what you hope to achieve through your practice, is something that I think gets cultivated when you commit to the maybe-10,000-hour trial. And if it's a good fit, if passion eventually follows the work, then that's great. If not, then you learned something. 

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. 
2021-01-26 16:34:03
Man I feel like the ones who even make it as far as the dip is a small minority. I'd  say that it's quite admirable to make it to the dip of anything because that . I feel like we aren't courageous enough. Most of us sell ourselves too short and quit even way before this dip. 

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
2021-01-26 16:44:29
So it turns out that the four curves article isn't necessarily about this more long term dip that you mentioned. The four curves happens to be about the success/dud lifecycle of a product/project. 

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. 
brianball
wrote about this in his first post here https://adagia.org/post/204 

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
2021-01-27 16:09:47
Will come back to comment on this, need time to mentally process. I need to figure out a system for queueing the things I need to read/think about, the list is growing too quickly and I generally try to avoid saying things like "that's spot on!" or "interesting!" haha. 
2021-01-28 02:04:32
Lmao I know precisely what you mean.
2021-01-28 02:17:31