In Gladwell's book, Outliers: The Story of Success, the principle states that in order to become a professional, outstanding in the field like a farmer, you may need 10,000 hours of practice. Gladwell is a storyteller, and is often better at telling stories than being scientific. Even taking a small look behind the research of his work, many of his ideas fall apart. Many run the numbers they believe they need, but like in story, the “ten thousand-hour rule” might be a metaphor rather than an actual number. Every day we take time to create, is practice. There may not be a hard number. I would feel terrible that one reaching only nine thousand hours would feel they are not as good or professional as those who have ten thousand hours. Some may stop practicing at ten thousand hours and just talk about their accomplishments.
In time calculation, the rule is 1.142 years or 13.689 Months or 59.524 Weeks or 416.667 Days or 10,000 Hours or 600,000 Minutes or 36,000,000 Seconds or one year, one month, twenty days, and sixteen hours. To double-check, the information was taken from calculat.io; you may see the numbers here. These ideas of Gladwell were taken apart in a rather humorous way in the podcast If Books Could Kill. Since Gladwell, the “ten thousand hour rule” can be seen about ten thousand times a day. However, the concept is metaphorical in that we might not know what ten thousand hours are and only a little about what they are not. All we know is that ten thousand hours is a long time and that what we might be trying to achieve takes a lot of practice that might never end. A runner does not simply sit down and stop after completing the first marathon. They need to practice every day.
While it might be a nice idea to make some goal that is huge to try and obtain, we can not make the goal or challenge of ten thousand hours the end result to win the title as you may stop if “ten thousand houring” was your hobby rather than creating. Creating may be a vocation for you and is never finished, and will overrun ten thousand hours, lasting a lifetime. It will be very easy to tell the difference between a vocation and the hobby of “ten thousand houring” as one with ten thousand hours will tell you as they have counted and kept track. They might be very good at what they decided to ten thousand hour, but after, they might move on to another thing for the challenge.
So do not be worried about if you spend enough time but work at your own pace. Use time wisely and be productive, but no need to keep track of all the hours. The only hours I keep track of are a count-down to the age of 86 to remind me to enjoy life and to also be productive, as it reminds me that there is an end approaching. But it is metaphorical to me even though from today, I might only have 13,427 days left. Knowing an end helps me schedule goals, act on them, and procrastinate less. And for sure, it takes a lot of practice, and making the good things better when in competition with ourselves is never-ending.
I hope you are able to get some practice in today, and don’t be intimidated by the “ten thousand-hour rule”. When creating, there are no rules. Just be safe and make work that matters to you and maybe others if you like. And if you would like to be a little more ambitious, maybe have your work bring about some type of change. Many times, a vocation is a lifelong journey that might not be all that pleasant. But after we have traveled a long way and have practiced a lot of hours making good things better, we may even enjoy all our sufferings once we start to see the results. Well…I need to go to the studio. I have only 5,234 hours in and it sure looks it! By heavens, don’t tell Gladwell on me!