10,000 Hours...

Here's an article I just haven't been able to get out of my mind over the last week or so: http://snipurl.com/5kyv1

It maintains that there is no such thing as a "natural genius" at almost anything -- that in almost every field extraordinary accomplishment is almost entirely accounted for by hard work. 10,000 hours of hard work over many years.

This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours. -- http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell-outliers-extract

Most often, that 10,000 hours is accomplished in roughly three hours per day on average for 10 years.

"In study after study, of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice-skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals," writes the neurologist Daniel Levitin, "this number comes up again and again. Ten thousand hours is equivalent to roughly three hours a day, or 20 hours a week, of practice over 10 years... No one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery."--http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2008/nov/15/malcolm-gladwell-outliers-extract

What do I spend that kind of time on? I guess it must have been my unspoken and unrecognized ambition to be a world-class TV-watcher, computer game player, and internet surfer! I'm so ashamed...

Well, here's a change of course -- I want to come to have world-class expertise in discipleship and character development. Today, in what I intend to become a new habit, I am up at 5 am to begin investing 3 hours per day in transparent discipleship. At 43, I'm late starting this I know. But by age 53 I hope to be an expert at learning from Jesus how to live this live and at being shaped by him in the best person I can be. I want to do this in a way that allows anyone who is interested to see what I'm doing, what I'm learning, what I'm wrestling with.

Short updates will be posted to Twitter -- I'm @texastwister. More lengthy matters will be blogged here.

What are you investing 10,000 hours towards?