Gladwell always points out the 10,000 Hour Rule, which only becomes more depressing as you age. In my mid (almost late) thirties, I now sit down and think about all the things I don't have time to become an expert in, even if I want to.
Even if I could dedicate two hours every single day of the year to becoming an expert at something, I'll be 50+ before I'm an expert in it. If I could dedicate about 15% of my waking life to becoming an expert in new things, there is only enough time in my remaining life to become an expert in two things at most. And that's assuming it doesn't take more hours or become more difficult or even impossible to become an expert in new things when you're much older. And, frankly, what's the use of becoming an expert in something in your mid 60s?! Just in time to finish the last bit of your life.
If only I'd known the value of time much earlier in life, so I could have jumpstarted that in my 30s and focused on more than one thing to become an expert in . . . you only realize that sort of thing when it is too late.
I don't think that this rule (I don't know Gladwell's version, but I hear this often in Karate) is meant to say that nothing less than 10,000 hours is worth doing.
Why do you do anything, after all? Do you have to be an expert for it to be worth doing? If this were the case, certainly no one would be a parent. It's just a guideline to keep people from claiming expertise that they don't have yet, which is often a problem with people who have been doing things for a very short time.
Or for a specific example, I've been doing karate for 10 years very seriously. Overall, I've probably spent about 4,000 hours doing karate in classes. Of that, I've spent probably about 1,200 hours teaching, which I started doing after only maybe 800 hours of training. I've trained two students from white belt to black belt, and have introduced on the order of 100 students to karate.
But I'm not an expert. According to this rule I need about another 10 years to be one. Does that mean that I don't enjoy doing it? Or that me doing it doesn't contribute to the state of the art? Hardly. Being an expert and being able to contribute are not the same. I'm not going to have karate masters coming to me for advice. But I still have made the world a better place, in a small way, for ~100 people.
My father and mother both started new careers at 40, again at 45, again at 50, and now they're both moving to new things again at 53 (they were young when I was born). Neither of them will probably be experts at what they're working on in a technical sense, but they're still making substantial contributions to the world. Heck, my dad just got his very first journal article published this year in an area that he started working in at 50!
I find that in some ways Gladwell's book as the opposite effect of causing me to not not even want to start something due to this "10,000" hour rule.
At the end of the day, we don't need to be an expert in most things to be proficient. Josh's book lays this out in a nice way. On a more practical level, even 1 hour a day on something has tremendous accumulative effect.
I believe the biggest gift we can give ourselves is to not lose our learning mindset. For those of us who have gone through college/university and gained the discipline to study, we tend to throw it out when we are done. In hindsight, that is the best skill that one should retain in their life. The ability to be disciplined and focus on studying/learning/doing new skills is what I am trying to continue to cultivate and I hope that when I am 50 I still have this mindset and discipline.
10,000 hour rule is only a metaphor. I think at best it should be treated as something that requires a lot of effort to master.
But its not like you go and spend 10,000 hours and at then at the 10000 hour 1 second you become an expert.
If you are deeply involved in something working day and night. Within an year, you will be close enough to swimming with experts. Often that is all you need.
