About me: I'm an unrepentant generalist finding my way in a world of specialists. I started this blog to review books, but I now talk about topics ranging from management to cognition to social software.
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Seen on Twitter: “We are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit.” Aristotle
Both Drive and The Talent Code make the same point: Becoming a master isn’t about natural talent or improbable achievements – it’s about getting a little bit better every day, and practicing until what is now challenging becomes unconsciously automatic.
I like Pink’s 2 questions: “What’s your sentence?” (in other words, what do I want to be known for?) and “Am I better today than yesterday?” The first question must be answered before the second can be asked; otherwise, the definition of “better” is undefined.
Once you’ve decided on the answer to the first question, Coyle’s book provides a guide as to how to execute on the second question of getting better. It’s about having the emotional desire (what Coyle calls ignition) to spend the 10,000 hours necessary for expertise in deep practice. To put it in colloquial terms, it’s about getting the reps. We can’t improve without practicing the skills we want to acquire and building them deep into our neural system.
I should note that it’s not simply about repetitively practicing skills – it’s about continually pushing the edges of what we can do so that we can continue improving. In weight lifting, if you can slam through your reps without slowing down, you’re not getting stronger; strength is built by pushing the muscles to the point where they slightly tear, so that they get re-built stronger. Pushing oneself to that edge is difficult – I was only in that zone when I had a lifting partner (which I’ll address in a followup post about the benefits of coaching).
I don’t feel I have good answers to Pink’s questions at the moment. While the tagline of “Unrepentant Generalist” is descriptive, it doesn’t make a good answer to Pink’s first question in that it’s difficult to say what I should be practicing on a daily basis. I have a number of 2,000 hour skills, but I think it’s clear that 5 sets of 2,000 hours is not the same as 10,000 hours. So I’ve been reflecting on what the skills I need to be practicing on a daily basis are. Candidates include communication, synthesis and pattern building, which are all skills exercised by blogging, hence my attempts to get back into blogging regularly.
I leave you with these questions: what skills are you getting the reps in right now, where you’re pushing yourself to improve and get better each day? And are those skills the ones that are part of your vision of who you would like to be? And if not, what are you going to do about that? I wasn’t happy with my answers a couple weeks ago, but I think I’m starting to move in the right direction by blogging more, and spending more time reading books. Reinforcing these habits will hopefully move me in the direction of excellence, as described by the Aristotle quote above. We’ll see.
P.S. Wow, I can’t believe I didn’t reference this 2007 post on mastery, since it hits several of the same points – I discovered it while working on my next blog post but decided to add the link here, as it’s entirely relevant.
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Wow, where to start.
I only like Pink’s second question. I think the first question is built on a number of assumptions that rarely hold.
Why do you need a sentence? The assumption, which I guess makes sense if you’re trying to sell these books, is that you are better off if you’re trying to become a master at some specific thing. But are you?
Do you think this is what Aristotle meant? I don’t believe Aristotelian ethics centered around the idea of becoming a world-class master at something. What’s the purpose of your life? For me, it’s some combination of enjoying my time on earth and leaving the world a better place than I found it. Is that my sentence? It’s pretty vague.
Would you personally be better off with a 10,000 hour skill? Would you be happier? Would the world be better if you had one?
Also, I think the whole idea of 10,000 hour skills has been overgeneralized. I am pretty willing to agree that sports and music are 10KH skills. But is pattern building or synthesis really a 10KH skill at all? I don’t think fashion modeling is a 10KH skill. What about acting — first time actors sometimes turn in astounding performances. Does Barack Obama have a 10KH skill? Larry Page? I’m even on the fence about things like math or physics.
I don’t think we need to or should encourage too much development of 10KH skills. I think the books actually underemphasize the importance of factors beyond practice, whether they be luck or “innate talent.” I know many musicians who have put in their 10KH, are *excellent* musicians, and cannot make a good living. The same is certainly true for athletes. Clearly, you need to put in the 10KH to become great, but there are still issues of demand and supply, and winner take all economics, to contend with. Picasso *did* take years to develop, but he was already brilliant as a young child.
On the other hand, I totally agree that deliberate practice in many areas is important. I just want to divorce this from the idea that the path to success for most people [including you] is to describe yourself in a single sentence and attempt to become a 10KH master at one thing.
Does there need to be a sentence? Perhaps not. But I think I would personally benefit from some focus in my life. I do lots of things at a mediocre level now, and that does not make me happy. I think I would be happier if I had a core skill set of excellence. I’ve had such things in the past – in the last ten years, I was a top LabVIEW programmer, one of the inventors of a new drug discovery instrument, a top choral singer, etc. Since I have gotten onto the generalist track, I have lost that feeling that there’s a skillset at which I kick ass. I get that feeling occasionally, but it’s so inchoate and undefinable that it’s hard to believe in.
And while I think the 10kH (love the abbreviation) skill idea may have been overgeneralized, I think there’s a core of truth to it. Whatever we focus on and do, we get better at, because we are embedding those patterns in our brain so we can think more deeply because the basics are wired. To take your specific question, I do believe that pattern building and synthesis are 10kH skills – I am certainly much better at those skills than I was five years ago. I make connections that are obvious to me, and have to slow down as I realize others aren’t making those connections. So I believe I am on that path, but it’s challenging because it’s ill-defined (the subject of another post).
“What’s the purpose of your life? For me, it’s some combination of enjoying my time on earth and leaving the world a better place than I found it. Is that my sentence?”
How do you intend on leaving the world a better place? That’s what I think the sentence is trying to encapsulate. Pink’s examples include being a parent, a community activist, a scientist, etc (and of course, one could do all of these). But for me, that’s the question – I want to make an impact on the world, and am asking the question of what form I want that impact to be. I don’t know.
Just came across an alternative version to the “10,000 hours”, which I think is better – L Peter Deutsch, in Coders at Work, states that “to be a master at something you have to have, pretty much at your command, something like 20,000 specific cases.”
That being said, rif has a point, the whole 10,000 hours mantra works well for a technical skill, but it’s obviously not the whole truth. I have clocked in well over 10,000 hours living, and I still suck at it.
So I agree that having some focus in your life is good thing. My objection to the 10KH metaphor is that it ignores how much you’re giving up to get it, the appreciation for how much time 10KH really is and that putting 10KH into something specific is often not a good way to succeed. Tiger Woods is an amazing golfer, but he gave up a lot of time to get that. You, like most people, are more of a generalist than Tiger. But 10KH’ers are by definition not just specialists, but fairly extreme specialists.
So you invented a new drug discovery instrument. Did you really spend 5 years fulltime doing that in a very specific way? You’re a good choral singer? Again, are you 10KH hours good? Would you want to be?
And I’m going to go back and argue again that pattern building and synthesis are *not* 10KH skills. I agree that you’re better at them than you used to be. I’m better at being a boyfriend/husband than I used to be — that’s not the point. I think pattern building/synthesis lack too many of the essentials. It is hard to define “deliberate practice” for pattern building and synthesis. It is hard to measure performance accurately. It is very difficult to repeat situations exactly, trying slight variations each time. I do think you’re learning something, which is to say I think you are “getting wiser”, but I don’t know how tightly it fits the 10KH paradigm, which is really pretty specific — put in your 10KH of deliberate practice, become a “master”.
So my point is that I agree that knowing a bunch of your core competencies is useful, and having some focus at any given moment is valuable, but I just don’t find the 10KH view helpful for most people — I don’t think it accurately captures enough of what we’re striving for.
Your question about how I intend to make the world better is a good one, and I don’t have a more specific answer, unless you consider “By using my brain to solve various problems that crop up, over and over til I can’t anymore” to be more specific. But I do think the answer can change over timescales much smaller than 10KH, and can also admit to a fairly generalist approach.
Oh, I don’t claim to have any 10kH skills. I have a few 2kH skills (I think that’s about the time spent for the ones I listed in my previous comment). 10kH is necessary for mastery. 2kH is sufficient to be pretty damn good at something, though. I don’t really see myself getting to the 10kH mark on anything – I would argue that even 2kH of deliberate practice is more than many people achieve on anything. I like the 10kH paradigm because it gives me a useful way to think about improving myself. It may not be a useful paradigm for others, depending on the set of skills they are trying to develop, as you observe.
[...] Getting the reps [...]
[...] previously seen situations and respond quickly without involving the conscious mind. When we are developing our 10,000 hours of expertise, we are building the necessary neural pathways in the unconscious brain (what Daniel Coyle says are [...]
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