Outliers

A few months ago, I read Malcolm Gladwell's book Outliers, and it changed my outlook on what it takes to be successful in today's world. In the book, Gladwell provides case studies - biographies, if you will - of a variety of succesful people, from lawyers to hockey players to Bill Gates. But rather than just charting their career histories, as would happen in a business case study, Gladwell probes beyond the surface to discover the hidden secrets or advantages certain people had. For example, Bill Gates is successful because he know computers. Okay. We all know that. He dropped out of Harvard to start Microsoft. He didn't need college anymore. Why? Well, by the time he started Microsoft, he'd spent almost 10 years working on computers full-time, not to mention studying them in school. He surrounded himself with computers, and even though he might've been frustrated with them at times, he was never bored. And by the time he quit school, he'd probably logged 10,000 hours working on computers. He'd been in the high school computer club (which his school had because he was from a wealthy neighbourhood), because computers were so new when he was in high school, him and his friends got jobs setting up networks for large companies arround Seattle. Then he bought a "make your own PC kit" from a magazine, and that was about that. 10,000 hours.
This is the secret, says Gladwell: if you do something for 10,000 hours, you become an expert in it. If you play hockey for 10,000 hours, you're probably really good at it... and you're probably in good shape, too. If you write for 10,000 hours, you're probably good at it as well.
So the other night I sat down and tried to calculate how many hours I've spent writing. I took my 12th birthday as the starting point, because that's when I started journalling, and calculated up till Saturday. I figured that, on average, I've spent 3 hours a week writing. Sometimes more, of course, but I've also gone months writing nothing except emails. And I came up with a figure. According to my calculations, I've spent approximately 2340 hours writing since the age of 12. That's well short of 10,000. It's possible this number could be higher or lower - I haven't really been keeping track - but it just goes to show that I have a LONG road ahead of me if I want to become an excellent writer.
And it also goes to show that our professors are right. The only way to become a better writer is to WRITE. Constantly. Even if you're writing shit, you have to put in the time.
If you write 20 hours a week for 52 weeks, that's 1040 hours. Do that for 10 years and you're past the 10,000 mark.
If I write 20 hours a week for 8 more years, I'll become an expert. Most likely I won't do that. So if I keep writing 3 hours per week, it will take me another 49 years to log 10,000 hours.
Look for my first book 2058!