The Master of Many, Part 2
Firstly, a (belated) Happy New Decade to all!
Before the holiday season, I wrote about how poly-expertise was possible. In particular, I did some basic arithmetic: if we kept at something — say, working at a particular job — for 5 hours a day, 5 days a week, that it’d take us just over 8 years to become an “expert” if we were to follow the Gladwellian 10,000-hour rule. That is, assuming we have an 8 hours’ work day but are actually effective for 5, and a few other assumptions. Best read all of that here.
So, what I’m going to is to show how, in practice, it’s possible to be a poly-expert over some time, even if you don’t try very hard. If you don’t have time to follow all the numbers and scheduling, feel free to skip right to the bit on why I think the numbers don’t actually matter.
Where did the time go?
When I started making these calculations, it occurred to me that I played a lot of music when I was little. Could we perhaps look at poly-expertise as a manifestation of habits that developed over time, that contributed towards being good at something?
From 7 years old to 21, including performance time, I averaged a couple of hours of practice a day + maybe 1 hour performance a week. (Mind you, that doesn’t mean I practiced every day or performed every week, it’s just an average.) The math: ((2 hours’ practice x 7 days) + 1 hour weekly performance) x 50 average weeks x 14 years = 10,500 hours. On paper, I was apparently already an “expert” musician before I had my first full-time job. In reality, given my age, I wouldn’t have been mature enough then to be a full-fledged musician.
It’s not hard to fit in 2 hours in a day even if you’re already working a full day’s work. There are 24 hours in a day after all, right? Even if you sleep 8 hours, there is technically still time to fill. So, I’d like to explore what happens to the time outside of sleep and work by looking at how I spent my “free time” throughout late high school, university, etc.
Let me give you an approximate breakdown of my schedule when I was in late high school:
- 8:30am – 3:30pm: Classes. I often took the lunch hour to play with the music computer in the lab
- 3:30pm – 5:30pm: Music rehearsal. (2 hours — not every day, but usually 2-3 days a week)
- 6:00pm-8:00pm: Cook, have dinner, wash-up etc. (2 hours)
- 8:00pm-midnight: Say, 2 hours for homework (I doubt I ever did that much), and 2 hours for something else, usually some kind of writing or reading. I was a nerd.
(For the curious, the “music computer” was Notator on an Atari. This was what it looked like. Come to think of it, that might have been what got me interested in usability in the first place…)
In my university years, my schedule was totally erratic, but I spent 10 hours a week either teaching or doing tech support over the course of 2.5 years. University weeks are shorter, we’re looking at around 43 weeks. That clocks up 1075 in preparation for my career in tech — that’s like 10% towards being an “expert”.
In my first few years of working full time as a tech-then-webby-sort of developer, my daily schedule looked something like this:
- 8am – 9pm: Commute to work. Write on the tram/train. (1 hour)
- 9am – 5pm: Work. (8 hours)
- 5pm – 6pm: Commute home. Read. (1 hour)
- 6pm – 8pm: Cook, dinner, wash-up. (2 hours)
- 8pm-midnight: Something webby, I was bored with work. At that time, I did a lot of writing, say 2 hours.
Let’s say I kept this writing up for 4 years. Let’s be conservative and not count weekends and minus a few weeks for vacations, laziness etc. 3 hours x 5 days x 49 weeks x 4 years = 2940 hours. Without counting in the time I started writing in my late high school years, this figure doesn’t yet make me a very good writer, but I’m apparently (numerically at least) about a third of the way there.
Checking in on my “tech career hours” in the course of these 4 years: 8 hours x 5 days x 49 weeks x 4 years = 7840 hours. Add that up to my tech work during university year gives us 8915 hours. That was around 2002, a good 7 years ago, I’ve clocked up about the equivalent since.
How you use your time is how you get good at something
Okay, I think we’ve had enough of the arithmetic and the schedules. What’s my point here? My point is that anyone can be a poly-expert, and chances are all of us are experts in more than one thing. If you break down how you’ve spent your time in your youth, you might figure out how you got good at something over time if you’d kept at it.
I made a couple of important life choices very early. I stopped watching television regularly since I was 12 years old. Instead, I chose to spend my time filling my brain with stuff (usually books), playing music and making things. (I only became interested in television again in the last year or two.) Secondly, I don’t have children — it was a conscious choice, and a completely different topic of discussion for another time. But this means even after a long day of work, I have 2-3 hours at my disposal. That’s 15 hours a week, not counting time on weekends.
Let’s say I’ve made good use of my 15 hours a week over the last 10 years, and let’s give that the full 52 weeks a year: I could have easily become fairly accomplished in a completely different field.
If you spend just 3 hours a day, 6 days a week, and every week for 10 years, you’d hit your 10,000-hour mark. But is that really necessary?
The non-linear runway
In certain fields that are emerging (such as new disciplines on the web) where the field is not any older than 10 years at a stretch, logically it takes a shorter amount of time to become an expert. However, I’d argue that no innovation is an island, and for old hands, our expertise in related fields bring a lot of value. If you are now a social media expert or a user experience designer, work in anthropology or ergonomics would’ve been an amazing asset. If you are a DOM/Javascript hacker, a painful university year or two coding in C probably helped you out. It’s also worth noting that to be really good at something may not require you to be an “expert” — you have to know enough to solve problems that arise in that domain of knowledge.
Of course, this thought experiment is somewhat too linear, and probably much too literal. In my essay I argued that it’s possible that poly-experts are likely learn faster because we constantly throw ourselves into new and unknown fields, and we have a skill that’s finely honed: the ability to learn. Along with the ability to learn comes the ability to analyse, synthesise and evaluate — abilities that make someone good at what they do, and this matters when we look at someone who does different things and have the skills to switch context, or borrow cross-contextual concepts very fast. This makes the ability to arrive at an “expertise” a much less linear matter than just accumulating 10,000 hours.
Good post!
One idea I’d like to bring to the fore is that the 10,000 hours spent at any particular pursuit must be spent in a specific way in order to reach expert or world class ability. In ‘The Talent Code’, by Daniel Coyle the physiological results of what he calls “deep practice” are increased production of myelin in the brain. The three basic rules of deep practice basically are to break a desired activity into learn-able chunks, repeat practicing each chunk individually, and finally to put the pieces together such that one can feel the new activity inherently. The latter is an oversimplification, however the idea is that with deep practice the production of myelin is maximized. Myelin, it turns out, is where learned skills are stored (so to be speak) in the brain. The unfortunate side effect of deep practice is that it can only be done effectively for 3-5 hours on average per day. So the 10,000 hour rule is more a generalized amount of time needed to complete enough deep practice necessary to be expert at anything. Simply logging the hours is not enough, one must continually push the boundaries of their ability on a daily basis. And I doubt that a day job does that for most people.
Coyle’s book is well worth a read, btw.
Hi Bill,
Thanks for that important bit of detail and info – I guess there was plenty of truth to “practice makes perfect” ;)
Do you have any resources to the physiological side-effect from deep-practice, which states we can only effectively do this from 3-5 hours a day? (Perhaps I’ll find it in Coyle’s book?) This is something I have noticed from observation, so I’m interested in finding out more about it.
And… what happens if you’ve trained yourself to learn? Is it possible that that 5 hour limit can be stretched if you are exposing yourself to multiple activities? I wonder…
I wonder how the brain’s learning capacity is affected by a change in a person’s location? i.e. a change of country/culture. I suspect it accelerates learning. Having to function in a new culture, often in a new language, while also learning, say, a new instrument or just a regular college program… it must surely tax the brain in new ways. It’s emotionally exhausting, and at some point, every traveler “hits the wall” after a certain period of foreign cultural immersion — you know, that moment when you collapse in tears and just want to go home and eat familiar food and hear familiar language. And then somehow the next day, everything seems manageable. WTF is that?? Growth or a protective form of delusion? I don’t know, but *something’s* going on in the brain, that’s for sure.
Then compound that with years of a nomadic lifestyle and what do you get? An extremely agile brain. The capacity to learn not just a new subject, but new modes of learning, and from any source, regardless of race, creed, etc. In short, an expert in multi-level learning and communication. Sort of like patting your head and rubbing your tummy at the same time. While hopping on one leg. :) Is there a title for that?
That’s a really interesting point/question, Belinda :) I kinda thought of that as just “learning”, similar to learning languages, where you borrow existing concepts or patterns you know, and create exceptions for what you haven’t encountered before. You’re making me wish I was a neuroscientist!
You might be interested in Edward T. Hall’s “Beyond Culture”, where he discusses fascinating paradigms as how “time” matters to different cultures, and many more such gems.