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.

How do poly-experts become who we are?

Today I’d just like to mull on what it means to be a poly-expert, and how you could have arrived at being one. I’m going to pretend to forget about the “what we call ourselves” question for a moment, and look at it through doing some basic arithmetic around how a polymath, poly-expert or generalist can possibly spend their time. If you don’t have the time right now (hah!) to read these two rather long pieces, let me synthesise here a couple of ideas that I want to expand on by pulling out some key quotes.

From my post:

Somewhere in the way we view what we, as respectable members of society, should do with our lives, we lose out the moment we think of ourselves as a cogwheel that can be good at only one thing. So many of the skills we possess in one discipline translate to another, it seems ridiculous to limit ourselves and fool ourselves into thinking that we were each designed for only one thing.

It’s a little like mastering languages. When you begin to know a couple of languages, the third, fourth and fifth language comes easier, because suddenly you have a much more flexible model of the world through which you can adapt what you see and interpret. As you encounter new things, they either fit into something you already know, or you create a new mental model.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that if we could pick up very different skills, that we should be able to be more efficient learners, and be more adept in more of the things we do?

From Stephanie Booth’s post:

The mono-expert builds his expertise on digging deeper and deeper and acquiring an exhaustive knowledge of his subject. He runs the risk of becoming blind to what is outside his specialty, or viewing the world through the distorted glasses of excessive specialization.

The poly-expert builds his expertise on digging again and again in different fields. In addition to being an expert in the various fields he has explored, the poly-expert is an expert [at] digging and acquiring expertise. By creating links between multiple fields of expertise, he avoids the pitfalls of excessive specialization — but on the other hand, he is often recognized as a superficial generalist rather than a kind of super-expert (because “you can’t be an expert in all those things, can you?”)

On a related note, Hunter Nuttall changed his blog tagline just two days ago to “personal development for polymaths”, and in a corresponding blogpost, he highlights some main points about polymaths and who they “are”.

Calculating “career time” as an expertise

I happened to have read Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers, and maybe so have you. I’m sure you’ve at least heard about the 10,000 hours it takes to be an expert. I’m not saying I agree with him on the figure, but it’s an interesting guideline to abide by. There are many more points in the book about the secret(s) of success, but I’d just like to think about what this means for poly-expertise by getting it down to a simple practical matter — what do we do with our time? I’m going to start with the most obvious calculation: let’s take this apart and look at it from a “professional day-job” standpoint.

Assuming 40 hours a week make a full time job, to be an expert we’d need 250 weeks. (10000/40-hour week = 250 weeks.) Time off work for vacations and holidays and such ranges from 2-5 weeks on average a year, so let’s say it’s about 3, as an average of an average. With a “career time” of 52 minus 3 weeks, we’re at 49 weeks per year. 250 weeks/49 would give you just over 5 years, not 10, if you stuck at working in the same field of knowledge all day. (Side note: There’s interesting history about where the 8-hour work day comes from, but that’s out of scope of this discussion.)

However, anyone who’s tried to estimate how long something takes (let me put my project manager hat on) will know that most people are really effective for no more than around 5 hours a day. So let’s make that a more conservative estimate: 10000/(5 hours x 5 days a week) = 400 weeks. Let’s divide this again with our average number of weeks worked (49): and we’re at 8.16 years. That gets us a little closer.

But wait. Aren’t there 24 hours in a day? Is it correct to assume that an 8 hours’ work day is where we’re all at?

In my follow up post, I’m going to explore some basic arithmetic around the other 16 hours in the day. Let me just go away for a bit and make sure I got my numbers straight.

As I was growing up, my parents, to their credit, tried to make sure I had a well-rounded education. I was given music and art lessons, and turned out to be quite good at these things in addition to being an A-student. However, the education system in the place where I was born was inherited from the British; your destiny is binary — you either end up in the Arts or the Sciences, depending on how well you did at school. (I’ve since learned this system is similar in many other places.) So, students who score good grades were streamlined into Sciences, and students who didn’t were cast into the Arts. If you were a Science student, your future is ripe for the picking, your oysters grown for you.

However, being someone who happened to be good at science and mathematics (it took me all the way until university before I started to loathe maths), as well as a performing musician when I began primary school, I couldn’t understand this arbitrary split of abilities and social rank, but I digress. At some point, I realised that to maintain a level of sanity, I had to make sure I could exercise both my artistic abilities and scientific inclination whatever I ended up doing.

I remembered one day when I came home from school and offered to help with dinner. My grandmother had always been nervous watching me cook because I was left-handed, and everything looked wrong to her. Out of nowhere, she said nonchalantly, “You’re such a good student, we can’t expect you to cook.” I remembered thinking to myself, “What?!” Even more surprising, she said it with a touch of pride. Maybe that was when it began — I refused to have my whole person judged upon one thing I did well, and wanted to do well in many things.

Recently, I was cleaning out my hard drive and found a random voice note I recorded at some point, probably for some essay that I never got around to write:

When I was in primary school, my headmaster thought I was smart enough to be a scientist one day. Looking back, I think he expected me to fill big shoes, maybe I could be like Albert Einstein or Marie Curie, but I think then that I really wanted to be like Leonardo da Vinci.

By the time I was getting into university, my matriculation score placed me in the top 3% of the state — probably not the best I could’ve done, but I didn’t really work all that hard, I was spending too much of my time playing in every single music ensemble the school had to offer. But that was alright, there were only two university courses my score wouldn’t have let me gone into: medicine and dentistry. Neither of these were of interest to me.

Throughout all these years, time and time again, my family repeatedly told me, “You can’t be the jack of all trades, master of none.” After awhile, I started calling myself a jackass of all trades.

And now, after more than a decade into my profession — which I stumbled onto rather than chose — I still hear this. Specialise, be really good at one thing. Don’t be a jack of all trades, master of none. You can’t be good at everything.

But I have the blood of a generalist. I was a fairly accomplished musician. In the realm of building for the web, I went from coding back-end systems, to front-end engineering, to designing user experiences, to leading teams, to project and product management. I wrote ever since my father thoughtfully gave me a book to fill since I was 7 years old, I sketched, wrote all the way through my difficult years, I learned to photograph the moment I could afford a decent camera. And thanks to my mother, I learned how to make things, and continue to pick up various different ways of making things. Later, I learned a little of the art of the barista, and learned how to silversmith.

If I hadn’t been a musician in an orchestra, an accompanist, or a soloist at times, I would probably not have had the ability know how to get people to work together, how it takes the power of many to create magic, how it takes careful listening, coordination and trust. If I had not graduated in computer science, I would not have come up with a team strategy that was inspired from programming for parallel processors. If I had not been a musician, I would probably never have been a good writer, communicator, teacher and speaker. What makes me a good cook is also what makes me a good project manager.

Somewhere in the way we view what we, as respectable members of society, should do with our lives, we lose out the moment we think of ourselves as a cogwheel that can be good at only one thing. So many of the skills we possess in one discipline translate to another, it seems ridiculous to limit ourselves and fool ourselves into thinking that we were each designed for only one thing.

It’s a little like mastering languages. When you begin to know a couple of languages, the third, fourth and fifth language comes easier, because suddenly you have a much more flexible model of the world through which you can adapt what you see and interpret. As you encounter new things, they either fit into something you already know, or you create a new mental model.

Doesn’t it stand to reason that if we could pick up very different skills, that we should be able to be more efficient learners, and be more adept in more of the things we do? In which case, why do we have a society that’s afraid of giving birth to generalists?

Update (Jan 7, 2010): Wow, for some reason this post is getting a lot of traffic after I’d even forgotten I’d written it. This post was a deep self-reflection, but I’m really happy to see that it appears to resonate with many. Also, seems like we lost some trackback info during our server crash a few months ago, so you may also be interested in follow up posts elsewhere:

• On Stephanie Booth’s blog: What if Generalist vs Expert was a Mistake?
• On my other blog, where I felt it’s more appropriate to take this thread: The Master of Many, Part 1 and Part 2.