What does it take to be the best? The best manager, the best website designer, the best boxer, the best marketer, or the best investor?
The off-the-cuff answer is 10,000 hours, popularized by the Malcolm Gladwell book Outliers As per Gladwell, 10,000 hours is what you need to become a renowned concert violinist, a brilliant mathematician, a chess grandmaster, a Pulitzer-winning novelist.
In other words, that’s 20 hours a week (or 3 hours a day) for 10 years. Well, you may look at this in one of two ways. You might get depressed looking at the 10,000 hours number and re-consider trying to be great in what you aspire to be. Or you may decide to sit down and start working away those hours.
But there are some serious problems with both of those approaches.
The problem with the first approach i.e., giving up, is that it assumes there’s nothing to be gained between hour 1 and hour 10,000.
“I will be nothing until I’ve mastered greatness,” you might say to yourself, “And the road is too hard and long, so what’s the point?”
The problem with the second approach i.e., settling in to grind the hours out, is that it matters ‘a lot’ what kind of practice you put in for 10,000 hours.
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