The moral of this tale seems to be: Spend less than 10,000 hours, and your efforts will be merely 'good'. Invest 10,000 hours+ if you want to be great.

I thought of the saying in the writing world that you have to write a million words before you are good. This correlates to what Gladwell is saying. How many hours of practice do we each have left to go before we hit that magic 10,000 mark of mastery?
 

Edited to add: Thanks, Elan. The 10,000 hours sort of ties in with the one million words idea and the "wallpaper your office with rejection letters" idea. And with the "I'd give my life to be able to do that--well, my life is what I gave" conversation.

[This message has been edited by Kathleen Dalton Woodbury (edited November 22, 2008).]
 

This thread acts as a reminder that time works against those who lie to themselves about their needs.
 

Somebody else (whose name has also slipped my mind) said you have to write a million words of bad writing before you can write the good ones. I passed that mark some time ago.
 

It's claimed that Mozart was a genius. Wikipedia thinks that Gates is a genuis too, with an IQ around 170. He's no great programmer, though; many would argue that neither Basic nor MS-Dos nor Windows are the best in terms of software engineering. What he's good at is making money out of software, something that many engineers who've spent 10000 hours honing their craft have not excelled at.

But if you're a genius, and enjoy what you do (as seems to be the case for Mozart and Gates in early life) then it's easy to spend all your waking hours on your talent, perhaps your obsession--in which case what made you great was not so much the 10000 hours, but the latent talent--and the fortutious opportunities to develop it and have it recognized. (I don't know about Mozart, but Gates went to a priveleged school and made the most of access to computer systems, rare at that time.)

Gates is not reported as having said things like, "Gee, I must get my 10000 hours in." To quote Wikipedia, 'Gates wrote the school's computer program to schedule students in classes. He modified the code so that he was placed in classes with mostly female students. He later stated that "it was hard to tear myself away from a machine at which I could so unambiguously demonstrate success."' (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bill_Gates)

Has the author done a systematic survey of successful people, or just picked a few that fit the theory? What proportion of highly successful people have paid their 10000 hours dues? Churchill, for example, only became great as a war-time leader, and he hardly had 10000 hours prior experience at leading freedom fighters in a world war!

Does everyone who spends 10000 hours become great? Surely not. It takes talent too. I've played guitar for well over 10000 hours and will never be great; I know that I have average to good talent, not great; it's just fun for me, no more.

And how does it pertain to writers? 10000 hours of writing? Of working in the areas of which we write? Do hours spent reading count towards the 10000? (They surely do, because good writers are well read.) Do hours spent on hard science count for one developing from scientist into SF writer? They surely do, methinks. That means that many of us have paid some of our 10000 hours dues in other walks of life, relevant to our developing writing lives.

I think greatness is more about talent, and the luck of being recognized. Hard work refines the talent and increases the chances of being noticed but doesn't, itself, guarantee success. And some, I'm sure, get to great before their 10000 hours are paid.

For me, learning to write decent fiction and getting published isn't about serving 10000 hours. It's having fun learning, sharing with others, giving and receiving crits, giving and earning the odd smile, and writing as much as I can when I can. I think it's more important to measure the number of stories completed and out to market than the number of hours I've spent on them ... which reminds me, I have a story or two to complete ...

Optimistically,
Pat

 

The confusion you are experiencing is caused by a misunderstanding. The 10,000 hours is MASTERY of something, that is different than being great.

Mozart was by nature, great, but he did not MASTER the art until he had the time in.

There are millions of masters of some job, but only a few are great. Greatness is not the issue.

Mastery in writing, is a matter of practicing the act of writing, trying to write well, practicing the art.
"If you write, you are a writer. If you are not talented, you will not get published as often, or at all" -Orson Scott Card.

I have maximum of 7,000 hours in my story ideas now over the past ten years. It is likely less as it does not take two hours to write most of my story ideas.
My story ideas made a major jump in quality over the past year, where, a while back, one every couple months resembled a completed short story. Now, one if five appear like short stories. The rest are telling what the novel is about. The quality difference comes from the practice of actual physical act of writing, along with practice in spinning a story around a basic concept.

The act of practicing something and learning necessary aspects of it, getting into the habit of dealing with it more like a job or business, rather than a past time, is what is required to master the act. Of course, proper practice of something is what makes one better.

When you start writing novels, your later stories will be better than your earlier one, simply because you have experiance, had seen what mistakes you made before, and learned how to correct for those mistakes.

I hope this helps.

 

A related example: The most obvious way to check a programmer's productivity is to base it on the lines of code. But lots of lines doesn't mean the code works. Nor does it mean that it's easily readable. The same goes for writing, in my opinion. I've written a couple flash stories and those were very hard for me, because every word has to have a purpose. I think the words I wrote in those stories took more effort, more thought, and so are somehow worth more than the words in longer stories I've written.

I do like the time analogy better, because it just says you have to put the time in and do your best, not that you have to be typing out as many words as you can.
 

To pull an example from our field of endeavor---Robert A. Heinlein used to claim he sent his first story in to John W. Campbell at Astounding and had it accepted. But, over the years, I've learned (1) said "first story" wasn't on its first submission, that it was rejected by Collier's, a prominent and better-paying market in its day...(2) that Heinlein had worked fairly extensively writing for political campaign newspapers for awhile before that...and (3) Heinlein wrote a novel (eventually published recently as For Us, the Living) well before his first submission to Astounding. (There's more detail to the story than that, but I think I've hit some of the highlights.)

So the basic point of getting good at something is Practice, Practice, Practice!
 

I think terms like, "genius," are bandied about by people, often when it doesn't apply. By calling someone a "genius," you're in effect belittling all the work that person has ever done, and excusing your own inability to achieve similar results in whatever field. Basically, society holds itself to a very low standard, so when people openly achieve a much higher standard, they are deemed "geniuses" to prevent the bar from being raised.

I'm of the opinion there's no such thing as intelligence, just varying degrees of stupidity.

The outliers, of course, would be those very, very few individuals of stunning talent that are able to create masterpieces with very little work/practice at all. I would point out both Jeanne d'Arc and Mary Shelley as geniuses at their respective professions.
 

Good point.

I believe that when he was young, Einstein was thought stupid by many because he did not appear to understand physics as it was then taught.

Cheers,
Pat