I’ve been coming across the notion of expertise a lot lately, especially with Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers still riding high on the bestseller lists. The argument is that if you put 10,000 hours of deliberate practice into honing a particular skill set, you will have mastered that skill, or, in other words, become an expert.
Let’s crunch the numbers:
Over ten years = 1000 hrs/year = 2.75 hours a day (approx.) of practice
Over twenty years = 500hrs/year = 1.5 hours a day (approx) of practice
Over thirty years = 333hrs/year = just under 1 hour a day of practice
And so on.
Putting it into these terms depressed me, as I realized that after 41 years, the only thing I am an expert at is masturbation.
3 comments:
Oh but being an expert at masturbation is the most important skill, until you've learnt how to please yourself, you'll never learn how to please others and thereby take an active but funtastic role in creating human community. I've always said, if you wanna smash capitalism you gotta start by wanking!
Floda says that he knows you to be an expert at dodging office politics. Floda is an expert at being an asshole and provoking other assholes into being even bigger assholes. We all have something to contribute to the swarm.
I really dont think that anyone is an expert on masturbation. If they were, the world would be filled with glandular fever and clearly it is not. I've been playing the bass for so long that I've forgotten how to play it which rather disproves the idea that the more you do something, the better you get at it. I mean take a look at my eighties and nineties back-catalogue (my noughties catalogue is, of course, a groove sensation as Michael K would testify). I still think Ebony and Ivory is a good tune but by the time I did 'The Man' and 'Say Say Say', I was so stoned I'd forgotten who I was. Did I mention I can teach you 17 ways to roll a doobie?
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