To Be A Better Best

To be better or to be the best?

After my reading for Outliers, I'm both skeptical and intrigued by what Gladwell suggest; approximately 10,000 hours of deliberate practice at something can turn you into an expert. Or in short, he proposed that after an exact amount of time practicing, you can be the best at something you do. And then I search more about the subject and surprised for what I found out:

1. About mastering violinist

…the most elite violinists accumulated about the same number of hours of deliberate practice (about 7,410 hours) by the age of 18 as professional middle-aged violinists belonging to international-level orchestras (about 7,336 hours)! By the age of 20, the most accomplished musicians estimated they spent over 10,000 hours in deliberate practice, which is 2,500 and 5,000 hours more than two less accomplished groups of expert musicians or 8,000 hours more than amateur pianists of the same age.

2. About getting doctoral degree

If you think about it, average Ph.D consumes 4 years to complete. Given a Newtonian year is worth 8760 hours and if nothing goes south, roughly a candidate will spend 2190 hours per year (1/4 of his full day and also take account for the off-day, according to some of students I knew) to do research and stuff to get the job done. To get more of that, it was  back to 8760 productive hours as a doctoral candidate.

And the list goes on. (Yea I know I'm too lazy to search but you get the point, right?)

That being said, 10,000 hours is only an average. And deliberate practice is not just going through the motions. The quote itself (just like everything else in this world) suggest that it has flaws. Or to be more polite, I'd like to say it can occurs with certain circumstances. You know you’ve spent more than 10,000 hours driving but that doesn’t make you ready for MotoGP, Nascar, or F1, no?   

So back to 10k hours of deliberate practice at something. Deliberate practice means getting feedback and always pushing to improve. It’s not flow and it’s not fun. It is what molds champions.

Quoting Cal Newport (a Ph.D holder from MIT), If you study people who end up loving what they do, here’s what you find and if you study the research on it, you find the same thing: Long-term career satisfaction requires traits like a real sense of autonomy, a real sense of impact on the world, a sense of mastery that you’re good at what you do, and a sense of connection in relation to other people.

Some days you are going to wake up and things will feel calm. Your vision will be clear, the world will be yours. You will dance upon the ashes of your past and your body will ache with an overwhelming feeling of joy. Other days, you will have a hard time twisting your scars into lessons. Your bed will seem like the safest place on this whole entire planet, and the sky will be riddled with clouds that look just like your mistakes. Well, it doesn't matter. Really. It will eventually disappear. Truthfully, nothing in this world is ever lasting.

What matter is, what you do about it. 

Take advantage of genetic gifts as a matter of finding what your body and mind might have been designed to excel at and aligning your efforts appropriately.

Find a great partner and a mentor to supervise.

Grit. Preserve. Persist. Commit to the long-term goal. 

Focus on improvement. Be an asshole stubborn for perfection. Set your mind to really doing it.

Arrange an introspective schedule. You need to know what is working and what isn’t so you can course correct as soon as possible.

For what it's worth, you don’t need to work endlessly or be born brilliant. There’s a very simple trick we can all use to get a benefit from the world: always be your better best.