How Many Hours Have You Written?

I recently finished reading Malcolm Gladwell’s Outliers: The Story of Success.  It offers some interesting insights into success and class and class change in America, which are important themes in my memoir Poor Relation.

Outliers is an interesting read.  One of the concepts that Malcolm Gladwell offers about success in America is the idea that almost anyone who does something consistently for enough hours will become an expert.  While the idea of hard work to achieve success is certainly ingrained in the American psyche, Gladwell goes further by actually quantifying the concept.  Spend 10,000 hours, he says, on anything and you will become an expert, virtually untouchable – world-class among your peers.  Whether you’re Bill Gates, who spent every free moment of his entire high school career on computer programming, easily 10,000 hours, or the Beatles, who as a high school rock band, perfected their act by taking five trips to Hamburg, Germany between 1960 and 1962 to play in the city’s strip clubs.  There, they played up to 8 hours a night, 7 nights a week, for roughly 100 nights each trip before they became an “overnight sensation” in 1964.

Now, 10,000 hours is a long time.  If you work 40 hours a week at something for 50 weeks a year, it will take 5 years to accumulate 10,000 hours.  If it’s only 20 hours a week, it would take 10 years.  And obviously, if you think in those terms, it is daunting to imagine that you have to spend that amount of time to be an “expert” writer, especially when you’re doing it “on the side” of your professional life and in addition to family responsibilities.  Most weeks of late, it’s been a miracle if I can carve out a few hours for writing.

So I prefer to think of Gladwell’s thesis as a reminder that to be good at something, you must practice the craft.  Forget the quantification, and just focus on the reality that the more you write, the better you become at writing.  Since my grade- and middle-school days of writing short stories, through my painful high school years writing poetry and music, on through college and beyond when I typically re-discovered my writing life every few years, I have improved steadily.  And even since I first began working on my memoir, I can readily see the improvement, easily discarding portions of my book that I wrote early on in the process before I had found my sea legs and my written “voice” for this work.

And as the hours of writing are spent and the pages do eventually pile up, I can see the fruits of my labors and know that there is certainly value in the time and effort I have spent.  And that gives me yet more inspiration to carve out as much time as I can to practice my craft by putting fingers to keyboard to WRITE!

Comments

[david]

Love this! Daunting. But at the same time inspiring.

-DDB