I’ve talked in two posts now about how to get good at something. Now I want to encourage you to go deeper in your chosen discipline. You may find what I’m about to say discouraging, but I’ll say it anyway. In “Talent is Overrated” Geoff Colvin says that across almost all disciplines there seems to be a magic number of practice hours required for mastering. That number is ten thousand. That is two and a half hours a day seven days a week for Eleven years! Crazy. My point in saying that is not to have you throw your hands up and accept mediocrity. It is to help you realize that if you truly want to excel at something you need to practice more than seems reasonable.
Right now I’m trying to learn how to sing. After I put the kids to bed I go down to my basement, get in the closet, close the door, and sing for twenty to twenty-five minutes. I hum for ten minutes and do lip rolls for ten minutes and then maybe a little something more. Based on this schedule I will master my voice at the age of 96. Do I want to be the next Andrea Bocelli? Well, actually, yes but I’m not banking on it. All I really want to be able to do is sing worship songs; not opera. That doesn’t require vocal mastery. But I think it might require me to practice more than twenty minutes a day; particularly as I take some time during every practice session to hit myself out of frustration.
The thing about increasing my practice time is that it really starts to eat into my day. Say I want go from 25 minutes to an hour. During the weekend that’s not a big deal. I can break that into two half hour sessions. But I can’t during the week. That means I have to put the kids down at 7:45 and go in my basement closet until 8:45. Ouch! Not much time left in the day now. Commitment. Discipline. What hard words!
Now maybe I decide that music isn’t important enough to me to put that much time into it. That’s fine. But I’m not ok saying music is that important but I’m too weak to put in the time it takes. For me, that is the struggle. Being strong enough as a person to push through those times when I would rather be doing something else like staring into space. Even if we really enjoy our hobby there are going to be times when we would rather be doing something else. We have to practice anyway. Do you think Michael Jordan had more fun playing basketball than you have working at your job? Of course he did. So why did he get to play basketball for a living? Because he spent all those hours practicing when he didn’t feel like it. The pay for the long hours is the joy of excelling at your craft and hopefully bringing joy to others through what you do.
