In his book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell says ten thousand hours spent in a craft are required to attain a level of excellence.
Just a little time and effort will produce only little results. If we want to get better, we must do a lot.
Ten thousand hours is roughly equivalent to five years of fulltime work.
Let’s do a little math. Didn’t you just love those word problems in math class?
If writers move toward publication with two hours a month with a critique group and spend four hours a month writing five double-spaced pages for that meeting, how long will they take to arrive at ten-thousand-hour excellence?
Translate the word problem into a numeric calculation:
1 year writing = 12 months × (2 hours + 4 hours) = 72 hours
10,000 hours ÷ 72 hours per year = 138.9 years
A follow-up problem:
If a writer wanted to achieve ten-thousand-hour excellence in ten years, how many average hours per week would be required?
10,000 hours ÷ 10 years ÷ 52 weeks per year = 19.2 hours per week
Obviously, if we want to get better, we need stay busy at our craft—and be persistent in that effort.
