The Art of Pacing Yourself
November 12th, 2008. Published under The Ultimate You. No Comments.
Malcolm Gladwell has noted that most people underestimate how many hours of sustained effort are needed in order to master a field of endeavor. The magic number, he says, is 10,000. That’s how long student Bill Gates programmed computers before eventually starting his own company.
I first realized I could be a good trumpet player the year I turned nine. That summer, my director at band camp named me the school’s most improved trumpeter. For the next four years I faithfully practiced my music for the recommended 30-60 minutes a day. By age thirteen, I had copped first chair in our school’s trumpet section. Did that make me a musical prodigy? Hardly. Four years of daily tooting had netted me at most only 1,460 hours of practice–a full 8,530 hours short of Gladwell’s golden 10,000. At the rate I was going, I would have needed another 23 years of daily rehearsal to become an expert!
Truthfully, I never envisioned for myself any greater musical accomplishment than reaching first chair by eighth grade. That’s why another of Gladwell’s tips for career success is so important: the need to vividly envision the reward that your efforts will bring. After all, when you’re busy building up 10,000 hours of experience in your chosen field, you want to feel more than the burn. You want to know in your soul the passionate thrill of chasing a dream as wild as a mustang–and as real as a fistful of mane once the dream is within your grasp.