It is easy to assume that people who have achieved great expertise and success must have ‘natural talent’. But while it is not always mentioned, when you look into it, they have all put in their hours of practice. Many many hours of practice. How much practice time are you giving your people? How much time are you dedicating to your own practice? What impact is this having on the success of your business?
A deceptively complex piece
As well as being a chartered statistician, my wife Pam is also a musician. She plays Jazz Saxophone and recently played her first shared solo concert in the Cramphorn Theatre in Chelmsford. She was rather nervous about it, but on the day she was pleased to have played her best yet and in particular she was delighted with her improvisation in the classic Dave Brubeck number ‘Take Five’. This is a deceptively complex piece and most people have high expectations about the way it ‘should’ sound especially with regard to the improvisations that the giants of jazz have recorded and popularised.
To me improvisation always sounded like a musician ‘doing their own thing’, I used to think that was the easy bit – they could just let go and play whatever they wanted. It was only when I first met Pam and she began to explain what it takes to be able to improvise in Jazz that I realised just how phenomenally complex it was. Having been classically trained she needed to learn a radically new set of rules, chord structures and rhythms.
When I asked Pam what had changed with regard to her playing so well, she was quick to tell me “Practice, practice and more practice!”
Putting in the hours
As a young man Sonny Rollins, one of the surviving giants of Jazz, would play his saxophone for hours and hours every night under the Brooklyn Bridge. There is also the story of a young David Beckham kicking a tennis ball against a door knob all afternoon, every afternoon, to notice the way the ball curved and what happened when different spins were applied by kicking the ball in minutely different ways. Louis Hamilton may have been the youngest winner of the Grand Prix but he put in his hours, starting off in go-karting as a very young lad. All of the above had one thing in common – they prioritised their practice and practiced their priorities, sometimes above all else and that probably meant making certain sacrifices. However, another key element in their success was the culture, community and family they were in. Having the encouragement and opportunity to practice is what makes the biggest difference. I invite you to consider: what are you doing to help your people practice their priorities?
The magic number for true expertise
In his book “Outliers: The Story of Success” Malcolm Gladwell states that Ten Thousand Hours is “the magic number for true expertise”. This is not just something he made up. There is firm academic evidence by the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues. They studied violinists at the elite Berlin Academy of Music in the early 1990s and their research has been corroborated by others who have studied everyone from chess players to master criminals to Mozart.
So how much is 10,000 hours? Well that’s three hours of work per day every day (or 20 hours per week) for 10 years. Back in the early 1980s when I was originally training to be a chef, I was intrigued when Michel Bourdin my Head Chef at the Connaught Hotel in London would compare being a good chef with being a Doctor. “It takes 10 years of training!” he would say in his thick French accent. That statement always stuck with me because back then it validated my career choice as a ‘Profession’ in the days when being a chef was still viewed by many as an option of last resort in the UK. How things have changed!
Productivity blogger David Seah developed a helpful scale on the orders of magnitude of practice:
o at 1 hour ... you are familiar with (aware of) some basics.
o at 10 hours ... you have a reasonable grasp of basic applications.
o at 100 hours ... you are fairly experienced and can probably deal proficiently with a variety of situations.
o at 1,000 hours ... you are an experienced expert, able to deal with and elegantly recover from a variety of challenges.
o at 10,000 hours ... you are a master, you can take extremely complex situations in your stride and make them look deceptively easy to deal with.
Gladwell makes some interesting comments about people who feel daunted by embarking on a new career, role or even just developing a new skill set.
“One of the reasons people don’t feel they can reinvent themselves is that they think being good at something requires some innate gift,” In an interview Gladwell said “They think, ‘I couldn’t do that, I don’t have that kind of mind or that kind of ability.’ But the 10,000-hour rule says you can do that; you just have to put in the necessary time. The thing that limits us in our choices is not something we have no control over – our abilities. It is something we do have control over – our effort. It really points to the value of experience.”
The practice mind-set
So even though she is a very busy and successful International Lecturer at the top of her field in statistical methodology, Pam is also committed to her music and put in at least two hours of practice every day for weeks leading up to the concert. It paid off.
Setting time aside and having a mind-set of ‘Practice’ makes it easier to overcome the fear and embarrassment of making mistakes. Even when at the top of their game, masters focus on the subtleties and continue to make tiny adjustments to everything they do. They maintain a ‘practice mind-set’.
It’s also important to recognise that training is only the beginning of developing a skill and that without practice any training will quickly become a waste of time and money. Just think about it; if you use the scale mentioned above you could become an experienced expert ‘able to deal with and elegantly recover from a variety of challenges’ within a year if you applied yourself to your chosen skill three hours a day every day. That is quite liberating.
Given that developing expertise and mastery is not so much about abilities but effort, the key questions I invite you to consider are:
o What are my priorities?
o What is the one skill that, if I were to master it, would make the biggest difference in my job / career / personal life?
o How motivated am I to prioritise my practice and to practice my priorities?
o How can I create a supportive culture that encourages practice?
There are many tools and techniques that can help with the answers to these questions. The good news is that ultimately your success is down to the amount of practice you choose to put in and the bad news is that ultimately your success is down to the amount of practice you choose to put in! It’s your choice.
As many regular readers of these articles will know, I am fascinated by motivation and continuously study how our below-conscious motivators drive our behaviour.
If you have any comments about this article or if you would like to know more about what it will take for you, or your people, to prioritise practice and to practice priorities drop me a line at
David.Klaasen@InspiredWorking.com or give me a call on 07970 134964.
Remember . . . stay curious!
With best regards
David Klaasen
