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Tuesday, March 20, 2018

Kyle Phoenix Answers:What is it like to have achieved 10000 hours mastery of skills and looking back, how was the journey?



The question is of course a play on the popular idea of Ericssons work from Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers.
I think many are over-complicating this and not mixing in other elements that 10k would bring. I've been writing stories since I was 6, long drawn out comics with stick figures and byzantine plots. By 12 I started journaling regularly. By 14 I had a small amateur comic company that was national. By sixteen I'd written half a dozen novels. At 22 I dragged a duffel bag of binders into a creative writing class begging to get in as a freshman. I did. I became Carlene Hatcher Polite's Ta, the year I added on Raymond Federman, the experimental writer.
I estimate I have about 40k hours of writing/teaching hours, which includes reading ever increasing in complexity texts, writing in nearly every form from novels to screenplays to directing a movie to plays to poetry to articles to essays to fan fix to blogs to grants to brochures to newsletters to case management reports to resumes to letters to erotica to online rants to marketing campaigns to school/program curriculum to business development process (from Michael Gerber The E-Myth Revisited: Why Most Small Businesses Don't Work and What to Do About It).

Mastery by Robert Greene and several books by Howard Gardner plus the talent code and talent explained quantify this better.
You need a minimum of 10k hours but then you need accomplished mentors, unbiased feedback and ever increasing and diverse challenges to the skill to achieve mastery.
I got those from professors from sending work out and getting published from writing classes where my rule was to never submit the same piece twice, even for different classes, so I was forced to do new things every assignment, being published by my teens so I got over that thrill and returned to the work itself and then the myriad of ways I've used that base skill, including teaching.So now I've written over 125 with the final plan including up to 500 books and published them. I see the first 125 as rough drafts of my lifetime canvas. I expect 499 to be an inch more or different than 125 or 307. Some pieces and books are great, others mediocre, a few the feeling the idea and the execution got too jumbled to be good. But a few, a psychic promised me 7-8 , will be my lifetime classics. But you have to be willing to learn how to cook for 10k practice hours then put in another 100,000 making stuff.
Incidentally a 40 week is about 2000 hours, undergrad about 4-5 years, masters 2 more....about 10k. It's only 4 years really l, maybe five or seven. What I've noticed is people want great skill without significant investment. Only one other writing classmate has seriously published and is a professional teacher writer and in retrospect she was as much of a zealot as I was about our art. Others not so much. They have mundane jobs, tweet a bit, blog a bit, have a dusty manuscript that they wont just self publications to get feedback and more important get on, evolve to the next good or bad idea.
That's the 10k success key---train, practice, mentors, feedback, increased complexity, repeat, repeat, repeat.
If you think expertise is 10k, you're narrowly complexifying expertise, expertise is hearing about the theory and doing a back coin on approximate time invested and come up with 40,000 plus hours, turning to your class at Columbia university, one of five, and realizing, oh, shit, that's the summation equation of how I got here and being thousands of hours past the line with no intention of slowing down. I'm sure ill clock at least two thousand more a year on average reading, writing creating for another twenty to fifty years. Now consider THAT number. Lol

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