EPISODE 2: The 10000- hour rule


PODCAST EPISODE 2:

Here we are with the 2nd episode of our podcast and today in The chronicles of a 20 year old I am here to share about,

The “10000-HOUR RULE”

So, last week when I was randomly scrolling on You Tube, I found a You Tube short about this 10000 hour rule, where the you tuber said that he read about this in Malcolm Gladwell’s book called- OUTLIERS: THE STORY OF SUCCESS, so according to this rule, “the key to achieve mastery or expertise in any skill is simply practicing it the correct way for 10000 hours.”

And as soon as I learnt this, I started calculating as to how many days will it take to master some skills that I would like to pursue, so I did some mathematics like a day has 24 hours so if we spend 8 hours put together for sleeping, eating, and bathing then we have 16 hours left out of which I have to spend 8 hours in college, so all I have is 8 hours left so  if I spend 8 hours every day in learning some skill then it will take me 10000/8 days to learn a skill and it was around 1250 days which comes close to 3.5 years, then I listed out the number of skills I wanted to learn, which included playing good Basketball and football, and when it comes to the instruments I have to master playing the Ukulele the Guitar and lately I have been developing some interest towards percussion too, then blogging, and podcasting too, and to sing soulfully, Ahn, to learn all the south Indian languages, also Hindi and reading books and study ecology. And I realized that the number of skills I want to learn has exceeded 10, but even if I narrow it down to 10, it will take some 30-35 years to master all of these skills by then I will be 55 years old.



But I very badly want to master a few things within 2 years, then I started regretting for wasting the first 20 years of my life where I could have mastered 5-6 skills mathematically, but If, think practically then I could have comfortably mastered at least 1-2 skills! Then an idea struck my head, I need to learn these skills but I can compromise with the level of mastery for the time being.

Like let’s take A.R Rahman, a relevant example for all us understand, he might have spent 10000 hours in composing, actually he might have exceeded this 10000-hour limit long back, the whole point behind this example is that, I don’t want to master the skill as good as A. R Rahman but I want to master it to a level which I am actually not able to quantify in terms of hours, but yes I want to master all of the skills that I mentioned some day in life as I said before the level of mastery can be lowered only for the time being, I actually forgot to mention about the 4 wheeler driving skills which I am currently learning about which I will be talking about in the next few episodes,

So, yeah, the 10000-hour rule made me realize 2 things:

1.       That I am wasting a lot of time

2.       That its not too late to learn something

This may sound like an irony but yeah, even if I invest 1 hour everyday in one skill then I will be better at it by a great percentage in the next two years, even if I have not mastered it to the extent possible, I will have definitely improved at it. Like something is always better than nothing, just start off! I know its very just say but to practically make it possible we need to cultivate a habit of devoting time to all of the skills that we want to master. So, the next episode will be about the goals I want to achieve with the time frame, and about the habits that I need to cultivate to achieve those goals, so to check if any of your goals coincide with mine then let’s start together!

I have also thought about tracking the number of hours I am going to invest for various skills that I have to learn.

So the moral of the story is DON’T JUST SPEND YOUR TIME, INVEST IT! Bye!

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