Skill Mastery

"Outliers: The Story Of Success" is a book written by Malcolm Gladwell in 2008. Throughout the book, Gladwell mentions the '10,000 hour rule', saying that in order to master a skill, one must practice that skill for 10,000 hours.

I find this a very interesting prospect, that anyone has the potential to master any skill with a finite amount of practice. However, when you begin to break down this number, you soon realise how daunting the prospect of 10,000 hours practice is.

For instance, if you (yes you reading this right now) decided to go and learn how to play the piano and practiced for 30 minutes every day, you would be a master pianist in the year 2067. Yes, you heard me right. It would take you about 55 years to master a skill with 30 minutes practice a day. Although, if you doubled the amount of practice and played piano for an hour a day then you cut the time to master the skill in half and you'd be done by about 2040.

So I decided to apply this to my own guitar playing. I wanted to see how far I'd already come to see if I'd already travelled a significant distance towards mastery. I found that between 2001 and (rounding to the nearest year) 2013 I have practiced for about 2400 hours.

About 800 hours between the ages 4 and 12
About 300 hours between the ages 12 and 14
About 1300 hours between the ages 14 and 16 (Projecting the data towards March next year)

I am delighted that as a 15 year old I am already about 25% of the way towards mastery. At my current rate of practice, I'll be a master in 15 years maximum. I think that my ambition in life is to become a master guitarist, I mean let's face it I might not be the next Jimi Hendrix by the year 2027 but I'll be pretty darn good.