In Mal­colm Gladwell’s new book, Out­liers, he makes an inter­est­ing obser­va­tion. In any rel­a­tively com­plex dis­ci­pline, it takes 10,000 hours of prac­tice to achieve mas­tery. This 10,000 hour rule seems to apply equally to music com­po­si­tion, soft­ware devel­op­ment, writ­ing, sewing, play­ing hockey, any­thing. No mat­ter what you do, you don’t do it at a pro­fes­sional level until you’ve spent 10,000 hours at it. There are no short­cuts. Even Mozart didn’t pro­duce what peo­ple con­sider his best work until he’d spent 10,000 hours composing.

Doing some back-​of-​the-​envelope cal­cu­la­tions, I fig­ure I’ve spent about 4,000 hours writ­ing in my life­time. Maybe as much as 5,000 if I’m seri­ously under­es­ti­mat­ing my blog­ging. I’ve prob­a­bly spent less than 1,000 hours writ­ing fic­tion. Assum­ing I can lump fic­tion and non­fic­tion together, that means that even if I buckle down and spend 2 hours a day, every day, writ­ing fic­tion until I get my 10,000, I’ll be ready to start writ­ing qual­ity work at the begin­ning of 2016, at the age of 44. I’ve fac­tored in a few skipped days here and there, since I know even at my most dili­gent there will be days where social com­mit­ments on top of my day job won’t allow for 2 hours of writ­ing time.

Seven years. Seven years of writ­ing stuff that I know I won’t be able to show any­one, because I’m not good enough yet. The thought fills me with over­whelm­ing dread, for sev­eral reasons.

First off, I know that in that amount of time I’m going to burn through every idea I cur­rently have in my devel­op­ment note­book. Every project I’m even mar­gin­ally excited about must be sac­ri­ficed to the mon­ster called “learn­ing the ropes.” By the time I’m ready to write pro­fes­sion­ally, I’ll have to come up with all new mate­r­ial. That part doesn’t worry me, since I know writ­ing ideas are like buses: another one will be along even­tu­ally. But I also know there’s no way I can spend seven years writ­ing about “filler” top­ics and char­ac­ters that I don’t care about. So I have to waste the stuff that I’m cur­rently pas­sion­ate about just to make it work. That’s a pretty depress­ing thought, moreso than wast­ing a block of stone or a can­vas for prac­tic­ing other art forms.

Sec­ondly, I’m acutely aware of how much that seven years of daily writ­ing sounds like work. Glad­well also posits that if the work you’re doing is ful­fill­ing, if it’s some­thing that you’re pas­sion­ate about, you’ll do it any­way and the 10,000 hours will come eas­ily as a side effect of how you choose to spend your time. As much as I feel like I should be, I’m just not jazzed about the idea of writ­ing that much “prac­tice” that is unlikely to ever get pub­lished. I write on aver­age 500 words an hour for fic­tion (1,000 or more for non­fic­tion), so we’re look­ing at 2,500,000 words, 2.5 mil­lion, before I’m “good enough.” That’s 15 – 25 aver­age length nov­els. So far I’ve writ­ten 2 and half nov­els and a novella. Ten times that out­put before I’m good enough to go pub­lic makes me want to crawl under my couch.

And lastly, “good enough” for what? Even if I get my 10,000 hours in, that puts me at the same skill level as pro­fes­sional nov­el­ists like King and Grisham. It in no way guar­an­tees the same degree of suc­cess. Glad­well also points out that suc­cess in any field has as much to do on who you know, how you were raised, when you were born and where you grew up as it does on indi­vid­ual achieve­ment and hard work. So while I might be as good, tech­ni­cally, as my favorite authors, I might have no bet­ter results in get­ting pub­lished and onto book­store shelves than I do right now. Is that much work worth it when there might be no reward?

Oddly, 10,000 hours of blog­ging feels totally doable, com­pletely unlike fic­tion. Two hours a day of blog­ging, point­ing out stuff on the net that inter­ests me as well as writ­ing orig­i­nal arti­cles like this one, is def­i­nitely more than I’m doing now, but it would be a pleas­ant and engag­ing use of my time. It is also just about guar­an­teed to make more money for me than fic­tion thanks to Google Adsense, though prob­a­bly never enough to sup­port me with­out a day job. But that doesn’t mat­ter. I’m in it for the LOLs, so they say. So maybe the prob­lem here is my insis­tance on hang­ing on to fic­tion when that’s not were my last­ing pas­sion lies (I’ll prob­a­bly always get a “bug up my ass” to tell a story every now and then, but the excite­ment never lasts long enough to write a book anymore).

What have you spent 10,000 hours doing, and does it sus­tain you, or do you sus­tain it?

Okay, Hol­i­day Cri­sis Sea­son is over, I can get back to writ­ing. and I’ve got quite a bit to cover. While you wait, I highly sug­gest read­ing Mal­colm Gladwell’s new book Out­liers, avail­able on eReader and Audible.