Everybody knows 10,000.
It’s 10,000 hours after all.
Malcolm Gladwell, right?

We all know how it works – 10,000 hours in any discipline to achieve ‘True Expertise’, whatever the hell that means.

But it seems like we haven’t entirely internalized the idea.
We understand it. It makes sense intellectually. But to actually use it?

That is a far more difficult task.

We’re so bogged down in our daily lives. I’ve barely got 15 minutes to spare in my day, let alone an hour. 1000 of those? Forget it.

What is that? What does that represent? It’s 10,000, but it feels like lightyears away. It’s not palatable. It doesn’t make sense to the brain. It’s a cool idea, but it’s not all that useable.

It’s too far out. It’s like being told there’s 4 kagillion stars in space. Cool, we understand that’s a lot, but how much a lot. We have no way to truly conceptualize it or use that information.

How many days is 10,000 hours? How hard do I have to work to reach that mile marker? When can I be an expert. It doesn’t make sense.

I prefer a different ancient Japanese maxim that I totally didn’t make up myself:
“The quality of your craft is directly proportional to the amount of time you put in“

Spending an hour everyday on a craft would mean it’d take 27.4 years to reach expertise. An hour on your craft is difficult to do. “15 minutes each day, that’s all you need”. At that rate it’d take 110 years to reach expertise. If you somehow spent the 4 possible hours of deep creative work on your craft, it’d still take ~7 years to reach that level.

The point is, to get good at anything, you’ve got to spend an exorbitant amount of time with it.

“The greats weren’t great because at birth they could paint,
the greats were great because they paint a lot”

Macklemore

The Greats

Malcom Gladwell. David Bowie. Kanye. Jordan. Phelps. Kobe Bryant. The Beatles. Steve Jobs. Malcom X. Pablo Picasso. Taylor Swift. Ed Sheeran. Eminem. Bob Dylan. Van Gogh. Einstein. Newton. Motely Crew. Basquiat. Stephen Hawking. Bill Hicks. Michelangelo.

Musicians. Painters. Engineers. Physicists.

The list goes on. You don’t get good by being half assed. These people dedicated a disproportionate amount of their time to their craft. That’s how you get good. So sculpt the Greek dick, damn it.

Hours and hours. Shot after shot. Day in and day out. And yet we spend so much time dilly-dallying. It’s not to say dilly-dallying is a bad thing, per se, but what the hell man?

We want to be great, incentivized by the legacy and status and money. But society doesn’t do all that much to celebrate the work done by closed doors. You’re expected to mingle and interact and go to dinners and hang out.

But that’s not how you get good.

“Without great solitude no serious work is possible”

Pablo Picasso

And that sounds like a pretty miserable existence unless you love what you do (a mindf%@k to the Myth of Sisyphus).

We want to be the best. Society celebrates. We get a social pat on the back from being successful. We get status and often a couple extra bucks to go with it. And who doesn’t enjoy those?

But as a species, we don’t celebrate the work to get there. We don’t celebrate the late nights and early mornings. Nobody gives you a pat on the back for skipping an evening with your friends or being an isolated loner. Nobody congratulates you for putting everything else in your life on the back burner.

We’re social animals. There’s nothing wrong with that. Actually, introverts, it’s a good thing.

But to dismiss our own curiosities and creative pursuits in pursuit of a “not wanting to feel left out” is bullshit.

They don’t really want your success

We celebrate the success, but never the work required to get there. Matter of fact, the journey to that success is often frowned upon because often times it requires isolation and shutting everything else out.

People congratulate you in public for what you do in private.

But nobody pats you on the back for not going out drinking with them. The sacrifice is in the early mornings and late nights up.

It happens on empty Saturdays and isolated Thursdays. It’s on the weekends and after work. It happens after practice and before lunch with friends. It happens during lunch with friends.

“On some Malcolm Gladwell, David Bowie meets Kanye shit
This is dedication
A life lived for art is never a life wasted”

Macklemore, 10000 Hours

We’ve been told to ‘pursure excellence’ and ‘follow our passions’ but that’s not what our relationships want in the moment. It sounds all well and nice. But what that journey actually means is far less desirable for the people around you.

The people at the absolute pinnacle of the business world – Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, Bill Gates etc – People are in awe at what they’ve accomplished, but these guys dedicated an insane amount of hours to their craft.

We celebrate the tip of the iceberg without having the faintest idea of the sheer monstrosity of dedication it takes. Being that good at something means forgoeing every other priority in life.

Olympic level athlete means forego traditional career. Everything in life has to revolve around that goal.

There is no half way, no ‘on the side’. You don’t get to let it ‘be on the side’ and also be the best.

The Best means letting other aspects of life fail. Could be relationships. Could be Financial. It could be mental Mental. It means giving every single mother fucking part of yourself.

Who the hell am I to say?

I’m just some schmuck running a little blog. Don’t listen to me. I haven’t got it figured it out. That’s just what people at the top say.

It’s your job to find your Life Purpose

The Japanese have a term ‘Ikigai’ with a rough translation ‘Life’s Purpose’. There are stories after stories of Japanese people devoting their entire livelihood to their craft.

Movie director Akira Kurosawa is a fantastic example. Ikigai retired and kept drawing. Wasn’t making movies, but he was still writing and drawing. It’s what makes him feel alive, so that’s what he did until his dying day.

Oh, and by the way Japan has the 3rd highestlife expectancy in the world. They might be on to something.

Some Japanese dude made sushi.
Another dude makes neon signs.
Another guy makes little sculptures.

There’s an interview with Jerry Hamza on George Carlin, arguably the greatest comedian to ever live, mentioning how Carlin could just sit and come up with creative material all damn day.

He didn’t want to be bothered. He didn’t want to be disrupted. He just wanted to create. Ikigai.

It’s the time you spend. Unfortunately, we’ve got it all backwards and think we’re supposed to spend all our time ‘recouperating from our job’ or ‘watching F.R.I.E.N.D.S. reruns’ or ‘working for retirement’.

But we’ve got the whole fucking thing backwards.

I think we’re supposed to find the things we love and enjoy and then do them every single possible minute of every day.

Growing up, all Dan Bilzerian thought about was girls and poker.
All Einstein thought about was physics and gravity.
All Russ thought about was making beats and music.

A weird combination of human beings, I know, but they’ve all spent a vast proportion of their time thinking about specific things, and look what happened – they got it.

Ray Bradbury has got some pretty similar and stellar advice on how to get good at writing.

If you dedicate every aspect of your brain to a thing, you get good at that thing.

As I end my ramblings I’ll leave you with this clip from Alan Watts – What if money was no object (3 minutes of your time pls check it out).

What if money was no object. What would you do? What do you love?

As always, thank you for listening to my ramblings.

Please do what you love. The world needs it. Signing off.