The 10 Year Rule

I am currently reading Malcolm Gladwell’s new book Outliers and really enjoying it though to be fair Gladwell is one of my favorite authors and Blink and The Tipping Point are among my favorite books. In the book, Gladwell strips away how we normally understand why some people are successful (the typical answers being a person's talent, hard work, passion, etc) and points at some different, and really unexpected reasons.

Gladwell doesn't argue that successful people aren't talented, just that there is more going on with a successful person than just talent. For one Gladwell shares the 10,000 hour rule, or the 10 year rule (Seth Godin also blogs frequently about this). Gladwell unravels the success stories of bands like the Beatles and entrepreneurs like Bill Gates and found that they both had this rule in common. For Gates, by the time he dropped out of Harvard at the age of 21, he had already logged in 10,000 hours programming computers, which is incredible when you consider first, how rare computers were back in the late 60s and early 70s, and second, how even rarer that a young kid would have had access to those rare machines. For the Beatles, they got their time in with 10 years at joints in Hamburg, Germany, where they were forced to play for several hours in a row, for several days in a row, where they honed their craft, perfected their stage presence, and took the United States by storm as a battle tested and seasoned group.

Gladwell summarizes the 10,000 hour rule when he writes “researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours. The emerging picture from such studies is that ten thousand hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert- in anything . . . no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems that it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery."

For most, success doesn't happen overnight. And for most, there's more going on than just talent, strengths, gifts, hard work, and perseverance. But think about the extensions of such a hypothesis- that to be good at something, or successful at something, you have to put in 10,000 hours. What might this rule look like in the following situations:

• in a marriage?
• in parenting? We often like to talk about quality time, but the 10,000 hour rule seems to imply that quantity time matters in gigs like parenting as well.
• in your job or career?
• in the life of a church? I am not saying that we give every program (or ministry for that matter) 10 years to prove itself, but if a church switched its overall vision or mission every few years, it may prove difficult to feel as if we're gaining any ground.

What other situations might this rule apply? And as with most rules, there are probably exceptions . . .