Ok, for people who haven’t read Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers, it includes the idea that to be really good at something you must practice. It’s not exactly revolutionary, but what is interesting is that he puts a number to the amount of practice you ought to do: about 10000 hours to be world-class. Gladwell goes through a lot of examples - Beethoven, The Beatles, Bill Gates. Some people might argue with some of Gladwell’s specifics, but what really is clear is that these people did practice quite a lot before they did any of their really cool stuff.

Gladwell makes a somewhat provocative claim: that what we normally think of as “talent” is basically the opportunity and willingness to practice. Some have disagreed with him on this point, saying basically that he is engaging in wishful thinking.

But when you look at 10000 hours, I’m not sure wishful thinking is really the way I would describe it. Having the opportunity to get that much time to work on a particular skill - well it definitely speaks to a certain amount of freedom from life’s usual responsibilities. It may simply be that 10,000 hours is correlated with great talent because if you are less than supremely talented, around hour 5000 or so somebody is going to insist that you stop practicing and get a real job.

Anyways, this has all got me thinking of my own life and how little time there really is for reflective practice. I may be here at Georgia Tech “training” to become a teacher, but even with practice considered quite broadly I’m not getting many hours in on a daily basis. You don’t have to buy much of Gladwell’s thesis to imagine that maybe 1000 hours of practice on a valued skill would be worthwhile. I am not on track, in that regard.

So this is all to say that I built an Android App to help motivate myself. It’s pretty simple: you tell it what skills you want to practice, how many hours your goal is, and then it logs how many hours you put in.

10k-hours.png

The most motivating line is the one that says how many years it will take to reach your goal at your current speed. It’s surprisingly how easily that can exceed a lifetime.

Anyways, if you have an android phone and would like to try my app, go here. You can also get the source here: hours10src.zip.

Given some motivation, I could probably test this on a couple more emulated systems and drop it in the android marketplace. Would anybody out there in internet land like me to go through the trouble?