10,000 Hours

I picked up Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point” for a plane ride last month, and it was a fun read. About 25% of it I had read before, as he gets double duty out of much of his writing by serializing bits of it into the New Yorker.

Anyways, he has a new one coming out, “Outliers”, a study of exceptional people, and one of the theses is:

This idea - that excellence at a complex task requires a critical, minimum level of practice - surfaces again and again in studies of expertise. In fact, researchers have settled on what they believe is a magic number for true expertise: 10,000 hours.

Which got me thinking – what skill did I hone enough before the age of 20 to become world class? I did a fair amount of music, but not anything close to 10,000 hours. Then I remembered.

I have all the makings of a world class reader. So, if you want a book read, send it along, I’ve got the mad chops to get it read for you.