I am a big Malcolm Gladwell fan.
That said, I am not a huge fan of his latest book, Outliers. However, there is one idea that he talks about that I found really interesting. Gladwell develops this idea called the “10,000 Hour Rule.” Essentially, the idea is that to get good at something, to get good at anything, you have to practice. You have to spend time on something to get good at it. A lot of time. 10,000 hours, to be specific.
It’s not a new idea. It’s a cliche, actually – practice makes perfect. But for some reason, I seem to expect myself to be good at something right away, and I don’t think I’m alone in that. We learn how to do something new – editing video in Avid, say, or html code, and so forth, and expect ourselves to be good at it right away. That’s crazy, when you think about it. Granted, learning new skills generally involves building upon old skills, so it doesn’t really take 10,000 hours, because it’s not entirely new. But it does take time.
A couple of months ago, I saw Ira Glass (of PRI’s This American Life) speak, and he talked about advice to aspiring journalists (or really, as he said, aspiring anythings): “Be prepare to suck.” Glass played a couple of his first stories at NPR, and they were truly horrible. Horrible as in he wouldn’t be able to get a B in a Broadcasting I class with them. The stories literally didn’t make logical sense or follow a coherent storyline. And now he’s an incredible editor and host. The message was clear:
Be prepared to suck. You have to practice. It takes time to get good.
I spent a lot of time getting good at dance. Years. Hours upon hours. And I haven’t lost all the skills gained during that time, or even most of them – I’ve lost just enough to be annoyed about it. Even more frustratingly, I know how to improve. I know exactly what I need to do – I need to practice; I need to put in the time.
I just don’t have the time.
My iCal is fit to burst, with law school applications and capstones and classes and journalism-ing and extracurriculars, and trying to fit in something resembling a social life. Dance, while something that I love, is just not as important as school. Getting better at triple pirouettes is something I want to do for my own personal fulfillment. But it’s not as important as getting this story done for KBIA, or finishing the lit review for capstone, or organizing a community service event for SRS I’m responsible for, or writing a paper for Philosophy of Law, or hey, blogging for J4700. Those things are really important in a way that dance is not. They’re not just about personal fulfillment. I love dance, but I love a lot of other things too, and those other things are going to come into play in my future. Hopefully I’ll be able to take a once-a-week dance class for a long time to come, but it’s not as important to me as those other things are.
So now I’m in this position where I am not putting in the necessary time to really get good at something I enjoy because I’ve decided it’s just not as important as other things. And I don’t regret that decision. I just wish I could find more hours in he day. That’s going to be my project for the next couple of weeks – trying to find more hours in the day, to figure out if I really can’t find a couple extra half hours here or there to mush together. Cross your fingers. I’ll keep you updated.
Now, back to the iCal. 
