Are You A Master Yet?

From the day we are born we are constantly learning new things. It’s a basic human need and not doing so can have serious health ramifications. It may be as simple as learning what Mr Smith down the road has been doing with his life for the last month, or learning a new set of characters on a TV show. We’re all doing it.

Some of these new things may even start to become a regular part of our lives. It could turn into our job or our passion and so we start learning more and more about it, dedicating lots of our time to practicing it until we become really good at it. But when can we call ourselves a master? Not an expert, not really good at it, but a true master.

Have a guess before you read on.

Now we know from our studies of the nervous system that in order for something to become a habit we need consistent stimuli over a 3 month period. That’s just to make it an ingrained habit. 

In order to truly master something we need to spend 10,000 hours doing it. Not only that, but we also need to keep pushing and bettering ourselves at it too. You can’t just plateau really early on and stop there.

10,000 hours. That’s 416.66 days of time, fully dedicated back to back non-stop for the whole time. In reality we will spend 1-8 hours a day maximum fully focused on practicing one thing depending on the task. So it starts adding up to a hell of a long time!

At 8 hours a day consistent practice it would take you 1250 days or nearly 3 ½ years. Add on weekends, holidays, days off depending on the subject/skill and it gets even more daunting of a task. 

So the next time you become content at the level you are doing your passion/hobby, ask yourself, ‘Am i a master?’ If yes, well done. You’re of a very small majority on this earth.

 

If no, get back to work!