10,000 Hours

Mark and Gary were the most amazing musicians I have ever known. That I have not seen them in over 30 years has diminished my respect for them not one bit. From 1978 to 1980, I was a graduate student in music education at The Florida State University. Mark and Gary were undergraduates in applied jazz. They happened to be identical twins. And they were monsters. In the jazz world, that is a very good thing.

But what are Mark and Gary doing in a blog about leadership, two super-introverted guys who even in their early 20s had not had a single date with a member of the opposite sex, attended a movie, or watched a television show from beginning to end? Simple. They epitomized what Malcolm Gladwell in his book, Outliers: The Story of Success, reminded us about anyone who would master a field.

According to a pile of research, if you are to be the best at whatever it is that you do, you must put in the time. But why would anyone put in the time? What would motivate a person to practice the saxophone, write computer code, turn pots, shoot hoops, take photographs, or design web sites for what amounts to five solid years of nine-to-five days, five days a week, fifty weeks a year? If you have other things going on in your life that rob you of your practice time, you may easily double to 10 the number of years to mastery.

This conundrum leads me to more research. In a famous 1970s study of professional violinists, a researcher wanted to know what separated the elite symphonic performers from the merely great ones. He found that the elite one percent loved not only the public performance but the practice. They loved getting the fiddle out of the case, putting rosin on the bow, pulling the bow across the strings, playing scales and arpeggios, feeling the vibration of the instrument in their jaw, and just listening to the enveloping sound. Hour upon hour, they enjoyed doing the one thing, over and over and over.

True confession time: As a musician, I loved the public performance and the applause it engendered. But the practice that got me there--not so much. I was an above-average musician but not an elite musician. I did not enjoy the practice like Mark and Gary did. In fact, I'm not certain that I would practice at all without an excuse outside myself like Mark and Gary did.

What I did enjoy, however, was being responsible for things, conceptualizing and implementing programs and projects from beginning to end, convening and catalyzing teams of performers, coaching others, helping others exceed even their own expectations. I love this work still. I suppose that is a kind of leadership. And I do this at every opportunity despite whether or not I have been asked to do it and regardless of whether or not I am being paid to do it. It is in my DNA. It is my identity.

For me, practicing and studying leadership has been that effort in which I have spent my ten thousand hours. I suspect that, as a reader of this blog you share a little bit of that drive with me whatever your pursuit. It is good to reflect on the Mark and Garys of our lives and realize that we need not be monster jazz musicians to contribute. Just be who you are and do what you enjoy. That is more than enough.