Unlocking Excellence: The Truth Behind Practice and Achieving Awesome

It’s often said that you can become an expert in almost anything by logging ten thousand hours in the subject. This “10,000 hour rule,” was originally derived from Malcolm Gladwell’s book,  Outliers: The Story of Success. However, it is an over simplification of the information he presented.

Beyond Expert

What Gladwell said was that you needed ten thousand hours to be a phenom at something. That is beyond expert — all the way to freakishly awesome. By phenom, he was referring to that person who is head and shoulders above everyone else and is good enough to be recognized by one name. That would include people like Tiger, Jordan, YoYo Ma, and Venus.

For his book, Gladwell studied the lives of extremely successful people to find out how they achieved such heights.  He tells of a study of violin performers in Berlin where it was determined that elite performers put in more than double the practice hours, in excess of ten thousand, than other performers. While no “naturally gifted” talent pool emerged from the studies, psychologists did find a direct correlation between the amount of hours practiced and a person’s achievement.

The Correlation Between Practice and Achievement

Bill Gates and Paul Allen dropped out of college in 1975 and founded Microsoft, now a household name. Prior to starting the company, Gates and Allen had thousands of hours of programming experience as youngsters and teenagers, which was rare for that time when computers weren’t readily available yet.

The Beatles, who seemed to burst onto the music scene in 1964 and sky-rocket to success, had actually been playing together in local clubs for years before then. By the time they became popular, the band had played over one thousand concerts together which is more than most bands play in their entire careers today.

OK, these are rare, long shot examples.

But, guess what?

The great news is that you don’t have to put in anywhere near the same amount of time to become good at something.  In order to be successful at a hobby, business pursuit, or skill of any kind, it isn’t actually necessary to be the elite or even an expert.  While you do have to dedicate the time to hone and perfect your craft, thousands of hours aren’t required.

Practice Can Make You a Winner

In The Winner’s Brain: 8 Strategies Great Minds Use to Achieve Success, by Mark Fenske and Jeff Browne, the authors indicate that one key to becoming a winner is to practice a skill until it becomes committed to your brain’s implicit memory. Then it beomes automatic. They write:

…when a task is practiced to the point of being automatic because it’s easier to free up neural resources when you don’t have to waste attentional energy thinking through each of the meticulous steps involved.  Well-automated tasks and thought processes reduce the load on attention and focus by habitually ensuring that the brain relies on implicit memory – implicit in the sense that we don’t have to consciously retrace the steps of our previous experience to complete it.

… this leads us to an essential Winner’s Brain strategy… Practice, practice, practice – until you can perform on autopilot.”

It’s unrealistic to think that practice, or anything else for that matter, will lead to perfection. However, putting hours of practice into a skill shifts your brain into winning mode and stacks the odds of success on your side.

When you understand how your brain works, you can maximize its performance and guide it to help you succeed in life. While all of your brain power is available to you all the time, there are many things that determine whether it has the potential punch of an elite race car engine or the limited energy of a golf cart. Much of its performance and power depend on you and your habits — how you take care of it.

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