10,000 Hour Rule

I was cleaning out my email archive at work before my transfer to the Pentagon (a place no young Captain should ever have to tread! Fortunately I only have to be there a week before language school).  I had over 10,000 emails in my archives.  I have mastered the art of the one sentence email so it's not as a bad as it sounds.  The mass email download reminded me of a concept in Malcolm Gladwell's book, Outliers: The Story of Success.  The concept is the 10,000 hour rule. 

10,000 hours doing one thing, like say programming or performing music, puts you in the "world class" category with the likes of Bill Gates and the Beatles.  Unfortunately most people, including yours truly, quit long before reaching 10,000 hours of...well, anything except maybe TV watching.    And great innovators often have a "10,000 hour" skill level at moment in history when suddenly their skill is in great demand.  Bill Gates was one of the few people on earth with over 10,000 hours of programming experience right at the moment when demand for software was exploding. 

Language learning ties into the 10K rule.  The more hours you spend studying it the better you'll be.  My back-of-the-envelope calculations say that in my upcoming 4 months of language school I'll get 800 hours of study.  It's a start.   In language learning, there's also the "500 verb" rule.  500 basic verbs is enough to express most thoughts in a different language.  So if you can learn the basic 500 verbs in a language you can communicate well.  That's 31.25 verbs per week for 4 months.  But guess I should start with the Sanskrit alphabet, ouch....

I am still trying to figure out what I what I could spend 10,000 hours doing.  It's not writing email, as good as my one-liners are.  It's not singing either.  How about leadership?  How do you clock 10,000 hours of leadership?  

And if you have ever wondered why most players in the National Hockey League are born in January check out the rest of Gladwell's book.