Harsh truth, I know, but truth nonetheless.
Malcolm Gladwell had great intentions, I’m sure, when he wrote Outliers – but he was dead wrong when he posited that 10,000 hours of practice will make you an expert. Simply not true.
10,000 hours is nothing more than a provocative generalization – a gross oversimplification about what it really takes for us to become masters of our crafts.
As Michael Miller stated, it leads to a misconception that anyone can become an expert in a given area by putting in the time.
What if you practice something WRONG for 10,000 hours? Do you suddenly get it perfect at hour 10,001? Uh…that’s not how it works.
All practice is not created equal – and neither is all learning. It’s the quality of learning and practice (education and experience) that creates greatness – not the quantity.
This whole 10K hours thing sounds great, but in reality it’s simply not true.
Practice creates permanence – not perfection. Poor practice = poor performance. Every. Single. Time.
There are a lot of factors that influence excellence in a given area – innate ability, age when you began acquiring the skillset, general knowledge, emotion, motivation….
Intentional or deliberate practice matters. If you’re going to position yourself in a market as an expert, supervised practice matters, too.
Miller nailed it when he said that “practice takes on meaning and relevance when the goal is connected to PURPOSE and long-term values.”
So perfect practice with intentional purpose and meaningful feedback makes perfect. Not education. Not certification. Not hope and dreams. Not the BS you’re posting in your FB profile section to hype yourself.
There are a ton of people calling themselves “funnel builders” or “master marketers” or “strategists” coming into the market now who have never once created a funnel or masterfully marketed a single product or strategized their way through anything except a brief period of education without a single moment of
– Intentional Practice
– Supervised Practicum
– Meaningful Feedback
Doing something once to pass a test in a controlled environment doesn’t make you a master at anything except passing a test.
I’ll say it again for the ones in the back – doing anything once in a controlled environment doesn’t make you a master at anything.
If you built a picture of a web page in freaking Canva and got a certificate, you’ve never built a web page. Period.
It’s like trying to eat a picture of a steak. It simply doesn’t work that way.
When I was in nursing school a million or so years ago, we started out with injections by giving shots to oranges. That’s not real world anything – how many oranges do you know that truly need a saline injection?
The orange gave us a lower-stress mechanism for learning and took away a lot of the fear that comes with actually sticking a needle into a human being (which comes later – after you’re proficient with the techniques for particular types of injections).
So we practiced. We got feedback from experienced nurses and nurse educators. We moved up to giving injections to people. We accepted criticism and adapted our performance based on that feedback – not to pursue proficiency, but to pursue excellence. I mean, who wants a nurse who’s only “proficient’?
Wanna know the difference there between intentional practice and real life?
The orange never flinches. It doesn’t bleed, no matter how poor your technique was. The orange just lays there and takes it.
That’s not real life.
If you take money from a client and you’ve only ever created a picture of a website, you have no idea how that website is going to flinch or bleed or respond on multiple screen sizes or devices or how your copy is going to convert – and when this is a funnel, it’s your client bleeding cash. That’s what happens.
It’s dead wrong for anyone to call themselves a master anything when in reality they are simply an entry-level employee trying to charge CEO-level prices just because they took a class.
I mean, right now anyone that can work a Zoom connection seems to be calling themselves a coach (insert my coughed bullsh– here).
So – where are you? Master of your craft with REAL WORLD experience and the results to back it up, or still injecting saline into oranges?
Sound off!!!