Mastering your craft: The 10,000 Hour Rule to Mastery

Throwback

In 2015 when we were vacationing in Italy 🇮🇹, I bought from this very random store something to read. As I'm more attracted to the book cover designs than the actual title, it turns out I left the shop with Malcom Gladwell's Blink: The Power of Thinking Without Thinking.

I hate self-help genre, in fact, I barely read anything else than the news and things that can improve my profession. This time I did read the Blink and I found it pretty ok, – when taking it with a grain of salt tho.

This writing isn't about Blink, but Malcom's successor book called Outliers: The Story of Success. I haven't read this one. Not even planning to read, but I have been listening to this super awesome podcast from Michael Hobbes & Peter Shamshiri called If Books Could Kill.

In one of their episodes, they poke and ridicule this book by its underlining statement that it will take 10 000 hours to master a craft.

So just to be super clear on this: I don't think it takes 10 000 hours to master something. The world keeps changing all the time so can anyone really master anything, ever? Granted you probably become more sufficient with the craft or expertise the more you invest time in it, to master something within some arbitrary frame of hours is just nonsense.

However, this idea got me thinking that it would be cool to see how long it would take to master something if we would treat this statement about 10 000 hours as being true and apply it in various scenarios.

With the trendy wave of AI being able to make things more efficient, I also added an option to see how the timeline changes if one is being assisted by an AI. The increase in productivity created by AI is probably subjective and depends also on the type of task and how much there is room for automation but, for the sake of it, these are the levels I am using:

1. No AI Assistance: 0% productivity increase
2. Minor AI assistance: 15% productivity increase
3. Major AI assistance: 50% productivity increase
4. Significant AI assistance: 66% productivity increase

There is some research behind every googling to back up these numbers. Significant scenario is from here: AI Improves Employee Productivity by 66%

So let's see how long it will take to master your craft!

Working for the craft and literally not doing anything else.

Say you have dedicated 24hrs per day. Doing nothing else than your craft. Obviously, this is not a realistic scenario until you're running wild with Elon's brain implants.

Only sleep and improving the craft

This is also an unrealistic scenario. With this amount of dedication, it would take 1.7 years.

Lets get realistic

Now you could eat and sleep. This scenario starts to become a bit more realistic. When one trains the craft for 8 hours every day (including weekends), it would take almost 3 and half years.

Let's be reasonable now

OK let's have something more reasonable. We have to sleep, eat, drink. Maybe some hobbies. Let's make it like it would be a full working day or 1/3 of the day (8 hours). And let's assume that the work is only done during weekdays, so weekends are off. This scenario is on par with full-time studies, too.

This would take you 4.8 years

How about a new career or practicing over the weekends?

How about you could have 8 hours only on Saturday and Sunday.

It would take you 12 years.