Artists, Mastering your craft 10,000 hours from Malcolm Gladwell new book.
If you focus on practicing your craft drawing and painting for 100,000 hours, what could you become?
I know I have not yet arrive that that strides…it was an on off for me. Now I have to reconsider my schedule and focus more on my craft. This art blog help me stay on course immensely, and some day I hope hard work pays off. 
I just read this book by Malcolm Gladwell, Outliers: The Story of Success Highly recommended!!!
In the first chapter (section), he talk about 10,000 hours that takes someone to be a master of of her trade. He mention Bill Gates, Mozart, etc.
His premise is that there are (at least?) two different kinds of geniuses, one is the type who may arrive at genius via an incredible inimitable moment of inspiration, another is someone who’s very smart and arrives at genius after years of focused study. 10,000 hours mastery theory.
Gladwell suggested that studies show 10,000 hours of focused study is what’s needed to become a master of something. And this translates to about ten years (actually 11.5, but thereabouts).
This makes a lot of sense to me and gives an interesting fixed boundary to work with. If you start drawing and painting seriously at 16 (four to eight hours a day), and stay there for ten years, at 26 you should be a master. And filmmakers and artists who start at 20, may hit their stride at 30. And of course you can accelerate or slow down the process according to how much you want to focus. And it highlights how you inhibit your potential in one field by spreading yourself across many fields. The phrase “jack of all trades, master of none” speaks directly to this 10,000 hours theory.
Anyway, the book is pretty long but the particular chapter was interesting to me and related to our field so I thought I would share it with you guys.
Summery of the book:
In this stunning new book, Malcolm Gladwell takes us on an intellectual journey through the world of “outliers”–the best and the brightest, the most famous and the most successful. He asks the question: what makes high-achievers different? His answer is that we pay too much attention to what successful people are like, and too little attention to where they are from… *The Outliers* (out this week) focuses on success and the hard work, social context and cultural background that explains why some people excel and others don’t. He has a related article in The New Yorker on genius (trivia note: a related post of his on this topic was rejected a long time ago by the New Yorker). Gladwell’s new book seems better at explaining the success of some than in its prescriptions for how to get others to succeed and so on.
Good luck to us all with 10,000 hours. Let me know what your thought are on this post.
