One of the major things that Gladwell touches on is dedication and amount of time put into perfecting a craft. In the second (or third--I'm not going to look it up right now) chapter, he studies a few cases of talented, famous engineers and musicians, eventually concluding that all of them had put about 10,000 hours into their respective crafts before hitting it big.
Ten THOUSAND hours.
I had to think, then, how many hours have I put into writing over the years? And really, what counts? Do blogging, journaling, writing papers, doing homework, etc., count? Or is it limited to active fiction-writing only?
Assume, for the sake of argument, that blogging, journaling, and writing college papers, short stories, professional documents, novels and their backstories, and English homework count.
Blogging: basing my numbers off of Aloha Kitchen, I blog, on average, 3 times a week. Assuming that each post takes an average of one hour to write and I started blogging in 2004, that brings me to 1092 hours for blogging.
Journaling: I have no records for my journals. But I do know that it's similar to blogging (I mean, come on, "blog" comes from "web log" which is, in essence, a journal) and I kept journals religiously from the time I was 15 to the time I was ...let's see, until about 2004, when I was 22. That brings me to an estimated 1092 hours for journaling.
College papers: I was a math major in college. Therefore, I didn't write a whole lot of papers. I did, however, take 2 semesters of theology, 2 semesters of philosophy, and a few other non-tech classes that required writing. Let's assume that each class required an average of 2 10-page papers that took ... hmm, let's just say an hour per page. That brings me to a total of 240 hours writing college papers.
Short stories: I have no idea how to begin to calculate this. I remember writing stories starting when I was six. I probably wrote one story a year, on average, and each story probably took me ... let's just say five hours a piece. That brings me to 115 hours writing short stories.
Professional documents: Wow. I was a professional, in the actual sense of the word, for about five years. During that time, I authored one really, really big document and a handful of much smaller, less time-consuming documents. So ... let's see. I know that over the four months that I worked on the really, really big document, I committed around ten hours a day to that bastard. (Roughly 800 hours.) And then I worked on the smaller documents for a total of ... well, I didn't work full-time during that time, but I could legitimately say that I worked six months out of those two years, and I wrote or researched for 8 hours a day. (960 hours.)
Novels and their backstories: Well, since Petra was about 1 year old, I've spent about ... let's see. I think I calculated five hours a week on just writing. (120 hours.) Aside from that, I've spent the entire month of November since 2005 furiously writing novels. I think it's safe to assume another 300 hours.
English homework: why am I including this? Because for the 180 days of my junior year, I had at least an hour of English homework a night. That was the year that I truly learned syntax, sentence structure, analysis, vocabulary, everything on which I rely today. (180 hours.)
Fan fiction: I almost didn't want to include this ... actually, I don't want to include it. But since I've done it AND I've logged the equivalent of a young adult novel in this, I think I'll call it ... hmm. An hour per 1000 words. A young adult novel averages 50,000 words. (50 hours.)
Where does that bring me?
Four thousand, nine hundred forty nine hours.
For simplicity's sake, let's just say 5,000 hours. That means I'm halfway there.
BUT.
If I keep up with my current rate of 8 hours a week (5 for writing, 3 for blogging), that means that I have another 625 weeks, which means I have another TWELVE YEARS before I can call myself an accomplished writer. Another 12 years before I can assume success. I'll be over FORTY before I can estimate that I'll be taking a nation-wide book tour extolling the virtues of my writing. FORTY.
There's hope in that. I can either up my writing to 13 hours a week, bringing my expected success time down to a little over seven years (which keeps me in my thirties), or I can be happy with the fact that by the time I officially become an expert at my craft, I'll still have another 40 years to enjoy it. Either way, yo, I'm happy.
But I might start writing more.
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{ 1 comments: }
Not just 10,000 but 10,000 focusing, working at it in every sense. I did a lot of hours of some things but not with the alert mind to improve. that's part of it.
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