The 10,000 Hour Rule
You must love what you do if you ever hope to become a master at it!
Everyone loves to talk about the boy genius Bill Gates and the overnight success of Microsoft.
How about Phil Knight and Nike? Another seemingly overnight success.
What no one wants to talk about is the crazy amount of work it took for both of those men to finally find success.
To finally master the product they were obsessed with creating.
Malcolm Gladwell popularized the 10,000-hour rule in his excellent book, Outliers. Listen to Malcolm explain the concept below:
Think about the truth behind Fleetwood Mac's best-selling album, Rumors. It was their sixteenth album, created ten years after the band was formed!
As Malcolm says in the video, Fleetwood Mac was anything but good for the longest time.
So, how did they keep going until they finally became successful?
They kept going because they LOVED what they were doing!
In the beginning, success was being able to play on stage and afford the necessities to survive and pay the bills. Over time, the band just focused on getting better.
Remember that success rarely goes to the most "gifted" people.
Success goes to the people willing to do the tremendous work required to master any skill and NOT GIVE UP.
I think of my friends, Michael and Marc Grondahl, who declared bankruptcy on their first try at running a gym.
Michael wouldn't admit defeat because he knew he was onto something when he had lowered the monthly rate at the gym they originally owned to only $10/month, with a $199 one-time enrollment fee.
When he looked back at the retention of those $10/month members, almost all were still paying members years after joining. He realized that pricing was elastic!
If the monthly membership fee were low enough, even when the member stopped using the gym, they wouldn’t cancel their membership. For only $10/month, they had hope that they would eventually use the gym again.
Ten years after staying in the fitness game, the brothers created a fitness franchise system that is seemingly unbreakable today!
Planet Fitness was most certainly not an overnight success. It took years and years of work with a personal bankruptcy thrown in just for fun.
But the guys loved what they were creating. That’s all they talked about.
It was an obsession.
I think now of my daughter, Brenna. She just turned 15 and finished her freshman year at Portsmouth High School.
Knowing that it takes somewhere around 10,000 hours of dedicated training to become a master of anything, I look at her life thus far and ask, “Is there anything yet where she has consistently put in the work, day after day, week after week, year after year?
10,000 hours equates to around 10 years if you are willing to work at least four hours per day at what you love!
“Is there anything in her life that she does out of the pure LOVE of doing it and getting better, however slow the process?”
Singing. Bren has been taking singing lessons for the last four years. She definitely does not practice singing four hours a day, but I hear her downstairs practicing at least a couple of days a week. She meets with her instructor, Michael, every week, no matter what.
Even if we assume that the last four years have only been the equivalent of one year of practicing 4 hours per day, does Brenna love singing to the point that she is willing to commit to upping her practice and on-stage time for the next nine years?!
Is Brenna willing to commit to the routine of getting better at singing until she is in her mid-twenties in the hope of potentially making singing her “career” of choice?
This understanding is the crazy part of making what you love your career. Bren has the talent to do it, but does she love singing enough to commit to the process?
You must go through the same thought process if you hope to take the entrepreneurial path and create a product or service you love so much that you are willing to commit your life to it for the next ten years.
Please don’t start down the entrepreneurial path if you don't LOVE what you are trying to create.
Do you know someone who dreads Sunday nights? If so, please forward this message to them. Let's help more people rewrite their weeks.
You can also click the heart button to help more people discover it on Substack.
Until next week, remember the function of Freedom is to free someone else!
I wrote Against the Grain: Ditch the American Dream and Build Your Own! to show you how to plot an alternate route to Society's Path and provide instructions for breaking out of Society's Box.
You can purchase my book by clicking on the link below: