That kind of utilitarian relationship will improve your final product but it might not be enough to turn you into a great writer. Some editors simply take your text, mark it up and return it to you. As writers, you might think your best mentor would be an editor, but that depends. Just playing an instrument, just running, just writing, or just _ (insert whatever other task you want to become really good at) for 10,000 hours is not nearly enough, even though it’s a lot. Furthermore, you need to do it in a very specific way. Even if you have buckets of talent, you still need to invest a lot of time and practice in order to become an expert. That’s a lot of time, isn’t it? Yes, and that’s Ericsson’s message.

If you spend two hours doing something each day, every day - with no time off for weekends and holidays - it will take you 10 years to accumulate 10,000 hours. The phrase “10,000 hours” is simply a symbol to represent a lot of time. You may not need 10,000 hours - or, you may need significantly more. I think recommendations are useful to writers as well. In it, Ericsson spells out his advice for how to become an expert at just about anything. Now, I’ve read Ericsson’s new book Peak: Secrets from the New Science of Expertise and I think you’ll find his suggestions interesting. And he argues against Gladwell’s interpretation.

Instead, it was the work of psychology professor Anders Ericsson, from Florida State University. In his book Outliers, for example, he described how the Beatles had spent more than 10,000 hours in Hamburg, Northern Germany, staging concerts and honing their craft before they became the well-known band we all still know today.īut, in fact, Gladwell wasn’t the person who’d done the research on the 10,000-hour theorem. You certainly know that writing takes time, but what do you know about writing and the 10,000-hour rule?īest-selling author Malcolm Gladwell popularized the notion that in order to be really good at something, you need to spend 10,000 hours doing it.

10000 hours book