Your biggest barrier to change is, um, you.
It takes 10,000 hours to master a craft or skill. At this point it’s safe to say this number, accurate or not, is in our public lexicon. I think it’s off and that the truth sways vastly to both sides of that number.
Ok, fine, I think it’s bullshit.
But, to spare Malcolm Gladwell from crying into his bags of money, let’s acknowledge it and also recognize that it’s a ballpark for mastery, not proficiency.
So what’s the number for proficiency? 5,000? 1,000? 500? 100?
Nope. It’s 20.
I see 10,000 hours and, honestly, I say get the fuck outta here with that nonsense. Why? It’s immeasurable and you can’t test it. Name one thing you’re really good at that you can accurately count the hours involved in being as good as you are at it. I’m a great guitar player and I can tell you I’ve been playing since I was 13. But to convey that in hours goes far beyond addition. How do I calculate the time spent showing someone how to play something, the range of time spent warming up backstage before a gig, the time I spend ear-training to the random music that pops up while watching TV? I consider that all purposeful playing.
When referring to big values we use larger units of measurement because it provides us with a sense of relational accuracy. Do you say, the drive’s gonna take about 3 hours or it should take about 10,000 seconds to get there?
But 20, 20 we can work with. Plus it’s 20 hours for proficiency, not mastery. Despite what the cults of personality in the self-help world preach, you don’t need much more than proficiency.
20 hours is doable. It’s a few weeks or days of concentrated work. 20 hours also compounds quick as our brains continue to adapt to a skill after a period of focused work.
But for most of us, the number is irrelevant. 20 hours could be 1 million. Why?
Our biggest barrier is actually starting*.
*aka Doing The Damn Thing.
We think about it, we mull it over, we rationalize, we waffle (I’m ok with this one, yum!), we push it out.
We want our next act to seem perfect before committing. But the only way to get anything close to perfect is to take action.
The next barrier is getting past the first few frustrating hours where we’re just not good at something.
We take a class or read a book on what it is we’re trying to learn, but an hour in we get frustrated that we’re not making progress and we say it’s ‘not for me’ and stop.
But if you were to just push through for a bit, get five-ish hours in on what you’re trying to learn, then you’d start to see progress pretty fast. Again, that’s our brain adapting and embedding our nervous system with ‘oh shit, dude’s getting serious about learning this, we better pay attention’.
Once you get to that point, the rest of those 20 hours flows. You know it, you’ve done this before.
So we have two barriers to proficiency:
Actually starting
Self-sabotaging before we see results
But there’s one more, and it’s also what turns proficiency into mastery.
The barrier from proficiency to mastery is persistence.
Not consistence. That’s just showing up repeatedly and, despite what all those Instagram quotes tell ya, being consistent isn’t necessarily great. You can consistently do the wrong thing for you and fool yourself into thinking you’re doing the right thing. Consistency is also fucking boring.
Persistence is pushing towards something. To be persistent you have to have an objective, show up repeatedly for it, push towards, every so often check to see is the objective has changed, then adapt what you’re doing to where the objective is now.
If you eat a cookie at the same time every day, you’re being consistent. When I come and snatch the cookie out of your hand and shove it in my mouth before your first bite, I am being a consistent asshole.
If you change your cookie-time every day so I don’t know when you’re going to eat it, you are being persistent about eating your cookie. If I then adapt and start to observe your actions and patterns every day to figure out when you’re going to eat the cookie, I am being persistent. And still an asshole.
Notice that our objective never changed: We both want to eat that cookie.
But our approaches constantly adapted. That’s persistence.
Think about the times you’ve seen someone do something that you once tried and gave up on and said, if I had only pushed through and stuck with that a little longer.
Or the times you’ve seen someone with a skill you wish you had and said, I wish I had learned that when I had the chance.
Do you want to keep doing that? No, you don’t. It’s no fun to live with those kinds of regrets, why keep piling them onto the burden on your back?
Getting past these barriers seems simple in concept, but they’re mired in the rules we make for ourselves. You know, the rules that come from the stories we tell about ourselves.
“I can’t do that.”
“That’s for athletic/rich/college-educated/fill-in-the-blank people, not me.”
“My parents wouldn’t like me doing that.”
“I don’t deserve that.”
“I don’t have time for that.”
“That’s so different from what people know me for.”
“I’ll never be able to be good at that.”
“I tried it before and failed. I’ll just fail again.”
Those stories? That’s conditioning. From our parents, our childhood, our traumas, our jobs, our social circles. They’re in us and the more we keep retelling them, the more we believe them as our truth.
But stories can be edited. Deleted. Re-written. We can acknowledge them as dated and write some fan-fiction that’s more to our liking. I mean if friggin’ 50 Shades of Grey started as Twilight fan fiction then YOU, my sparkly non-vampire friend have absolute permission and freedom to write your own fan fiction about yourself.
I know, it’s hard to get started. You have reams of history books, journals, documents piled up all around you, and now you’re supposed to ignore them and start with a blank page? What are you supposed to do?
I’ve stared at many a literal and figurative blank page as a writer, musician, and in my own business; this comes from experience: You just start. You just need to write down a word. Then another one. Then another one. They don’t even have to make sense. You just write. You take action.
Soon those words start to form sentences that make sense. Eventually, those sentences start to tell the story you want them to tell. Then, one day, that is your story. And when someone asks you about yourself, that’s the story you tell them.
You can do it. You are worth it. It is worth spending the time, energy, and money on yourself to rewrite the dated stories that don’t serve you.
I believe in you.
If you don’t believe in yourself, you have my permission to borrow my belief in you.
There’s plenty to go around.
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