Gladwell’s 10,000 Hours

I recently read a blog post on The Writer’s Coin which discussed some concepts from Malcolm Gladwell’s book Outliers. I haven’t read the book (yet) myself, but it sounds fascinating, and the post got me thinking about expertise.

Gladwell claims that to be a world-class expert in any given subject requires 10,000 hours of practice.

DAMN.

That’s a lot of time.

Let’s say you work full time on a skill you want to be a world-class expert on. 40 hours a week, 50 weeks a year (with two weeks of vacation) comes out to 2000 hours a year. So you would need to work full-time for five years. And we’re talking undivided attention here — time spent taking a break or working while distracted doesn’t count. 10,000 hours of real dedication, moving forward, challenging yourself, working at your edge and pushing beyond it constantly.

I say again: DAMN!

Even with enough free time, how do you find the motivation to do something like that?

Expertise and Me

Not everyone wants to be a world-class expert, and perhaps those who do usually have the dedication to work single-mindedly on their craft like this. I enjoy being good at things, but I’m less fond of the hard work required to get there. I guess that means I’m unlikely to ever be a world-class expert at anything, unless I discover something that I enjoy so much that it doesn’t feel like work to do it full-time.

I love the feeling of being the expert (a situation I have encountered a couple of times in my professional career), but the idea that true expertise requires that much time and effort is daunting at best. And yet the end result is so alluring that it might be worth it. Then it becomes a question of figuring out what to become an expert on, and that’s where things get really tricky. There are just so many choices!

I’ve been thinking lately about returning to the workforce (though likely in a limited capacity). For the first time in my career, I am thinking hard about what I want from an employer in terms of working conditions, company culture, and values. Expertise is one of the thoughts that keeps crossing my mind as I explore these ideas. “The expert” is my favorite role I’ve ever held in the workplace. Working in software quality assurance, I was often required to become an expert on how the product was supposed to work (and how it actually did work). This put me in a position to serve as a resource for other departments (technical writers, customer service folks, trainers, and even sometimes programmers). Being valued for my knowledge is extremely rewarding to me, whereas being valued for doing real work is almost annoying. I guess I like to be appreciated for my strengths rather than my weaknesses. 😉

I’m keeping this in mind as I think about employment — I will be much happier with a job if it offers me the opportunity to be the expert.

Cultivating Expertise in the Workplace

Now that I’ve worked a few different places, I have some perspective on what factors allow for the development of expertise. This is slanted toward a job in software QA, but I’m sure many of these factors are of general applicability.

• Small team size. The fewer ways the work is divided, the more each person has to know. Large teams dilute expertise. For large and complex projects, it can be valuable to have each person develop expertise on one or more areas of the project, however.
• Broad project scope. If an individual’s assignments are in too narrow an area of the product, it can be difficult for them to develop a good understanding of the big picture. Knowledge should be deep enough to qualify as expertise, but also broad enough to be useful often.
• Quick turn-around. Repetition helps a lot with retaining what you’ve learned. If you learn something once and never need it again, odds are the details will fade. On the other hand, if you use that information again every day of the week, it will soon become second nature.
• Good availability of information. Having an oracle of your own to turn to is invaluable in developing expertise, whether that oracle be another expert, printed documentation, a well-maintained wiki, or even just the application source code.
• Customer input. Three things are certain in life: death, taxes, and the fact that the customer WILL abuse your product in ways that no one ever could have anticipated. The customer is both your best friend and your worst enemy in terms of uncovering information about your product. They will help you discover new things, but you may well wish they hadn’t!
• Long-term attachment to one product/project. Switching from one project to another means that you’re no longer using and reinforcing the knowledge that’s unique to the first one, and you’re starting from scratch learning something new. That’s not an efficient way to leverage (or even maintain) your expertise. Working on one project for a long period of time allows you to maintain, develop, and deepen your expertise and put it to good use on a regular basis.

These elements will help you get closer to that ideal of 10,000 hours.

The blog post I mentioned above included this quote about the Beatles from Outliers:

All told, they performed for 270 nights in just over a year and a half. By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964, in fact, they had performed live an estimated twelve hundred times. Do you know how extraordinary that is? Most bands today don’t perform twelve hundred times in their entire careers. The Hamburg crucible is one of the things that set the Beatles apart.

Do your best to find or create a crucible for yourself, and expertise will follow.

The debt snowball is a frequently-recommended method for successfully paying off debts in a relatively short period of time. It is related to the concept of compound interest, and it works by starting with small payments and building upon small, early successes to create larger, quicker successes later. But if you don’t pay off your debts, they can quickly snowball and bury you just as easily — the snowball effect works both ways. Successes tend to build upon and magnify each other, and failures do the same. And this effect isn’t limited to wealth — there are examples of it in health and relationships as well.

Let’s examine the snowball effect first in the context of money. Let’s say you have several outstanding debts (loans, credit cards, etc.) and you pay the minimum on each every month. At this rate, you will be in debt for roughly the rest of your life. To get out of debt, you can use a debt snowball: figure out how much more you can spare, and pay it all into one debt — typically either the one with the highest interest rate or the one with the lowest balance (there are good reasons for both; which one is best depends on your personality). When that one is paid off, take all the money you were paying into it every month and add it to what you’re already paying on the second one. You’ll be paying it off at a faster rate than you did the first one. When that’s done, roll the whole payment that used to go into the first and second debts into the third one. That will go even faster, and you’re well on the way to being debt-free. It can take a while, but if you don’t rack up more debts along the way, it will go faster and faster the longer you do it. It builds momentum.

Saving money works the same way. Compound interest builds savings in a manner similar to the debt snowball. The more money you have, the more you make, so there’s more there next time, so you make even more, and so on.

Of course, if you have debts and you don’t pay them down, the snowball effect will work against you — every month your debt will grow more than the previous month as interest and penalties accumulate and become the basis for the following month’s interest and penalties. The balance owed gets bigger and bigger faster and faster until you can’t possibly keep up with it! It’s important to keep the snowball effect working for you and not against you. Compound interest is a powerful double-edged sword.

The snowball effect isn’t limited to personal finance, though. It can also appear in other areas of your life. For instance, depression is a negative snowball effect that affects your mood. It’s a vicious circle. Depression can deter you from fixing your problems, allowing them to get worse, which can be even more depressing. This was my situation five years ago — I was suffering from Major Depressive Disorder and $14,000 in debt besides. And the way I recovered from depression was very similar to the way I paid off my debts, though I had to take out a “loan” to recover from the depression, in the form of psychiatric treatment. Medication gave me the traction I needed to start making small positive changes in my life, those positive changes helped me feel better enough to make slightly more significant positive changes, and so on, until I no longer needed the medication and no longer felt depressed. The snowball effect in action.

I’m experiencing a negative snowball effect right now in my physical health, and working on finding the willpower to reverse it. An unhealthy diet and not enough exercise contributed to my being overweight, which makes it harder to exercise, which exerts pressure toward getting fatter and more unhealthy. One of my major focuses in the next month or two will be discovering ways to turn my health snowball around and make it work for me instead of against me. All I need to do is identify and implement the health equivalents of the things I did to improve my finances and mental health.

Snowballs can be used in relationships too, building your confidence on social settings and trust and intimacy with the people in your life by starting out with small steps and building on them. The more I learn about how to improve various areas of my life, the more I’m struck by the parallels between them. It seems like the same ideas come up in exercise as in dating as in personal finance as in mental health as in entrepreneurship as in healthy eating as in everything! It almost seems like it should be possible to create a generic template for “how to improve your X” which applies for nearly all values of X. One element of that template would be the snowball effect.

What other ideas do you have for applying the snowball effect?

Financial books and blogs frequently tout the importance of paying yourself first.  And in many cases, this may well be the best course of action.  Certainly when you’re new to personal finance and trying to get your affairs in order, if you don’t follow this wise advice you may never get around to saving.  But the practices that serve us well when we are first starting out can hold us back later on when we are wiser and better off financially.

The cost of paying yourself first only begins appearing when your income begins to exceed your expenses by a noticeable amount.  Let’s play with some numbers to see how this breaks down.

Pay yourself first:

Let’s say your net monthly income (that is, after taxes) is $1400 a month.  Rent and other bills cost you $1000, leaving you with $400 for living expenses (such as groceries) and entertainment (dinners out, movies, bars, video games, whatever) for the month.  That’s $100/week, and when a dinner out with your partner can easily run you $40, that money runs out quickly.  It’s easy to see how it might be difficult to carve out a percentage of your budget for savings in this scenario.  Paying yourself first makes sense here, because if you don’t, you may have nothing left to save later.  Decide how much you can spare and set it aside FIRST, before you spend it.

Don’t pay yourself first:

If, however, your gross income is $3000 a month (net $2000), things are a little different.  Let’s say you’ve developed a good habit of paying yourself first, so you squirrel away $200 (10% of your net) before paying anything else.  Your bills still total $1000, so you now have $800 left over for living expenses and entertainment!  Here’s where things go off-course: you’d probably be perfectly comfortable with only $600, but if $800 is just sitting there tempting you, you’re much more likely to spend it all — impulse buys, little splurges, things you don’t want or need.  You’ll spend it, but you won’t really get much benefit from having done so — especially compared to the value of the compound interest you could have been earning on it.

In this latter case, paying yourself first is precisely backwards.  There’s a much better way to budget your $2000: pay yourself LAST!  You know that you have $1000 of bills which have to be paid one way or another.  And through experience you’ve learned that $600/month in living money is a comfortable lifestyle.  So you budget those two figures and route the money to two separate checking accounts —  $1000 goes to an account for bills which is accessible only by checks (which you leave at home when you go out) or electronic bill pay, and $600 goes into an account which is also accessible via your ATM/debit card.  Now, after setting aside in advance the money you need to keep your bills paid and live a comfortable life, whatever’s left over goes to savings — $400, DOUBLE what you would have saved if you’d paid yourself first.

This strategy becomes even more valuable if your income fluctuates a bit — let’s say the following month you work some overtime and wind up with an extra $200 net — if you paid yourself first, this money is likely to get frittered away, but by paying yourself last, you get to keep it instead of giving it to people for things you don’t really need or, let’s face it, want.  This month you save $600 instead of $400 — excellent!

Some people call “pay yourself first” the golden rule of personal finance — but it is by no means the only way, or even the best way, to save successfully.  I’ve been paying myself last for several years, keeping just the leftovers after allocating fixed amounts each paycheck to bills and to discretionary spending.  By doing so, I’ve seen my net worth consistently grow over that time, putting my leftovers into paying down credit cards as quickly as possible (until I learned how to profit from keeping card debt), saving in high-interest savings accounts, and buying CDs to maximize my returns on my investment.  Paying myself last has improved my net worth a great deal, much more than if I’d been paying myself first.  The key is not to follow anyone’s financial advice (even if it’s EVERYONE’S financial advice) without question, but to think about what will work best for you, try things, and keep the practices that make you successful.