10,000 hours

You need to put in roughly 10,000 hours of sustained effort to get really good at anything.

That's one premise of Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers: The Story of Success. I highly recommend this book. Often we attribute success—especially in the case of phenomenally successful people—to intelligence and ambition. Gladwell argues that while these factors absolutely matter, they're less important than (1) being in the right place at the right time in history and (2) getting your 10,000 hours in.

It's the latter concept that interests me in terms of design and other creative pursuits. Gladwell explains that—partly through circumstance and partly through personal choice—the people we regard as creative geniuses, people who redefined an industry or a genre, are those who got their 10,000 hours in early on. It's well known, for instance, that the Beatles spent the early 60s playing clubs in Germany. Here's what I didn't know: In Liverpool, the Beatles had played 1-hour sessions. In Hamburg, between 1960 and 1962, they routinely played eight-hour sessions, night after night. Gladwell notes:

"By the time they had their first burst of success in 1964... 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."

Gladwell goes on to quote an interview in which John Lennon explains that the sheer number of hours onstage not only built up the band's stamina but forced them to become more inventive as artists. So without those formative years in Hamburg, would there have been a White Album later on? Who knows. Maybe not.

Aside from the Beatles' story, Outliers does not explore in great depth how the "10,000 hour rule" applies specifically to the arts. This raises a couple of interesting questions:

(1) How does the 10,000-hour rule jibe with the concept of the "Renaissance Man" who pursues multiple creative outlets? How do you explore different outlets without sacrificing the time you spend perfecting one craft? There are artists who do it, of course, but few who do it well.

(2) How do you balance your active creative time with your passive, receptive creative time—the time you spend taking in images and ideas? No one's a self-contained fountain of creative inspiration. Good writers read. Good designers look. But there can be a fine line between seeking inspiration and seeking distraction, and there are 10,000 distractions clamoring for our attention.

Incidentally, 10,000 hours is about 5 years at a typical 9-5 gig (40 hrs/week x 50 weeks/year). If you're lucky, your day job includes a lot of time spent on the work that matters most to you. But even if it doesn't—every hour you get in counts, including those that feel wasted or failed. Remember that the next time you throw out a creative experiment gone disastrously wrong, be it visual or literary or even culinary. Every hour counts.