Vikram Banerjee
Elite players don’t just seem to have superior skills and fitness than us mere mortals, but they also seem to have more time than us when for example, facing Steve Finn bowling at over 90mph. However what they really have, through hours of preparation, is the ability to anticipate what is going to happen in a game more quickly than us or their fellow players. How?
This article is part of a series by Vikram Banerjee on “What can Sports and Business Leaders learn from each other?” – click to subscribe to his articles.
Arguably the greatest ice hockey player of all time, Wayne Gretzky, is famously quoted as saying that he skates to where the puck is going to be rather than where it is. You could probably say the same of someone such as Lionel Messi, Sachin Tendulkar or any other player who excels in their sport. What is the linking factor between them that makes them stand out from the crowd?
The 10,000 hour rule
Malcolm Gladwell, in his best selling book, ‘Outliers’ attempts to explain high achievement through his 10,000 hour rule. In the book he claims that the key to success in any field is, to a large extent, a matter of practicing a specific task for a total of around 10,000 hours.
“The people at the very top don’t just work harder or even much harder than everyone else,” Gladwell writes. “They work much, much harder.” Achievement, he says, is talent plus preparation.
Malcolm Gladwell
So the next time you watch a top golfer, cricketer or footballer on the television and wonder why he is so much more consistent that you, when you spend every Saturday on the golf course, the answer is beneath the surface. He or she has probably spent at least 20 hours a week honing their art for at least the last ten years before you get to see them. There is a reason that sportsmen and women are said to reach their peak in their late twenties and not before.
Neurologist Daniel Levitin has studied the formula for success extensively and shares this finding: “The emerging picture from such studies is that 10,000 hours of practice is required to achieve the level of mastery associated with being a world-class expert in anything. In study after study of composers, basketball players, fiction writers, ice skaters, concert pianists, chess players, master criminals and what have you, the number comes up again and again. Of course, this doesn’t address why some people get more out of their practice sessions than others do. But no one has yet found a case in which true world-class expertise was accomplished in less time. It seems it takes the brain this long to assimilate all that it needs to know to achieve true mastery.”
There are, of course, many provisos to the 10,000 hour rule. As one example, it’s not enough to just practice for 10,000 hours; the person practicing must constantly strive to get better. Someone who practices without pushing themselves will plateau, no matter how many hours they practice. I suspect many business leaders fall foul of this proviso, putting in enormous hours, but mostly doing work which doesn’t extend their abilities.
10,000 rule in the business world
However, there is research that shows that the 10,000 hour rule still applies to those in the business world. The computer giant, Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft, is proof of the 10,000 hour theory. Gates had a series of lucky opportunities that enabled him to obtain 10,000 hours of computer programming experience before his work with Microsoft. He attended the private Lakewood School in Seattle. The school started a computer club with funds from The Mother’s Club. Most colleges at this time didn’t have such clubs, so this was a rare opportunity for a grade school student. Thanks to The Mother’s Club’s paying of usage fees, Gates was given opportunity to practice programming on the large computer at the University of Washington.
From here, Gates’s opportunities to practice computer programming were remarkable for someone his age: He had the opportunity to work at ISI at nights on their payroll software while still a teenager. And he received permission from his school to spend his spring term at the company TRW writing computer code; all experience that added up to that magical 10,000 hour mark.
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Someone just starting out in industry cannot expect to see overnight success, regardless of initial expenditure and risk taken. This is the challenge to most up and coming leaders, and it needs to be seen as just that – a challenge. True leaders realise that every minute spent studying, giving up free time, honing their skills by providing a free service to your friends counts towards their 10,000 hours and so they are the stand-out successes and make it happen in three to five years rather than eight or nine. Sportsmen are infamous for their single-minded dedication to the cause. The lesson here is simple and universal; the harder you are willing to work for it, the quicker you’ll realise success.
In my next article I will talk about how things change once a leader reaches the top, and the challenges involved with staying there.