What Happens After you Master 20,000 Hours at Your Life’s Work?
A new book shows you how to be a master at your craft.
October 17, 2012 - 4:14 pm
That is the question posed by a new book by Robert Greene called Mastery. The book reveals what happens to the brain after spending 20,000 hours studying a field or craft and how people like Einstein or Darwin come to be masters. He debunks the many myths about genius and believes that the secret to mastery is already within us. He interviews nine contemporary masters to help the reader learn to unlock their inner passion and become a master themselves. It looks like a good read if you are looking for help finding your life’s work or are doing it but need guidance on becoming a master at it.
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Related at PJ Lifestyle:
I’ll read it after I get to 20,000 hours.
This is apparently not quite a direct rip-off of the guy who talked about 10,000 hours:
http://www.amazon.com/Outliers-Story-Success-Malcolm-Gladwell/dp/0316017930
I’ve actually bought a couple of Greene’s previous books for myself and as gifts.
10,000 hours gets you to professional level, so I guess 20,000 would get you to world-class level.
Practice doesn’t make perfect. Practice makes permanent. Poor practice will make poor performance permanent.
20K hours is about ten years of full time work. IF, a big if, you’re working at a high level, you can get quite good at it in five years, about 10K hours, at ten years you probably know enough to make strategic decisions. But that presumes that you are in a good working culture with high expectations and your work is progressively more challenging and responsible. Ten years of being a slug just makes you a slug and in any big organization, public or private, if you’re stylish and well-mannered about it, you can make a fine career of being a slug.
Of course, if you work in IT, 20K hours means the detailed parts of yours skills are way past their sell-by date.
That’s only true if you don’t keep your skills up to date; see my discussion of “Slugs” above.
you finish your surgical residency