My 10,000 Hours
Last night, I started reading Malcolm Gladwell’s book, Outliers, and today I would like to write down my thoughts about it. In Outliers, Gladwell seeks to uncover the hidden alchemy of success and dispel the widespread myths surrounding it. He asserts that our common notion that success is achieved through some kind of utopian meritocratic process is patently false. In hockey, he explains, the vast majority of successful players share a single characteristic: their birthdate’s proximity to January 1. Why is this? It’s simple: hockey’s age cutoff begins on January 1, and so players born closest to the cutoff will be the most mature in their cohort.
One would not, at first, imagine this to be a huge difference-maker. However, Gladwell is quick to point out that it serves to reinforce a self-fulfilling prophecy inherent in hockey’s development model. When players are young, say below the age of eight, hockey players all play together. But at this young age, a few months of maturity can make a big difference, and so those players born close to January 1 tend to excel. This leads them to be selected for advanced training, the effect of which becomes compounded over many years, and voila: our best hockey players are overwhelmingly born from January-March.
So, Gladwell muses, perhaps success is not purely based on talent. Indeed, maybe our environment and the circumstances in which we grow up is a better predictor of how high up the ladder we will climb. Investigating this notion further, Gladwell turns to world-class musicians. Here he finds that the secret to utter mastery of an instrument lies in a seemingly arbitrary yet highly recurrent number: 10,000 hours (of practice). It is this number that he finds cropping up everywhere he looks. Whether it be back with the hockey players or in his interviews with high performers across fields as diverse as music, software engineering, and management. Gladwell even posits that Mozart may have only produced his best works–works which truly deserve the “masterpiece” designation–after he had reached the 10,000 hour mark in his twenties.
This led me to think: “what are my 10,000 hours?” and what would I like to do with them? Throughout my childhood I focused on various pastimes. Early on, I played hockey and competed in alpine skiing races; in my teens I focused on academics and became interested in mathematics, physics, and economics; in my spare time I developed an enthusiasm for Rubik’s cubes: either solving big ones (like the 7x7x7 or the 12-sided Megaminx), or solving them quickly (speedcubing, as it is known, e.g. solving a 3x3x3 in under 20 seconds); I even regularly played, and still play, the guitar. But upon reflection, I must conclude that it is mathematics, without a doubt, wherein lies my potential to reach the all-important 10,000 hour mark.
In high school I was in the advanced math class, a member of the math society, and wrote my high school thesis on a subject in mathematics; I had a tutor who would take me through advanced topics every week, and my innate passion for the subject has led me to pursue a master’s in data science and to work on math-related subjects in my professional life. If we group together the disparate fields in which I have worked (mathematics, physics, operations research, data science), and place them all under the banner of mathematics, my rough accounting estimates I have spent between 8,000 and 10,000 hours in the practice of mathematics. I hope I am soon be due for my masterpiece!