Nick's Journal · Craft Decisions
There was a concept that first became popular in what is now probably two or more decades ago, but lingers still in the public discourse when discussing expertise, or professions, or quite often any sort of skill being applied in a productive means. The concept was coined as ten thousand hours. It was not simply a number pulled out of thin air, though quite often with non-fiction and the ability to choose which data one pays attention to and which one ignores, the distinction can become quite blurred. Regardless of its veracity though, it became common wisdom.
One must accumulate ten thousand hours as the means of entry towards expertise in any domain. I suspect that this is about to become a hotly debated topic again, and one that is stress tested as much as any claim in recent history. If artificial intelligence and robotics continue to progress in the manner that they have, the amount of career displacement that is experienced may very well be unparalleled in history. Will all of these newly displaced professionals truly require ten thousand hours, the equivalent of roughly 4 to 5 years of full-time employment, before they become experts in their new fields?
I suspect that we will find that the answer is a resounding no. If I were to hazard a guess, I think that the answer is far more likely to look like a bell curve, applied from the old skill, to the new skill. If you excelled at your old profession, do not be surprised if you rather quickly excel at the new profession. I have many reasons for feeling this way, some of which I will dive into, but one of the most readily obvious is the very fact that your old profession is being disrupted by general intelligence.
General intelligence is very much what the word implies in some ways. It is not highly specific and unique intelligence. The kind that takes years and years of specific focus on a singular skillset in order to develop. It is rather the type of intelligence that one accumulates in nearly any form of employment and interaction with society. It is pattern recognition rather than deep understanding.
When dealing with an upset customer, here are the various methods of resolution and their likelihood of success, based on experiencing them firsthand. Here is how to communicate in a corporate setting, based on experiencing the pros and cons of each style. Here is how one navigates interpersonal relationships in a workplace setting and here is the level of effort that places one above their peer group.
These are all far more interchangeable than we are led to believe. There are a myriad of reasons for this no doubt and it is worthwhile for someone to spend time on this topic, especially given what is coming down the pipeline, but I think an obvious one is that it is not in the interests of the business world that employees believe they have additional leverage. Capital, which we can simply refer to as Wealth for the purpose of this essay, wants the opposite outcome. They very much want an employee to feel that the time they have invested at a company is unique to that company and provides them zero leverage in the job market.
Let me instead argue the opposite here. I will frame it with a term that may not be the best of terms, but one that I think captures many of the aspects that lead me to my conclusions and is one that is familiar to all. Instinct, rather than a set number of hours, is what allows one to progress far more quickly in subsequent domains then in their initial one.
What ten thousand hours suggests is akin to a world of millions of Venn diagrams where the circles have significant areas of no overlap, completely unique and specific to that domain. While I believe there are likely domains that do qualify for that viewpoint, theoretical physics perhaps, my contention would be that the overwhelming majority of professions are the polar opposite to this view. I would instead picture a modern world with an enormous cluster of circles in the middle of the diagram, spiraling out somewhat but largely still tightly clustered around the center.
In such a world, that initial ten thousand hours, which I do not dispute and which I believe is a fair and accurate representation of skill accumulation that happens in your first truly professional employment, is vastly more valuable than the common wisdom framing makes it appear. That ten thousand hours might very well save you eight thousand hours in nearly any other profession that you find yourself choosing in the future, in particular professions that do not put one in a wildly different skill set.
Once again, if you chose to be a concert violinist, than you could expect to spend ten thousand hours on that skillset almost no matter what else you may have done with your life. And that may be true of many other highly specialized fields. That isn’t how many people make their way through life though. And even in these extreme cases I think you would find that it is often the complementary skills that you bring along with you that can prove to be the most valuable piece.
Picture two individuals. One, a concert violinist from day one, focused on it in their youth through to adulthood. At some point, there is almost undoubtedly vast diminishing returns on time spent in pursuit of further excellence. Now picture a second individual, pursuing a career as a concert violinist after two other medium-term pursuits. They will need to put in that ten thousand hours playing catch-up, but when they do, they will now have ten, perhaps even twenty, thousand hours of other expertise that the first individual does not have available to them. And though it may be difficult to envision it, that will almost certainly lead to opportunities and problem solving that the first individual is simply incapable of.
Why I chose instinct to frame all of this as, is that the mechanisms in how this plays out are all but invisible to the individual. They will simply go through their day as they think is best, making thousands of decisions and judgments that do not even feel as such to them. The more experienced you are, the less a judgment reads as a judgment and the more it simply becomes habitual or automatic. That experience will matter though. It will help to guide it in the right direction and to ensure that the range of poor outcomes is narrowed, because that is what experience leads one to do.
Even in pursuits that might seem wildly divergent at first, there will almost invariably be way more crossover than you expected. Appealing to a consumer shares many qualities even when the type of consumer themselves changes. Interactions with people are normally specific to human qualities, not domain qualities. On and on the list can go, and it is instinct, honed over the years, that will guide your way.
If you find yourself at the bottom of a mountain, one that someone is telling you took them ten thousand hours to climb, and feeling the weight of the effort that is being asked of you, I would urge you to pause for a moment. Look closely at the mountain and let your instinct weigh in. Is your instinct telling you that it will take you that long? Or does it already see a shortcut perhaps, one that required knowing that you could bend yourself just so?
If it is telling you that, than don’t be surprised if it does not take ten thousand hours. In fact, don’t be surprised if one day you are looking down at those who told you that it would, as you never stopped at the top of the first and have scaled a second one since, with a few thousand hours still to spare.
Much love as always,
Nick
Nick