Reducing distractions and the 10,000 hour rule

I am in the middle of a transition period in life; I've got another 6 months till I turn 30 and the big question of "where do I go from here" that I need to figure out. One of my colleagues turned 40 a few months ago and the only thing he was muttering the whole time was "I just can't believe I'm an old man." The interesting thing about my life is that I get along well with people that are older than I am; it's always been that way when I was young and the best part of having friends that are older than you is that you get a glimpse of the future so I can prepare for it now.

As of recent, I've been thinking much about my future; or at least, a strategy for one. Getting prepared for the future isn't like getting prepared for a trip or a disaster, where you just spend a few days going out and buying what you need. Preparing with skills, knowledge and experience is a different game, where you pay for it in the currency of time.

The sub-prime crisis and the following recession/depression fiasco has wreaked indiscriminate financial catastrophe to all walks of life; the young, the middle aged and the old. What was interesting was how each group was affected by the economic downturn. For example, the young cannot find jobs, the middle aged are have debts to deal with, and the old had their savings hit. What this economic downturn has taught me is that you need to keep a good backup plan to protect yourself from being stuck between a rock and a hard place, especially if you've become old (or transitioning to being old) and had your savings wiped out (naturally, you would have been investing in "secure" investments).

So where does this all fit in with me? At this point in life, I've come to realize that with growing age, the number of options I will have available will start to shrink in then next decade-- the number of new fields I will be able to jump into and get really good at will dramatically shrink. So it is now that I should start looking into explicit skills that I can enjoy and be really good at to make a good living. It has been oft quoted from by Malcom Gladwell's book "Outliers," that the number of hours it takes for a person to become an expert at something is 10,000 hours.

Doing the math, to become a master it will take:

• 27.4 years at 1 hour/day of practice
• 13.7 years at 2 hours/day of practice
• or 6.8 years at 4 hours/day of practice

This calculation also puts a lower bound on how long it takes to be really good at something and also the number of skilled expertise that a person can have over the course of a life time. The other thing is the earlier you have more skills, the more they will pay off in the long run. Meaning, if you start training hard by the time you are 50 years old, you might finally become an expert by the time you are 60, however that doesn't leave a lot of time to put those skills to use.

The other interesting thing about skill sets is that they also come outdated as time goes on. Someone that might have been a really good switchboard operator/manager in the early 50's would find their skills useless in today's modern world. Or perhaps a little differently, some computer gamers might find their skills in Starcraft 1 be outdated by the release of Starcraft 2. You might have some transferable skills, but you won't be an expert off the bat. This brings up the interesting point that transferable skill erosion occurs with every new generation of technology, the further along we go in generation, the number of skills we can transfer will negatively compound. Though it might be a little early for me to start thinking about this, it is something that I should keep on mind.

So here is the thing, suppose that I do practice something at 4 hours/day, it will still probably take me 7 years to be really good at it. What it also means is that if you want to be good at something in a reasonably good time, you really don't have a lot of time to waste.

After coming to this realization. I have decided that I am going to institute a system to reduce the number of unproductive distractions so I can spend more time learning. Mainly less checking of news sites, less youtube, less computer games and etc. This doesn't mean that I will be aiming to live a boring life, far from it actually. What it means is that I should more effectively use my time by doing things that brings me memorable value; which could include picking up skills or spending time traveling to somewhere exotic, learning more about wine or whatnot.

I think there was an Indian saying that went like this:

When you are young, you make your habits.
When you are old, your habits make you.

Time to make some productive habits while I still can.