10,000 hours

I’ve heard, somewhere, that it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert at something.  Have you ever thought about when and at what point you consider yourself an expert at something?  Perhaps you crochet?  Ride endurance?  Skateboard?  Create movies?  Write lyrics?  Scuba dive?  What constitutes you being an expert at whatever it is?  Application of time, according to the 10,000 rule.  I am thinking about this a lot right now for two main reasons.  One, I have to teach my current UCSD students to think about this in terms of how they present themselves as experts in some field, and two, I will be taking my qualification exam on August 5, 2013 at 1pm.  The former is an exercise that is collaborative and the latter, well, feels like it rests entirely on my shoulders. 

10,000 hours. According to a simple Google search 8,760 hours is equal to one year and 10,000 hours is roughly equivalent to 416 ½ days, or approximately a month and 20 extra days beyond a year.  That is a lot of time spent on any one thing.  But when you consider that we spend, on average, a year and half or two in the bathroom by the time we are 75 or that we spend around 540 hours a year in our cars (which works out to be 22 days out of the year) you start to realize that we are “experts” at a lot of day-to-day tasks that amount to a significant portion of what we spend our time doing.  In addition to any number of these banal tasks we are supposed to acquire a kind of niche expertise.  In my students' case this amounts to, for now at least, figuring out what they will market themselves as when they get out into the “real world”.  For me, it is wondering if my 10,000 hours is really what I have under my academic belt.

So, let’s break this down for my five years in grad school.  I spend, on average 40 hours a week working as a TA and as an instructor.  That 40 hours a week of teaching works out to be 2080 hours a year.  This means that in the last five years of grad school I have taught 10,400 hours.  OK, so that means I am an expert at teaching.  Of course transportation is an important part of getting things done and mainly I travel to and from work.  I don’t just use my car however.  I incorporate bus and bicycle travel into my commuting so as to save some money and feel like I can legitimately call myself an environmentalist.  Let’s say my travel time is equivalent to what most folks spend in the car, which as mentioned above, is 540 hours a year.  Ïn five years that is 2,700 hours.  I don’t watch TV, so that’s good, but I do spend a lot of time on the computer between social networking sites, blogging, news reading, writing and research.  If I spend 8 hours a day on the computer that is 2,920 hours a year, or a whopping 14,600 hours in the last 5 years.  I spend about 7 hours a day sleeping, amounting to 2,555 hours a year, 12,775 hours in 5 years.  Honestly it feels like I often get less, but let’s go with this number.  Finally, according to the US Department of Labor I spend a mere two hours a day on household activities, but let’s round that down and say I spend 1.5 hours a day on household activities.  This amounts to 547.5 hours a year, or 2,737.5 hours in the last five years.

How much of this time, 1,824 days (5 years) give or take have I devoted to my actual studies?  Well, without belaboring the point (pun intended) I have apparently spent 8,642.5 hours on activities that just sustain my life, which turns out to be just 122.5 hours shy of the 8765 hours in a year.  So I spend 122.5 hours a year on my studies away from those hours that require the computer.  This includes things like field work, reading, and research at the library.  So lopping off 50% of the time spent on the computer, or 1,460 hours.  Adding the 122.5 to 1,460 I have spent 1,582 hours a year on my studies.  In the last 5 years this amount to 7,912.5 hours.  That is less than 10,000.  I am just shy of being an expert.       

I am not going to lie.  I am terrified.  I feel like I have more expertise on how to saddle a horse then wax theoretical on the material plane of nationalism and Swiss Volk fetish. We know, of course, that according to the theoretical 10,000 hours, many of us graduate students are experts at teaching.  After all, earning a living is time consuming.  In my case this means working for UCSD as well as for Miramar Community College and teaching SAT skills to high schoolers in the summers.  Regardless of the hours under my belt I feel like I am forever adjusting how I teach and what I teach.  So, if being an expert means having arrived at some plane of expertise, I am missing the mark.  It is also important to consider  balance maintaining activities like: hugging my dog, running, having a date on occasion with my sweetheart and staying in contact with my family.  The resources and energy and time required for one little life is quite remarkable.  Time is truly of the essence.  The Western linearity of it all requires that there is a sense of the amount, limits and indefatigable progression.  How we use it is in many senses a measure of the commitment to time as something that is both finite and infinite.  Where does it all go?  Before you know it a day is done, a month is over and a year is up.  And then you are 41, freaking out about a qualification exam while many half your age are already having their first kid and in a lifelong career.   

Eking out 10,000 hours. and more to the point, 10,000 consistent hours, is almost like getting downright devotional.  It may be that I have spent too many hours in my life trying to develop expertises that do not inform what I am currently focused on.  Hence my status as a "non-traditional" student.  I have been, at any one point: an actor, an electrician’s apprentice, disaster worker, volunteer director and manager, a Fed Ex truck loader, an educational outreach coordinator for a non-profit before eventually finding myself an academic in Communication Studies.  And this last development was not without a brief, but intense, stint in home improvement retail.  (Side note: Retail should, at some point, be a part of everyone's resume.  It humbles you.)  The point being, my background is diffuse, scattered, and not sanctified by a solidly elite intellectual lineage.  I am not self-made, but I am scholar on a slow burn.  I tremble at the implications.  I mean, how will all this extraneous activity ultimately impact me on August 5^, 2013?  Let’s not think about that for now.  I’m not sure I can handle it.  In the meantime I have 32 days or 768 hours until I am facing the committee.  I will have to hope that it is not just the application of 10,000 hours that matters, but also the intent behind the time spent.  The "directedness" of my attention to my work and my focus when I am working.  Speaking of which, it is time to turn back to writing and studying for now.  Happy fireworks and barbecue madness to all.

Sweet graph on the 10,000 hour rule