| Jan. 6th, 2010 @ 09:16 pm Ten Thousand hours? |
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Current Mood:  thoughtful
The idea that it takes 10,000 hours of practice in order to become a world class expert in a particular skill has been popularized lately by Malcolm Gladwell. In his book he actually says that it is more than merely 10,000 hours of practice. It must be intense practice, daily practice and long practice to really fit the pattern he describes. Most of his examples practiced 8 hours a day, 7 days a week. This averages out to about 10 years of practice.
Naturally I thought about my experiences with swordsmanship. My practice has not been daily. The closest I ever came to that was in university when a few friends and I would go into the woods on campus and sword fight. (The dean of students was not happy about this) At first we just used sticks but as the year went on our tools became increasingly sophisticated. Since joining the SCA my practice has generally been weekly except when it has been less often. Through in events like Pennsic and the balance may work out to about an hour a week. In High School I did three semesters of fencing and practices were about 2 hours twice a week. When I participating with AEMMA I practiced twice a week. Sessions were between 1.5 and 2 hours long. I could have gone three times a week but I made a decision to be in church each Sunday a long time ago. So I never attended the Sunday morning practices.
Lets say my practice time was about 1 hour per week over the course of 15 non-continuous years. That is probably generous and works out to 780 hours.
Intensity of practice for me has not been as high as it could have been. The most intense practice was when I took fencing. AEMMA would be second. In each case an instructor set skills to be practiced and drilled the students in those skills correcting the students as they worked.
In my informal university club and in the SCA practice was really a free form sparring activity with very little if any structured *practice* beyond what each participant imposed upon him or her self. Nor was there any set duration of activity in these practices. Fight til you were tired, rest until you felt better, repeat. All in all it is a fairly low-intensity form of practice. I improved of course. Looking at photos from 1995 of Jason and I at university fighting I am impressed at how good our form is. Its not great form. There are errors that now seem obvious. We had no instruction (other than pain), but in spite of that we did develop a certain degree of skill.
So I don't have the duration of practice either short-term or long-term nor do I have the intensity of practice necessary to meet my goals. Can I change that?
My work and family commitments mean that it will be difficult for me to increase the number of SCA practices I attend. Not impossible, just difficult. So that leaves the type of practice I can do on my own. Slow work and maybe, maybe, pell work. If I could manage the equivalent of an hour a day I could break the 1000 hour mark by the end of the year. Is that a realistic plan?
I'd like to be a world class expert. The reality is, I am unlikely to be able to put in the hours of practice needed. Reaching 2000 hours, which Gladwell identifies as the amount of practice needed in order to instruct in a skill, is a challenging enough goal at this time. |
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