Only 9,999 more hours to go…
I’m going to start this post with a commonly accepted premise: to achieve mastery of a specific skill requires 10,000 hours of deliberate practice. That’s the idea first propounded by expertise expert Anders Ericsson and popularized by Gladwell, Colvin and others.
There are actually a lot of things wrong with taking that statement too literally, but the general idea is not controversial: you have to put in a lot of time, and do a lot of the right things, if you want to reach the top levels of performance.
The problem is that if you want to be a great speaker or presenter, you will probably never have an opportunity in your entire lifetime to accumulate that much time practicing the craft, unless presenting and speaking to groups is practically all you do for a living. Just looking at the math, if you want to put in 10,000 hours in the first twenty years of your career, you’d have to present at least two hours every working day—and doing the same presentation over and over doesn’t count.
Fortunately, the second part of the premise—deliberate practice—is much more important, and it IS something you can control: quality is much more important than time.
