Bill Joy, the cofounder of Sun Microsystems and writer of much of today’s UNIX (the operating system behind the Apple laptop I’m typing on), logged 10,000 hours of programming at the University of Michigan Computer Centre.
“Bill Joy was brilliant. He wanted to learn. That was a big part of it. But before he could become an expert, someone had to give him the opportunity to learn how to be an expert,” writes Malcolm Gladwell. Learning how to be an expert takes time. According to Gladwell’s latest best-selling book about success, Outliers, 10,000 hours is pretty much what it takes to be really, really, really good at anything.
Bill Gates logged 10,000 hours’ programming time long before anyone else had a computer. The Mother’s Club in his Seattle private school raised money and purchased a time-sharing computer terminal for his school’s computer club. Big deal, you say? For a nerdy eighth grader in 1968, it was a big deal.
While still in high school the Beatles gigged strip clubs in Hamburg where they played non-stop seven-hour shows, seven days a week.
In total they played 270 shows in a year and a half—more than most bands in their entire rock and roll careers. The youngsters from Liverpool had played 10,000 hours of live shows before they walked onto The Ed Sullivan Show.
There is a certain amount of talent required to be good at something, but at the highest levels the ones at the very top are the ones who worked much, much harder than everyone else. It doesn’t matter if we are talking about computer programmers, pop musicians or even whitewater paddlers.
In the rafting staff cabin next to mine lived a young and athletic paddler named Billy Harris. It was the summer of the Perception Whip-it; we think it was ’93, but neither of us can remember for sure.
Billy spent the next six years chasing swimmers down the Ottawa and guiding and teaching kayaking in Nepal, Taiwan, New Zealand, Costa Rica and Ecuador. He’s trained winters in Australia and travelled the U.S. freestyle circuit. These days Billy spends 300 days a year on the water and is training for the 2009 World Freestyle Championships. Now in his mid-thirties, he still paddles two to four hours a day, five to six days a week, not to mention five days a week at the gym. He is unquestionably one of freestyle paddling’s most elite athletes. He’s talented for sure, but Gladwell’s 10,000 Hour Rule would suggest that his real greatness has come because Billy has worked harder than everyone else.
Ten thousand hours of paddling to a guy with an office job looks like this. At an average of two eight-hour paddling days every weekend for the four summer months—so 32 days, 256 hours per year—it would take 39 years to complete a 10,000-hour paddling log. If you started paddling at 20 years old, like me, you’ll be as good as Billy Harris when you’re 59.
Humbling.
And so, a little over halfway to being really good, I sit at my UNIX-based MacBook typing into Gates’ Microsoft Word listening to The White Album, paying tribute to my friend and the man who taught me to surf, Billy Harris. To you boys I drink from a bottle of The Balvenie single malt scotch that, like you, took the time to become the very best.
This article originally appeared in Rapid, Summer/Fall, 2009. Download our free iPad/iPhone/iPod Touch App or Android App or read it here.
