Is the 10,000 hours principle true? And if it's true, what are your chances of success? And what are the biggest flaw? How do you take the concept of Malcolm Gladwell's 10,000 Hours story (He took it from a K.Anders Ericsson study) and reduce the number of hours? Is talent really attainable in fewer hours?  http://www.psychotactics.com/expertise-fewer-10000-hours/ ----------- Hi. This is Sean D’Souza from Psychotactics.com, and you are listening to the Three-Month Vacation Podcast. This podcast isn’t some magic trick about working less. Instead, it’s about how to really enjoy your work and enjoy your vacation time. Have you ever watched a 16-year-old go for a driving test? They probably practice for two or three off and on, and then after that, they drive. Now, imagine they changed the rules of the driving test. Imagine they said that you needed 10,000 hours to drive. How many of us would be on the roads today? Several years ago, best-selling author Malcolm Gladwell wrote a book called “Outliers”. Within that book, there was this concept of 10,000 hours, and the concept was very simple. It said that if you wanted to be exceedingly good at something, you needed to spend at least 10,000 hours. As you can quite quickly calculate, that’s about 10 years of very had work or 5 years of extremely hard work. The interesting thing about 10,000-hour principle is that two sets of people jump on it, the people that had already put in their 10,000 hours in something and those who hadn’t; but what if you hadn’t? What if you hadn’t put in those 10,000 hours? Were you doomed to be always untalented? Understanding this concept of the 10,000 hours is very important, especially if you want to take vacations. You have to get very skilled at a lot of things very quickly. If you don’t understand the concept, then you struggle for no reason at all. In today’s episode of the Three-Month Vacation, we’re going to cover three things. The first is, why is the 10,000 hours true? The second, what are the biggest flaws in the 10,000 hours? The third is, how do you go about shortening that process, so that you just do maybe a thousand hours? Let’s start out with the concept of why the 10,000 hours is absolutely true. Now, nothing is absolutely true, but the 10,000-hour principle works for a simple reason. That is we don’t know that we’re making mistakes. If you take a guitarist, say someone like John Mayer, or Eric Clapton, or B.B. King, and you look at how long they spent with their guitar, they probably spent an excessive 10,000 hours. When you’re starting out and when you’re playing that guitar, you don’t really know what mistakes you’re making, and you don’t really care. You’re there just to play the guitar, and this is what a lot of artists do. This is what a lot of writers do. They spend enormous amounts of hours just fooling around, just playing the guitar, just drawing a cartoon, just writing something, and they make mistakes. They make a lot of mistakes, but the problem is they don’t know that they’re making a mistake. Take for instance my own life. When I started drawing cartoons, I was probably just out of school, and I was drawing cartoons that are pretty flat. One day, my friend, Howard, he said, “Well, there’s something wrong with your drawing.” I said, “What’s wrong?” He couldn’t explain, but he said, “They’re really flat.” It was then I realized that I wasn’t using perspective. Until that moment, I didn’t realize. I’ve been drawing for hundreds, maybe thousands of hours, but I didn’t realize I was making a mistake. Several years later, I started doing commercial projects, and someone mentioned that my lines were too weak. Lines are too weak? What do you mean by lines are too weak? They couldn’t explain, but I had to do my own research, and then I found that great artists have this variation in their life to take and attend. This is what most musicians, artists, painters, people who are talented at anything that you think are talented at someth