Quoting Yoda at me is a sure-fire way to piss me off. The first time this happened was when DDB asked me to do something. I said I would try. “Do or do not,” he said, “there is no try.” This was annoying enough to have made it into one of my more popular stories, so I suppose I’m glad it happened, but just to put it out there: do not fucking quote Yoda at me, please.
Besides, that quote is rubbish anyway. If you want a quote that actually means something, you’d be much better served with Quatto, from Total Recall, who said: “You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memories.” I think the reason this hasn’t got much traction is because Quatto was this freaky little baby-man embedded in Rutger Hauer’s stomach. Nonetheless, the idea – that you can be whatever you want, so long as you do what is necessary – has been a powerful one in my life, sometimes in its explanatory power for how I’ve chosen to live, but more often for its explanatory power for why I feel so shitty.
Anyway, Malcolm Gladwell is apparently about to shed some light on this idea:
Or take the case of Bill Gates. Gladwell cites a body of research finding that the “magic number for true expertise” is 10,000 hours of practice. “Practice isn’t the thing you do once you’re good,” Gladwell writes. “It’s the thing you do that makes you good.” Gladwell shows how Gates accumulated his 10,000 hours while in middle and high school in Seattle thanks to a series of nine incredibly fortunate opportunities—ranging from the fact that his private school had a computer club with access to (and money for) a sophisticated computer, to his childhood home’s proximity to the University of Washington, where he had access to an even more sophisticated computer. “By the time Gates dropped out of Harvard after his sophomore year to try his hand at his own computer software company,” Gladwell writes, “he’d been programming practically nonstop for seven consecutive years. He was way past 10,000 hours.” Yes, Gates is obviously brilliant, Gladwell concludes, but without the lucky breaks he had as a kid, he never could have had the opportunity to fulfill the true potential of that brilliance. How many similarly brilliant people never get that opportunity?
The notion that expertise is largely a matter of putting in the hours is not new; Herb Simon famously wrote a bunch of papers on it with regard to chess masters, and these papers now form part of the canon of cognitive science. But the idea is worth revisiting, especially if Gladwell is the one revisiting it.
The reason I’ve been thinking about this more than usual is that I’m trying not to go fucking bugshit in NH. I’ve been extraordinarily depressed since I got here, which surprised me, since taking the job and moving here made a lot of sense. It makes more sense every day, in fact, considering that it looks like the economy is only beginning to go to shit. But moving here has been really hard, and if Monica hadn’t been with me for the first ten days I think I would have melted down.
So yesterday I asked myself: if I felt like how I want to feel, how would I act? A simple question, with a handful of simple answers, yet it turns causality on its head. This isn’t how we think life works; we think: I feel like crawling into a cave and dying, so I’m going to go home, lay on the couch, and watch television. But the truth, as verified by a number of psychological and neurological studies, is that if you do ‘happy’ things you will be happier; and if you do ‘angry’ things you will be angry. And yes, it’s true that more variables are in play than this paragraph would imply, but it’s also true that to an extraordinary degree you control how you feel, not by force of will, not by trying super hard, not by keeping perspective or thought-controlling yourself into a positive attitude, but by simple actions and activity. How much physical excersise did you get? Because the results are in, and excersise beats the shit out of anti-depressants. Did you get outside? How many minutes in friendly conversation?
You can control that. So after a week or so of skulking about in my angst and letting my emotion drive my action, I decided to think about what I could change about my actions to feel better about this life. A few days in and it’s working a lot better.
I’ll let you know how it goes. But to come back to Gladwell’s point: if it takes 10k hours of action to turn into something, what have you made yourself after all these years? And is that really what you want to be?