Ten Thousand Hours

            When I was a little boy I always thought that I would end up being some sort of scientist or engineer. Building complex structures, spaceships, and cars with my legos was my favorite pastime. I even dreamed that perhaps someday I would be a rocket scientist, which was the ultimate scientist according to any informed eight year old. But now I’ve decided that I am going to be a philosopher/writer/teacher when I grow up. Somehow it still seems glamorous, even though I am already in the trenches and know that it’s not. There is still something romantic about the idea of reading, thinking, and writing and getting paid to do it. Yet the very real problem arises: I have no idea who really wants to pay a 25 year old kid to write stuff that most people don’t want to hurt their brains enough to think about. But I have a passion, I have something I love, and I am going to go for it even if I get slapped in my naïve face.

I recently read the book Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell, in which he states that the magic number of success is ten thousand. He argues that anyone that spends ten thousand hours doing something will be an expert at whatever it is. A musician that practices for ten thousand hours will be magnificent, regardless of any natural talents that he or she may or may not have; a computer programmer that spends ten thousand hours is bound for programming success, and so forth. If it works for musicians and computer programmers, then I hope it works for writers and philosophers too.

            Based on this idea of practicing something for ten thousand hours, I have decided that I need to spend some time every day writing something. The discouraging thing about this is that I am constantly thinking up new ideas to write, but I am seldom, if ever, motivated enough to actually write them down. It’s not that writing down my thoughts is hard; it’s just that I always have something else “better” to do. It’s not a priority, and so writing gets pushed down the list of to-do’s further and further until it isn’t on the list any longer. Because it is so easy to fail to hold myself accountable in my own writing, I have decided to make an attempt at writing a blog. My idealistic self says that I should try to post something every day, but my realistic self says that I will probably post something a little less often, but hopefully with more substantive content.

            Starting a blog is intimidating. And the intimidation creates hesitation. Partly because I want to offer something of value on a blog, while simultaneously feeling like I don’t have anything of value to offer. And partly because what I really want to write for—journals and the like—offers so much more professional appeal than a blog that writing on a blog feels like a second rate approach to being published. Because of these two major obstacles of total emotional engagement the beginning may be a little rough.

            Everyone believes that they have something important to say, and even when they don’t think that what they are saying is important, they believe that they are important so people should listen. This is why writing a blog for pretty much no one but myself doesn’t sound quite as exciting as believing that you have an audience of thousands, or tens of thousands. Because I fall in the category of believing that I have something important to say (albeit I am not sure what yet), I think I might write better if I work under the delusion that at a minimum a thousand people will be reading my blog. There’s just something wonderful about working under delusions of grandeur; it just makes things feel more real.

            So, if you’re still reading, I wish both you and me luck with any future writing that I produce. Thanks for joining me on the adventurous trail to becoming a better writer (which is really the whole point of this thing).