Out Lying – Reflections on Malcolm Gladwell’s New Book Outliers
I’ve started reading Malcolm Gladwell’s latest book – Outliers. I’m only into chapter 3, but the “10,000 hour rule” keeps bumping around my head and has me thinking. Especially as I am spending the week at the Family Medicine Forum, brushing up knowledge.
“Outliers: The Story of Success” (Malcolm Gladwell)
Basically, it takes 10,000 hours to become an expert. Malcolm gives examples of hockey players and musicians practicing. Bill Gates programming, etc.
But, what counts in the 10,000 hours?
Bill Gates spent 100s if not 1000s of hours program a financial system – not a programming languages or an OS, but it seems to have counted. The Beatles played in Hamburg for thousands of hours, but how does that translate to the White Album?
In my recent career(s), I have two streams of work – my clinical and informatics work. How much are those intertwined into developing my own expertise?
By my calculations, I put in over 1,500 hours in obstetrical training. I don’t practice obstetrics anymore – does that still count?
I was an animator in the late 1980s and 1990s. What from there is transferable to my “expertise”? How about my biology degree?
A friend argued with me once that we mathematically cannot prove irrelevance. That is we cannot prove that one activity is not relevant to another. Is my understanding of wave theory relevant to my happy marriage?(1)
So what is relevant in those 10,000 hours? Is it game time, or just time on the ice? Is it physical action or visualization? Is it ward time or classroom time? I’m not sure.
Malcolm Gladwell hints that it is time dedicated to improving your skills. In that way reflection on action is key.
Maybe it is also how you define your expertise? Maybe Seth Godin has it right – try to be the best in the world. And the way to do that is to define our own world. Create your world and spend 10,000 hours becoming an expert in it.
My professional world consists of primary health care, clinical information systems, developing understanding of teams of engaged people wanting to make a difference, user-centred design goodness and of course lots of play intermingled. It’s a pretty good world and I’ve definitely enjoyed lying out here for a few thousand hours 
1. Actually yes, as it turns out It has been – a few times just recently, in fact.
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