In his latest book (Outliers), Malcolm Gladwell argues that if you want to really master something (e.g. playing guitar, programming, playing golf), there is a high probability that the number of hours you will need to invest into it will revolve around 10,000.

10,000 hours if you want to be an expert at something. This means 14 years if you are doing it 2 hours per day.

Looking back at Seth Godin’s insightful post entitled What would a professional do?, this makes me wonder:

How much can you really achieve by doing all the little tasks you’re (at most) average at yourself instead of leaving them to those who have devoted their 10k to them?

Once again the question of focus and extreme specialization. Sharing work and profits vs. keeping it all to yourself because you can just do it so much better and faster.

Based on the experiences of others and my own, I would say that the question you need to ask yourself is this:

Is the combination of your personal talents, traits and circumstances, confronted with all the tasks in front of you, so wonderfully special that you can do twice a better and cheaper job doing it all by yourself?

This is seldom the case, but surely not unheard of. And of course, your environment and circumstances might be preventing you from doing otherwise.

But consider this: if you can do it only twice as good as with a team of other 10k-ers, you will probably make a profit; however, the next time around you will not have made the important connections and experiences to even have this choice and you will most likely be doing it by yourself again.

And as you get older, and the cycle continues, you probably start losing your edge, along with your wonderfully special advantage – and you lose.

Bottom line:

Do the stuff that matters to you the most right now and stop thinking about what you feel might come in handy later.

Otherwise you end up just being an amateur at a lot of things. And – as Seth Godin put it -

Be an amateur on purpose, not because you have to.

There will always be enough time for your whims later on if you do it right. Right?

Focus FTW!

P.S.: I think we might be building up a little fascination with the number 10,000 here (see my earlier post, 10,000 Reasons To Focus).

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• Book Review: Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell (basilandspice.com)
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• 10000 Hours, Hits and Experts (steffanantonas.com)

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How many books do you read per month nowadays?

Two? One? Half a book?

If you’re a busy professional, perhaps not even that?

I’ve always found reading to be an essential part of personal development. Not blogs – I mean the normal, in-depth, catch every word – not just the headlines – reading .

Over the past couple of years, I’ve noticed how my shelves started getting full of books I had no idea when I’d come around to read. Business books, fiction, language books, you name it …

Looming over me like a very pronounced shadow of outdated aspirations.

But why do I read less?

I suppose partly due to the standard reasons that we all face – apart from the apparent busyness, it’s ever-shifting interests and professional pressures that are making it increasingly hard to sit down and dive into one of the classics that you’ve always felt bad about not having read.

Like War And Peace, or Crime and Punishment, Bhagavad Gita, the Qu’ran, or even Cryptonomicon.

Another undisputable factor is the change in the way we read. This article captures it well.

We’re far less experiencing but rather processing written content – one of the tools our minds use to help us survive the information overdose.

But let’s back to the initial problem – sitting down, opening a book, focusing and doing nothing else for about 10 hours.

Quite rare in my current life.

So – about 2 years ago, I switched to audio books. I got one of those subscriptions at Audible and since then, not one month has passed without an epic story, historical drama, marketing advice or similar.

I run about every other day for 20-40 minutes, which makes a bit less than 8 hours per month, and I’m in the car at least 8 hours per month.

About a thousand hours per year that could potentially be wasted.

The dramatized version of War And Peace is about 9 hours long (the unabridged version is 65 hours ), so this is just about right for 1 audio book per month without any significant change to my daily routine.

This means min. 1 book in the busiest months and about 2-3 on average – not perfect but more than satisfactory for the current pace of life.

What about recommendations?

I’ve recommended business books before, so here are two magnificent works of fiction, both about young girls in dire circumstances.

A Thousand Splendid Suns – a stunningly tragic and epic account of a young girl’s life in Afghanistan during the recent wars

The Diamond Age – Neal Stephenson’s epic sci-fi drama about a Young Lady’s Illustrated Primer – a great read or listen, almost as good as Snow Crash

Here are some recommendations from the last couple of months:

Malcolm Gladwell: Blink
About “the power of thinking without thinking”, an excellent read about the decisive first few moments of looking. Available at Audible (audio book).

Fisher, Ury, Patton: Getting To Yes
A really good book on negotiation – getting the other party to agree without being at an unfair disadvantage that could haunt you later. Also available as audio.

Malcolm Gladwell: The Tipping Point
Good marketing read about how little things usually make a huge difference. Also at Audible.

Nassim Nicholas Taleb: The Black Swan
Fairly entertaining read about the impact of the highly improbable. Summary: Gaussian distribution sux for most cases. The ideas Taleb describes are interesting and useful, but DO NOT get the audio book as, adding to the writer’s very noticeable self-confidence, the narrator makes the whole thing sound terribly big-headed. I later heard Taleb speak at a conference and I was shocked at how nice the guy actually sounded .

Buckingham, Coffman: First, Break All The Rules
Great book on effective management.

* I have recently noticed that this post has come to rank quite highly in Google and thus felt I needed to add some clarification, given the fact that a lot of readers do not seem to have understood the underlying sarcasm and the message it is trying to convey. This blog is aimed towards entrepreneurs and as such views this book as a potential time waster – even though larger organizations might benefit from its (however inconcise) message. As it is often talked about in entrepreneurial circles, I thought I’d give it a mention. For a more relevant list of reading material, please look at my list of Recommended Business Books.

Inspired by the terrific insightfulness of Blue Ocean Strategy, I have tried to capture the gist
of the book by comparing its own value curve to that of your conventional marketing business handbook.

On the x-axis, you see a set of values the books bring to the reader, on the y-axis their strengths.

(read on)

It is quite evident that marketing book A and marketing book B go down the usual path of trying to compete with similar emphasis on the individual value points, while Blue Ocean Strategy completely innovates the value curve and creates a blue ocean of uncontested market space for itself.

Yaay!

After having read (or rather, listened to) Blue Ocean Strategy,
I want to go out and buy one of these:

Don’t get me wrong, I like some of the ideas mentioned in the book (like value curve innovation), as well as the examples, but the way the material is presented worries me …

The later in their careers people read it, the better -

- just don’t adopt the stupid lingo .