10,000 hours

alex whitmer

alex whitmer

Veteran
I'm reading a book titled Outliers, by Malcolm Gladwell. In a nutshell, getting to the point where you have practiced or engaged in something for 10,000 hours + is what is going to push you to different level - the Bill Gates' and Mozarts' of the world. The super achievers. It argues there is no such thing as genius, only commitment to craft.

Anyone here anywhere near the 10,000 hour mark in screenwriting? A 9-5 job adds up to roughly 2080 hours a year, so you would need to write 8 hours a day, five days a week to get that 10g in 5 years. Working part time, we'll call it 10 years to hit the mark. 10 years to get your craft of writng for the screen above the rest. Better than good enough.

That's commitment.


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I took from Outliers exactly that. That genius is a matter of trial and error and honing the craft. Especially the thing about the Beatles since they seem to have invented something from nothing when they burst on the scene. Those covers over all those years in all those shows created an ensemble that was able to move music the way they did. All of the Freakonomics stuff is just to say that if you look at things clearly things move very differently than the common wisdom suggests. I think the 10,000 hours is just a way of talking about it.

I think that people who are not happy with their early efforts should realize that your early stuff is supposed to stink and that it comes finally to those who stick to it. I had an acting teacher say the same things... you haven't really tried unless you've been at it for 10 years.
 
Maybe you won't achieve greatness until you've been doing it for 10 years, but come on. If you can't get something made in 10 years it's probably because you just ain't good enough. Unfortunately you can teach structure, grammar, but you can't teach imagination.
 
You're arguing a point nobody else is making.

The original post wasn't about "getting good at something", it was about being great. It was about being Bill Gates, or Mozart.

If you follow the Pareto Principle, which I do, you usually get 80% of your results from 20% of your efforts. And under that guise, yes, you could get really quite good and competent at something with maybe 2,000 hours instead of 10,000. But to get that last 20% of results, is going to take 80% of your efforts. Not many will put in that work. And for those who do, it's usually not because they have to, it's because they can't imagine not doing it, and that's what makes them great.

Look, I never toot my own horn, but I do have a little bit of perspective here. I've scaled a few career mountains in my day; I've been a world-record-holding video game player, I was one of the top video game programmers in the world, and one or two other decent accomplishments. I've been at the top tier in whatever I dive fully into, and yes, it takes years and years and years and years of profoundly focused efforts.

I've also gotten pretty good at some things, in much less time. My third screenplay won the silver at a national screenwriting contest, after I'd been at it for only a couple of years. I won an Emmy for some PSAs I did, after only a few years of full-time video production. But in neither case would I consider myself among the greats, or knocking on their doors, or even knowing where their addresses are. Heck, I can juggle five balls for a decent length of time. Juggling three, you can learn that in an hour. Juggling four, that takes a month. Juggling five, that takes a year. Very few people who can juggle, can juggle five. But does juggling five make you a great juggler? Hardly! It makes you in the top 20% of all people who have any juggling skill, but when Albert Moreira can juggle 13, well, that's several orders of magnitude more difficult, and represents, yes, thousands and tens of thousands of hours of work.

Point being -- if you want to be great at something, it takes profound amounts of effort. Thousands of hours of work, yes. And if you put in the effort, you can indeed scale the mountain and rise to the top tiers of a profession. Someone with reasonable intelligence, reasonable capabilities, and who puts in the hard work, can rise to the top 20%, definitely. But as any tennis player will tell you, being ranked in the top 100 in the world would be a fantastic accomplishment, but you'd still be dogmeat when you come up against the true greats (any of the top 5).
 
Gladwell's book is amazing. It gets a little redundant but it certainly puts things into perspective. Applicable to more than just screenwriting - effort and perseverance is key.
 
Ah, I see I was arguing a point no one disagreed with. Yeah, we see that in business world, so in many cases we settle for the 80-90%, because the remaining amount is prohibitively expensive and labor intensive for such little gain. I think in sports and creative endeavors you just can't put a price on the effort.
 
Chris_Keaton said:
so in many cases we settle for the 80-90%, because the remaining amount is prohibitively expensive and labor intensive for such little gain.
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This is very true. And also very smart. Because 80% of perfection is usually really quite good, and would put you in the upper echelons of most endeavors. So if you had 10,000 hours to spend, you could put 2,000 hours into each quest and become an award-winning screenwriter, a professional computer programmer, fluent in German, master the unicycle, and become a very good cinematographer, all at the same time... or, you could pour all 10,000 hours into one relentless pursuit to reach the top, top, top tier of one discipline. Which appeals more to you? That's an individual question. Once you reach the 80% proficiency level, with only 20% of the effort expended, you then have a choice -- keep refining that same goal, or go conquer another field? Getting to the 80% level is still really pretty good and much, much better than most other people manage.

However, if you want to be a Spielberg or a Gates or a Jobs or Mozart, you'd better be prepared to ignore everything else and devote your absolute full time efforts to it, as much as possible. If all you can manage is 4 hours a night, then yes, that's what you'd do for 10 years, to achieve the top. Is that really, really, all that much? Not really. For someone who's 20 it may sound impossible, but for those who are sixty, looking back, would it have been that much to pour all your efforts for 10 years into becoming a recognized master of whatever it was you wanted to pursue?

Then again, there's a lot, lot, lot, lot of folks to whom life is about spending their days in a job they hate, so they can get a weekend off, and spend it so drunk they don't even remember it, and the next thing you know you wake up at 50 years old and have nothing to show for it. Not even memories.

Hey, it's your time. Spend it however you'd like. But if your dream is to be really good, even great at something, you're going to have to spend your time on acquiring the skills. There really aren't any real shortcuts.
 
10 years for mastery is a good benchmark, I think. Maybe you can get competent (good) at around 5. If you think that's all way too long, then as Barry said, you're likely an impatient kid who knows little of life. What the hell did you think you were signing up for? Easy fame and money? The rest of us signed up for committing ourselves to an art form for the rest of our lives.
 
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There is a hidden danger in all this. One can complete their 10g and then some, and still not master their craft of choice. Why? Attitude. Ya gotta be commited for the right reasons. And arrogance will greatly diminish the gains - trust me on this. The 'ol 'Hey man, I've done this all my life, so I know jack'. Been there, know them.


For what's it worth, I hit the the 10g mark in screenwriting about a year and half ago, and feel I have only begun the journey.


Who decides whether you've mastered a craft? Three producers read the same work. One thinks it's full of holes, the other is meh, and the third loves it, buys it (then changes it!).

No matter the bumps and such, ya gotta set your own definition of mastery, commit to it with mind, body and soul, and be willing to change this definition as you learn and learn and learn.


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Who decides? That's a somewhat open question. I would think getting an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay would be a pretty good indicator. But on the other hand, many great artists aren't recognized until they've passed on...
 
I've been shooting for 10 years. I can set up a great shot with my eyes closed (as i have done on one commercial as an experiment), i can "light" using a coat hanger (as i have on another to impress the client), i can... it goes on and on but only in the past 12 months deeper questions started to pop in my head - what's meaning? How can meaning be conveyed within an image? How can i take the image outside of glossy banality of all those commercials and music videos and infuse some "higher" truth into it? Well, you can say only now i've matured enough to ask those questions OR you can propose that only 10 years after starting to develop my craft i can wonder into those territories. SO yes it takes shi* load of effort to get good at something and a ton more to be above good.
 
Barry_Green said:
Who decides? That's a somewhat open question. I would think getting an Oscar nomination for Best Screenplay would be a pretty good indicator. But on the other hand, many great artists aren't recognized until they've passed on...
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Awards go to people who know how to play the game - doesn't necessary imply to the best of the best.
 
Patryk_Rebisz said:
How can meaning be conveyed within an image? How can i take the image outside of glossy banality of all those commercials and music videos and infuse some "higher" truth into it?
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Yes. This is exactly what has drawn me to filmmaking and screenwriting. They are among the few fields wherein you can ask these kinds of questions while you are (hopefully) making a living doing it. I think believing in the power of film is a big part of mastery. When people get too cynical or have low expectations about their field it shows in their work.
 
What I've often wondered about this is how many different skills the entire realm of "filmmaking" is divided into. Frankly, I'm not too convinced that the 10,000 hour rule actually -works- that way. It's a correlation only.

For example, I used to be obsessed with basketball, and as an 8-year-old I'd diagram plays on a dry-erase board. When I played on a court, I learned to simultaneously view the court from a bird's eye view. This was building my spacial awareness, a critical skill to know in order to direct a camera. When I watch movies now, I cannot help making overhead diagrams of the camera blocking. Does this go into my 10,000 hours? Gladwell would say 'no,' but clearly this sort of thing has made me better.

No director has ever had 10,000 hours of directing by the time he made his first film. Many first (feature) films truly are masterpieces, despite the popular wisdom around here that you should expect your work to be awful. Orson Welles, to take the obvious example, was a master storyteller from his work in radio, and then (apparently) watched Stagecoach 40 times to learn how to direct a camera. Where did his 10,000 hours come from?

There is no doubt a lesson to take away from Gladwell's book, which is that dedication is the most important force in mastery. I agree, although I'm not sure this lesson is all that actionable on its own. The reason it doesn't mean much is the modern watering down of the word "dedication." To dedicate oneself is more than to just spend time on something. To dedicate implies a sense of purpose, a sense that your work matters, and it's this limitless force that propels an individual to reach 10,000 hours with ease.
 
I think something here has been overlooked. You can "hone" in any skill, but unless it is INNATE within you, the "level" you reach may be yay-high.

Mozart and Shakespeare may have had tutors/mentors, but it was innate within them, the greatness of what they did. You can study for 100,000 hours but unless you have "it" -- study will make you very, very, very good and possibly great, but not the beyond amazing.

My opinion, of course.

Barry -- video game champion? Had no idea. Oh, my, I know swoon over you - LOL.
 
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