10,000 hours of what?

Nas Daily, on Facebook, is a good guy, Palestinian dude traveling the world making 1-minute videos on a variety of topics. He recently made a video celebrating the fact that he had, over almost 3 years on this project, spend 10,000 hours or so making videos, thereby reaching the "10,000 hours of deliberate practice" threshold that Malcolm Gladwell, in Outliers, said was necessary to become world-class at something.

Despite the fact that there have been real critiques of Gladwell's guideline, there is a ring of truth to it, and Nas has definitely gotten good at making thoughtful and attractive videos that elucidate a single thought in a minute.

And it led me to reflect: what have I gotten good at through 10,000 hours of practice? I haven't blogged that much yet, though it might seem like I might have.  I have been offering some sort of operational/financial guidance to people and businesses for north of 10,000 hours, but the challenge is that the specific type of advice has varied, I don't have 10,000 hours of deeply specialized experience speaking to the specific needs of a specific audience. Certainly I have spent 10,000 hours musing on the human condition and being in the world, but that and $2.75 will get me on the subway. Lots of people do that.

I think that the codicil to Gladwell's 10,000 hours guideline is -- and he probably says this, I've never actually read that book -- is that you have to find a specialization to which relatively few others have dedicated themselves. Rapier, for example, or eminent domain. Or steel futures. And it's helpful to find a specialization for which there is a market. But if the market is big enough, it will be crowded with others. Aye, there's the rub.