Competency or Mastery

I recently discovered a blog by JD Roth, the guy that started get rich slowly. I’m enjoying reading his articles, and would like to highlight a few in my posts. One of the first that caught my attention was about tenacity verses talent, largely because I think I fall in the tenacity section! It describes about learning a new skill and the hours needed to become competent or to gain mastery. If you want to be reasonably competent, you need to spend approximately 500 hours on subject matter at hand, being learning a language or musical instrument, etc.

I often like to dive into learning new skills, and I am often inspired by the masters, but I also can be a little discouraged by the amount of effort required (it can seem like a huge mountain to climb). However, his blog post has certainly helped me view things quite differently. I now know that if I want to become reasonably good at things, then I only need to put in 500 hours of practice. I know from past experience that I do have the tenacity for having 1 hour a day practice at something new. This means I have to practice an hour a day for about a 1 year and 3-4 months and then I will be competent at it. Currently, I am learning to play an Indian drum, known as the Tabla, which is so much fun as it is a really expressive instrument, with so many sounds that can be played to many interesting rhythms and is often heard in world music, fusion music in addition to classical Indian styles. How great is that I only need 500 hours, I’ve probably already put in a few hundred and can happily play along with my musical friends already, so maybe in only another 6 months or so and I will be quite competent.

Mastery on the other hand is really something else, I suspect for mastery you need to really love the subject, to get to such a high skill level and here you need to spend more like 10,000 hours on the subject. To put it another way, 1 hr a day for 27 years! That is why the master’s always get my respect. I guess choose to master one or two things you really love, and the rest, don’t sweat it give it a year or two of sincere practice and you will be competent enough. ☺