Fuck The 10,000 Hours Idea

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“Researchers have settled on what they believe is the magic number for true expertise: ten thousand hours," Malcolm Gladwell writes in his 2008 book Outliers. With this book, a dangerous idea was born.

10,000 hours is an intimidating amount of time for anyone hoping to learning a new skill. If you think you won't become an expert until you hit 10,000 hours, many people won't even start. Even worse, many people think they can't make money until they hit 10,000 hours or some arbitrary level of expertise. This is bullshit.

During college, I ran Facebook ads for small businesses. A client asked me to do Google ads for them. I’d never run Google ads, but I said OK and sent them an invoice. When the $400 was paid, I learned how to do Google ads. Everything worked out fine.

Fast-forward to last week. I left The Defiant to build up my web3 writing business. Because I've built up a portfolio of web3 articles, clients are confident I can learn and write about a topic even if I've never written about it before. I've gotten paid to learn and write about blockchain video games, ZK-rollups, and crypto hacks.

If you’re confident enough in your ability to learn, you can get paid for something you’ve never done before. You can get paid for learning how to do it. If you start making money at 0-1,000 hours, you'll fly past your peers who are waiting until they're Gladwellian "experts".

In the words of my friend and fellow crypto writer Randy Ginsburg, "Saying yes to opportunities that you don’t know how to do and then figuring them out is how u build confidence and grow your biz." You grow through discomfort.

Your knowledge isn't important. Your ability to learn is.

I touched on this idea in my essay Digital Self-Reliance, recalling a conversation with dropout-turned-founder Richie Bonilla where we discussed how if we were placed in a foreign country with nothing but a laptop, we’d learn how to make money and survive.

This is what learning a new skill online is really like. If you know how to use Photoshop, you can get dropped into Figma and figure it out pretty quick. Learning online skills isn't a straight line up. It's a zigzag across a continent of Google links.

Gladwell's 10,000 hours meme makes learning sound boring and repetitive as well. "Malcolm Gladwell read our work, and he misinterpreted some of our findings," said Anders Ericson, the researcher who originally published the 10,000 hours idea.

Unlike how we were taught in school, learning a new skill isn't as simple as repetition and memory. I'd be an awful writer if that was the case. I have a low attention span and marijuana-tainted memory. Learning or improving on a skill is far more like an adventure video game than it is like memorizing flashcards.

Yes, you need a foundation. "If you go to the library and there’s a book you cannot understand, you have to dig down and say, 'What is the foundation required for me to learn this?' Foundations are super important," writes Naval Ravikant. But, once you get past the first hours of boring foundations, you need to have the chutzpah to put away the flashcards and go test your skills in the real world. That's great you can code little programs, but can you make a product people would use?

It's the difference between memorizing French flashcards and going to Paris and attempting to flirt with a girl in French. You can memorize flashcards all you want, but you'll never have fun until you put your skills to the test.

I'll leave you with Paul Graham's take on coding. "It’s odd that people think of programming as precise and methodical," he wrote in Hackers & Painters. "Computers are precise and methodical. Hacking is something you do with a gleeful laugh." Writing is the same way. Language is precise, but writing is something I do with a gleeful laugh. I haven't hit 10,000 hours, but I promise I'm getting paid and laughing my way to the bank.