Malcolm Gladwell, author of
several books, referred often to the 10,000-Hour-Rule in his 2008 book Outliers: The Story of Success. The
general principal, which caused some stirring debate, was that a significant
part of what makes one an expert at practically anything is devoting a lot of
time to it -i.e. 10,000 hours. I'm not going to join the debate. What I am
going to do is share my initial thought on this concept.
Here is comes...........
Well duuuuuhhhh!
This is one of those claims that
drives me bonkers when I see it splashed throughout the news. It's the same as
when medical associations come together to share their year-long studies studies
on how people who exercise tend to be healthier, or how eating too much sugar is
bad for you. I repeat. Well duuuuuhhhh! Sorry, no studies needed to prove these
things.
It only makes sense -preposterous
sense- that spending hours and hours of your time doing or learning something
will make you rather adept at it. No, shooting hoops for 10,000 hours isn't
going to guarantee you an NBA spot. But... it certainly can make you better
than most.
Where does this fit into reading?
I'm kinda hoping you're about to have a well duuuuuhhhh! episode of your own
here.
Imagine logging 10,000 hours of
your time reading. I'd bet big money that 10,000 hours of reading would make
you very much an expert reader. Now, for the sake of perspective, that's a lot
of time. According my crazy computations it would take a person over 40 years,
reading 40 minutes a night, to hit 10,000 hours. (See my math below. And
please, email me if I'm way off with my numbers.)
OK. So. You're maybe still not convinced
(really?) so I'll drop this into place. Here's a breakdown from the National
Assessment of Educational Progress on the relationship between minutes of daily
reading and words acquired by a student. This comes from a from a 2005 report.
Achievement Percentile Amount of Outside Word Gain/Year Reading
by Minutes/Day
__________________________________________________________________________________
__________________________________________________________________________________
90th percentile 40+
minutes/day 2.3 million
50th percentile <
13 minutes/day 600,000
10th percentile < 2
minutes/day 51,000
Those are EYE-POPPING numbers. Reading
only 38 minutes more a night will result in a word gain 45 times greater than a
mere two minutes. If that's not registering for you, then think of it as money.
Imagine earning 2.3 million dollars during the course of your schools years for
working at something 40 minutes a night versus earning 51,000 dollars for
putting in only 2 minutes a night.
I'd say those extra 38 minutes
are well worth the investment.
Now, git reading, please.
* My math: 10,000 hours equals
600,000 minutes. 600,000 minutes divided by 40 minutes equals 15,000 units of
40 minutes. Take those 15,000 40-minute units and divide them by 365 and you
get 41 years, roughly.
