Wednesday, October 3, 2012

The Rule of 10,000 Hours Meets 40 minutes



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.

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