Author Archives: Michael Griffiths

Inertia

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Inertia is that fickle friend, who talks not of accomplishment but of inaction. Work, it claims, seems so far from here and such an effort to begin.

Slow, slow, slow down is the message; and in ever-slowing, the work that lies a head seems to be growing ever-greater. Tasks that once seemed small now loom large; events that seemed so close to inspire urgent fear now seem far too long in the future to worry with now.

Slow ’til you stop, and in motionless pose repose. Settle down and watch the world pass by, its frenetic speed and frantic, grasping actors a warning to those tempted to participate in the rat rate – a race whereby those racing can see nothing but the race, and those nearest to him. Neither the beginning nor the ending hold any especial meaning, and the journey is obscured by the quest for speed, speed, speed.

‘Tis a tempting message, once that still center has been reached. Such an effort to beginning moving, accelerate, and maintain one’s place. But inaction has its consequences, and those are hard to bear.

The 10,000 Hour Myth

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Malcolm Gladwell recently came out with the book Outliers. The hypothesis is simple: what makes people great is a lot of hard work. Mathematically, that works out to around 10,000 hours.

Seth Godin thinks that doesn’t hold up. I agree with some of his post – applying the basic idea of niches, and making time-to-expertise variable bears looking into – but this stuck out at me:

There were bar bands in Buffalo, where I grew up, that put in far more than 10,000 playing mediocre music… didn’t help. Hard work may be necessary, but not sufficient

This overlooks a simple, core component of “theories of practice:” it has to be deliberate practice.

You can practice golf for 50 hours, and demonstrate dramatic improvement. You can play for 500, and improve not one whit.

Deliberate practice involves mindfulness with regard to performance. It means paying attention, and trying to improve.

Most people, when they work, aren’t “deliberately practicing.” They aren’t attempting to become better at what they’re doing. Consequently, they don’t – their skill level plateaus.

Gladwell’s figure of 10,000 may or may not be correct. I don’t have a lot of faith in magic numbers. But I do subscribe to the idea that practice – real practice – well show improvement, and expertise is an inevitable result.

Blogging Notes

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So I’ve upgraded to WordPress 2.7, and installed a bunch of new plugins (some of which I haven’t activated/configured yet).

Looking good.

Hopefully, I’ll be able to pull together my schedule enough to start blogging consistently prior to next semester; and then continue in a “blogging instead of writing essays” fashion.

Writing as thinking; blogging as (public) thinking. Thus far, I haven’t jumped on the blogging bandwagon yet, which is a big shame – and something I hope to change.