The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg

 

Do you want to be world class at something?  Playing an instrument?  Computer programming?  Writing? If Charles Duhigg is right - and his argument is quite convincing - you can.  All you have to do is get into the right habits and then put in the hours.  How many hours?  About 10,000.  To save you the mental arithmetic that is about three and half years at eight hours a day.  Take weekends off and it is about five.



If  you are interested in more detail I can recommend this book.  If you are interested in achieving great success, don't read this book.  I have already given you the salient points, you need to get on with putting in the hours.  In fact stop reading this post and start now.

I did read the book and so proved to myself that I will never become world class at anything because I will always let my curiosity and love of new things get the better of me.  The bulk of the book is given over to stories that are there to illustrate the points the author is making.  And they make fascinating reading.  For instance, the Beatles might well owe their huge success to the time they spent in Hamburg playing 8 hour shifts. You start thinking of other examples that conform to the same pattern.  For example, Steve Pavlina mentions in passing the huge number of personal development books he has read.  He claims that he writes his articles at great speed with little in the way of preparation on only cursory subsequent editing.  I've no reason to doubt his word on this.  It seems like a heaven given talent the rest of us can only marvel at.  But I wonder if the real secret is in the many many hours of reading.

The biggest thing I took away from this book was an explanation for something that has crossed my mind an number of times over the years.  I'm fairly quick on the uptake and rarely have much trouble learning a new skill when the need arises or the whim takes me. I've had my fair share of successes in life.  I have enough money to live comfortably and a good circle of friends. My life is basically good.  But I wouldn't say I was a huge success that other people should look up to.

Fair enough, by the laws of mathematics most of us are doomed to be average. I'm simply not one of the tiny proportion of exceptional people.  What of it?  Most people I know fall into the same category and seem to be happy enough. And yet when I have met people who by most people's standards are great successes, they are not really so very different.  Maybe a bit more obsessive, but otherwise not dramatically different.

I think the difference between me and them is simply that they have chosen to focus on something and have kept at it.  And now thanks to this book I can put a number on it.  They've put in the 10,000 hours to succeed that I haven't.  Now I quite enjoy the fact that I have dabbled in a lot of different things and had a varied life.  It would have been nice to know the key to success a bit earlier.  At my age I don't have that much time left.  Perhaps a younger me would decide that nothing is more important than becoming the world class accordion player I could have been.  Perhaps I should have dropped many of the other things I did and simply got on with practicing.

But looking back, I am not so sure that it would actually have made me happier.  The price of success turns out to be a high one.  Perhaps success is more available than we realise, but less rewarding than we imagine.