Ultimate Guide to MASTER a Skill!

Is the 10,000-hour rule actually true? We'll find out in this video. So I was recently asked a question from one of my YouTube viewers, Sally. Love you guys. How many hours per day would you recommend to work at a particular skill in total per week to become outstanding at something? So a while ago in his famous book Outliers, Malcolm Gladwell came up with the 10,000-hour rule. His theory was that if you spend 10,000 hours working on something, then you would get to master class level. He used examples of the Beatles The Beatles, who toured Germany in the early '60s and built up their 10,000 hours of practice. And Bill Gates, who got his first computer as a young teenager and spent over 10,000 hours programming on it. But do you actually need to spend 10,000 hours to become world-class at a particular skill? So here are my 3 thoughts on it. Number 1: Your passion matters. You can spend hours and hours and hours and hours working at something, and if you're not passionate about it, you're not gonna become masterclass level. Just think about when you were in school. There are some subjects that you loved and some subjects that you hated, and no matter how much time you spent on the subjects that you hated, your growth would grow so slowly and painfully. But the subjects that you loved and were genuinely interested in, you would learn so much faster. And that's the problem with most people today. They're working at jobs that they hate. They graduated with whatever degree, entered the workforce, and they spend 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years working at a company that they hate. You can spend 10 years at a company and never get that big promotion, never get to be the CEO or anywhere close close to it, even though you've spent the 10,000 hours plus, 20,000 hours, 30,000 hours, you're never getting to that level where you want to be because you're not passionate enough about it. If you are genuinely interested in the subject you're learning, you're going to pick it up much more quickly than if you're forced to do something that you hate. Number 2 is not all hours are the same. The fastest way to pick something up, the fastest way to learn a new skill, is to model success. Get a coach, get a trainer, get a teacher, get somebody to show you the ropes. The slowest way to figure something out is to try to understand it yourself and make all the mistakes that people have already made. So 10,000 hours trying to struggle and figure it all out for yourself may be equivalent to 500 hours of being taught by a professional on how to do it. I look back on my YouTube channel as an example. In my first videos, I didn't really know what I was doing. I was experimenting, I was trying to do everything myself, and my first videos were really, really, really bad. And slowly I got better but it was a slow crawl forward. Go look back on my channel and you'll see years and years of just slow development. And then when I met Jenny, who's my media coach, she trained me on how to get better, and within a couple months I was already seeing significant growth on my channel. Now, I still worked hard. I'm still putting in the effort. I'm still applying everything that she's teaching me, and as a result, the growth in my development, the growth in my subscribers, the growth in my views on each video has grown tremendously. So not all hours are created equal. If you model success and learn from the best, you'll achieve results a lot faster than someone who tries to do everything themself. And my third point is, why do you really care? And I ask this because if you're asking how many hours it takes to get really good at something, how many hours you need to dedicate in your week to, to get good at this particular skill, then it kind of tells you that you're not really that interested in learning the skill. If you really want to get better at something, then you should feel like you're getting lost in it. Like you could wake up in the morning and start working on it, and then look up and it's already 6 o'clock at night. And you're not keeping track of the hours to say, "Ah, only 100 more hours until I get really good at this." It's like someone who starts a business just trying to make a lot of money. You find that they never do. They struggle, they struggle, they struggle, and they tell themselves, "If I keep this struggle up, eventually I'm going to make my millions of dollars." but they never get there because they never loved it in the first place. You should want to get better at that skill. It should drive you, it should fuel you, it should make you happy and excited to learn and get better. And if you have a number in your head that that's your end goal, like, "When I get to that number of hours, I'm gonna be really good and then I'm gonna achieve success," that's the wrong way to look at it. Instead, you should find a skill or a goal that you really want to get better at. Something where you stop tracking the hours. Something that you can really have a positive impact on the world with. And if that's your intention and you work hard at it, you will achieve masterclass level. Believe. I'd love to know what your thoughts are. Leave a comment below. Let me know if I've caused a little bit of a controversy or not here. And if you like this video, you want to see more, don't forget to subscribe to the channel. Thank you so much for watching. I'll see you soon.

Self-improvement books are like fitness books. They never work on their own. What you need is a trainer. That's Evan. Get the newsletter.